Most people live the lives of others, their thoughts are the opinions of others, their lives are imitations of others, and their enthusiasm is a quote.
Between two blizzard rides and a farm house covered with retro wallpapers, the plot of "I Want to End It All" does not look complicated: a girl with curly hair in a sweater and a boyfriend who has just been together for only six weeks Jack, go to Jack's hometown to visit his parents together. However, this parent-seeing story is not about Ben Stiller meeting Robert De Niro. After a long conversation in the window glass of the opening, with the arrival of Jack’s home as the node, "I want to end it all" began to change. Strange and abnormal:
The snowy car among the green grass, the too swaying dog, the girl’s sweater color and jewelry are constantly changing, Jack’s parents travel back and forth between middle-aged and old people, and in the dialogue, the girl’s occupation, name and the story of her acquaintance with Jack are staged Mutually exclusive version. At the same time, the daily life of an elderly cleaner is interspersed in the story. It seems that he is looking at the journey of Jack and the girl through the snow curtain.
"I want to end it all", this film dominated by a lot of dropped dialogues, puzzling details, and inner monologues that seem to be heard by each other, is indeed a bit obscure. However, although the amount of information in the film is so large that it rushes to the audience like snowflakes, "I Want to End All of This" is more like a labyrinth with an established outlet, rather than a piece of puzzle that needs to be pieced together. It has a fixed distance and points straight ahead. To reach the end, participants may need to find two important keys: the identity of the curly-haired heroine and the old cleaner.
So, who is this girl who led us into the story and let us listen with joy?
At the beginning of the film, the girl sitting next to her boyfriend leaned her head on the car window, but she thought "I want to end it all". The "everything" here seems to point to the relationship between the girl and Jack, and is filled with the tiredness that is known in the future. However, when we thought that "I want to end it all" focused on intimacy, and thought that Charlie Kaufman finally jumped out of the brain of the "sad old man" and chose a woman as the protagonist and research object for an unprecedented time, we just It was hit by his subtle and confusing smoke bomb.
The identity and role of a girl is the key to understanding the setting of "I want to end it all". The timing of finding this key may be different for each audience, but once they find it, they will immediately understand the origin and destiny of the story. I may be a rather hindsight and inattentive audience. In my case, the prompt for the answer to the question appeared in Jack's childhood room. The small room filled with books and DVDs and children’s beds, like Jack’s brain slices and memory totems, suggests that this girl as the film’s narrative perspective is just the incarnation of the ideal partner in Jack’s mind. It is imagination and intention. The product of lewdness, and this journey and this home are all fictional dramas and doll houses in Jack's mind.
Everything in Jack’s room is closely related to the girl: the girl read a self-proclaimed original "Bone Dog" in the car when she came. This poem appeared in a collection of poems placed at the end of Jack’s bed; it was placed on Jack’s bookshelf. With Pauline Kyle’s film reviews, the two talked about "The Drunk Woman" on the return trip. The girl smoked a cigarette and quoted Pauline Kyle’s comments on the film; there were books on physics and painting on the bookshelf. , The girl claimed to be a physicist for a while, and immediately changed her mouth to become a painter.
Standing at this node and looking back, before this, for the setting that the girl is a product of imagination, "I want to end it all" has given a lot of hints: there are many conversations between two people in the opening car scene. In the overlapping part, it seems that the two protagonists know what each other is going to say, and they can pick it up immediately before finishing asking the question; Jack seems to be able to hear every inner monologue of the girl, constantly asking "What are you thinking?" "; And at Jack's house, the girl mistakenly identified the little Jack in the photo as her childhood self, which also proves that they are both the same person, or that they exist in the same deep mind at the same time.
So, what role do girls play in this fantasy world?
When Jack and the girl just set off, Jack mentioned Wordsworth's "Ode to Poem: Recalling Childhood and Realizing Immortality", saying that this poem was written to a girl named Lucy, an ideal lover in the eyes of a poet. Therefore, the girl next to Jack, who was named Lucy at the beginning and changed her name continuously, is actually the incarnation of the most perfect girl in Jack's heart.
In the fantasy world, Jack brings home such a perfect object, which has three functions. First of all, girls are everything that Jack had imagined to be but did not become: Jack likes painting, physics, poetry, and movies. Girls turn into painters and physicists, write poems casually, and talk about movies. At the same time, the girl’s mouth is constantly changing. The first encounter with the story makes Jack smart and romantic in the eyes of his parents, humorous and boldly chasing love. The most important thing is that Jack hopes that girls can see the commendable behavior of taking care of their elderly parents. He needs to be seen and recognized.
However, the perfect object is always one and two sides. Since the girl can carry all Jack's false illusions about romance and success, she will definitely become the ultimate embodiment of Jack's self-doubt and anxiety. Therefore, the girl’s accusation that Jack can only imitate and quote, and her thought of "I want to end this" throughout the film, are not the awakening of the self-consciousness of a fantasy person, but the Jack who built this fantasy world. In reality, the feeling of being unworthy of oneself is getting deeper and deeper. This kind of thought, which can no longer be overshadowed by fantasy, transformed the fictional perfect girl and kept her receiving calls. On the other side of the call, the old cleaner’s voice was full of fear and anxiety.
Different from the smoke bomb of the girl's identity, the old cleaner is the old Jack, that is, the master of the fantasy world seems to be better guessing. From the beginning of the prologue that the old cleaner and the young Jack appeared from behind at the same time, the connection between the old cleaner and the young couple's world has always been obvious, just like what the old cleaner sees and feels, penetrates into the subconscious, and then penetrates into it. In the crevices of the blizzard in the fantasy world.
The rehearsal of the musical that the old cleaner encountered while cleaning turned into a selection of "Oklahoma" from the little couple's car radio. The plot of the TV series he saw was directly borrowed as a romantic story of a little couple; his car Tulsi ice cream packaging scattered in the middle of the game, and then incarnate as an illogical ice cream station in Blizzard, and the cleaner uniform also appeared in the washing machine of Jack’s house; in the high school corridor, he saw the beautiful blonde girl and the excluded girl Later, they all turned into ice cream station employees, and when fanciful Jack took the ice cream, he and the employee girl had the same rash.
The best proof that the old cleaner is the subject of fantasy is the fear of age and aging that is still flashing in the beautiful world of fiction, like a little omitted electromagnetic radiation, which turns the fantasy world into a horror movie. Mother’s tinnitus, her sense of humor that fades with age, father’s forgetting, Jack and the girl’s discussion of gerontology all suggest that the master of this imagination is experiencing and constantly fearing aging. Jack's words before going to the ice cream station even showed that he was not the guy who was less than thirty in front of the audience. His reflection on his mother's doting, his doubts about all the clichés and his distrust of the narrative of "you will always meet someone who belongs to you" all prove that this Jack has long experienced vicissitudes and losses, and is helpless at the end of his life. elder.
It seems that Charlie Kaufman is not interested in reversal at all. From the beginning, he filled the film with clues to two key issues, and "I want to end it all" has thus become a two-way dialogue customized for each audience. It doesn't matter where the audience gets these two keys, because once they understand it, they can immediately understand the twists and turns they have traveled before, and walk awake to the exit of the maze, and the long-destined ending.
At this point, the whole picture of "I Want to End All of This" finally appeared: Jack, a single and sickly old cleaner, constructed an idealized fantasy world in his mind, where he had a realization of all his wishes His perfect girlfriend, and his lonely self, was also seen and listened to by her.
At the same time, outside of the fantasy world, Jack’s small life is also completely outlined: he has a lot of love since he was a child, but he has no talents; he yearns for love, but is too cowardly; his parents often quarrel (even in the perfect fantasy All the quarrels in the world appear in the background), he is also squeezed out at school, his mother dotes on him, but he is worried that his father will forget him like the pig on the farm. Ironically, he (suspected) eventually abandoned his mother in a nursing home, and his father, who had Alzheimer's disease, really forgot him.
At the end of the journey, when the high school that had completed the tragic closed loop in Jack's life, the two keys of the girl and the old cleaner finally met. After a song and dance clip that satisfies Kaufman’s selfishness, the old cleaner chooses to end his life, end the fantasy of romantic love, end the accountability of the original family, and end the meaningless ideals and hopes, and follow the one that once made him the most. The scared pig, with maggots hanging under his body, walked towards his own awards ceremony.
There are many ways to interpret the choice of old cleaners. My personal understanding is that the fantasy world constructed in the mind of the old cleaner and the journey of Jack and the girl is not a revolving light before the death of the old cleaner, but like a breathing machine for the soul to maintain the old cleaner’s life. It has been carried out. After many years, many cycles. The girl felt that she had known Jack for a long time, and the ice cream cups full of trash cans outside the school building seemed to prove it. However, with the aging of the old cleaner, as he became more and more suspicious of himself, he also analyzed his sad life more and more clearly, his changes drove the girl in the fantasy world and began to question. Started to want to escape.
So, in this final journey, when the girl stood in front of the old cleaner, she finally recalled the true story of herself and Jack. Jack is nothing more than a pervert who stared at her in a bar at the beginning of a girl, and a girl is nothing but a beloved person who didn't have the courage to ask for a number years ago.
In front of the rows of lockers, the old cleaner finally admitted his failure and finally gave up the daydream of building for many years. That dreamy ballet was supposed to be the romantic climax of a fantasy story, but this time, the old cleaner killed the fantasy self who was more handsome than the young self, and liberated the young Jack and the girl in the fantasy world.
Jack's story is tragic. He has many passions and ideals, read many books, but still has a bad life. He can only express his thoughts in other people's language, imitate the lives of others poorly, and then whitewash peace with fantasy. However, although "I want to end it all" ended with Jack's suicide, it showed a pessimistic rise.
On the road to death, Jack finally reconciled with his worst nightmare, the pig with maggots. At the awards ceremony before Jack’s death, although he still used the speech of "Beautiful Mind" and ended the performance with a song from "Oklahoma," Jack no longer blamed himself for quoting, but Peacefully let those works that have influenced me become an eternal part of myself. Even Jack no longer feels fear of aging. He celebrates his mediocre and lonely life together with the important people in his life with the same old age makeup.
In the last scene, there is no one in the snow, beside the tree outside the high school, the car where Jack ended his life is buried by the snow, like a white coffin. In this freeze-frame landscape painting, although there are no sad characters, it accurately conveys the saddest emotions. Jack, who has been imitating all his life, finally completed the first original creation of his life by ending everything.
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