Suffering, anxiety, confusion. This is how I feel most of the time watching "I Want to End It All". In the old house of the Jake family, it seems that time has reversed. Parents from different periods have appeared in turn. Lucy walked through it, witnessing their youth, old age, and death. But this kind of testimony is not linear. Lucy, like the audience, sees a mess, which is mixed with weirdness and cruelty.
The film’s dialogue is very dense, seemingly full of speculation. As a movie-watcher, I try to grasp a line of "point-of-the-art", and then use this clue to decipher the truth behind the story. But every time I think I'm close to the answer, the story slides in unexpected directions.
When "I want to end it all" was just released, the media described the film as "brain-burning" and "it is absolutely impossible to guess the truth until the end." But in fact this is not a suspense film. The audience can act as a detective in the suspense film, take a break, approach the truth step by step, and finally get a clear answer. But at the end of the movie, my feelings were still confused. We can make countless interpretations and overturn them. We are sometimes drowsy, and sometimes restless because of the chaos.
So I gave up to sort out a clear clue for this movie, and let those chaotic feelings rise and fall freely in my mind. At this time, I realized that perhaps the chaos and contradiction themselves are the subject of the film. The movie simulates the hasty life of people in a small space, and the unpleasant experiences when we watch the movie are exactly how we feel about life itself most of the time.
"We are still. Time passes through us like a cold wind, stealing our heat, making us freeze and crack. I feel like I am the wind tonight." After leaving Jake's house, Lucy sat in the car and had such a period. Inner monologue. Perhaps this monologue can be used as a theoretical basis to explain the sense of rupture before and after the story. It is this monologue that implies that although the film takes Lucy as the main perspective, the real protagonist is Jake. Jake is the fixed point in time, and Lucy is the flowing time, so Lucy's identity, story and even name are constantly changing and inconsistent. Lucy is never a specific person, and multiple meanings can be found in her.
Lucy can be a collection of women who have loved in Jake's life. In Jake's story, she was first a painter, later a physicist, and later a waiter. She is sometimes called Luisa, or Lucia. The process of her meeting and falling in love with Jake has a different version in each narration. When the memories of a lifetime collapsed into one night, the women Jake had loved come together to construct the image of Lucy, the girlfriend in this fantasy.
Lucy can also be the witness of Jake's life, but he appears as his girlfriend in this memory. She traveled through the old house where Jake grew up and saw the family's past, present, and future. Japanese science fiction writer Taizo Kobayashi wrote in "Drunken Stepman" that time is fragmented and illogical, while the linearity and causality of time only exist within the subjective consciousness of people. We always make choices cautiously, but in the end destiny takes us to the end of endless loneliness and despair. The time in "I Want to End All of this" seems to be the same. The different ages of Jake's parents appear randomly. She first saw the old age when Jake's parents were gradually deprived of consciousness by illness, and then witnessed the death of Jake's mother, and then the images of Jake's parents when they were young alternately appeared before her eyes. She shuttled between different rooms in this house, just like jumping between different time and space. Everything is full of fatalism, and the sad ending of life is enough to dispel the meaning of life itself.
Lucy is even Jake himself, she and Jake are the inner and outer parts of a person. Jake wants to take his girlfriend to see his parents to further confirm the relationship between the two, and Lucy wants to end the relationship and put everything to an end; Jake is content with the status quo and ignores the strange atmosphere in the house, while Lucy is anxious. Can't wait to leave in a blizzard. If Jake represents the smoothness and stagnation on the surface of our lives, then Lucy represents the struggling side of our hearts. We can’t wait to escape from this weird house, just like we can’t wait to escape from aging, disease and death, but we don’t know what we are caught in our feet, we are stuck in the mud of life, and we fall continuously, finally letting despair drown ourselves .
Those surreal experiences can be regarded as variants of Jake's memories. In fantasy and dreams, Jake condensed the experience of his life into a night and a journey. But dreams and fantasy can't be without flaws. The scene of the elderly Jake cleaning the school alone is always abruptly interspersed in the entire narrative. No one can avoid loneliness, aging and death, so no matter how Lucy objected, the car finally drove into the school-that is where Jake died alone.
The space of the film has been reduced to four—cars, farm houses, dessert stations, and schools. Each space can represent a period of life of the protagonist Jake. The farm house is where Jake grew up. It symbolizes his unhappy childhood. He wants to escape from his neurotic parents, but he is still bound by the affection. Dessert Station was a puberty he didn't want to look back on. He was ridiculed and isolated by Mingyan's female classmates because of his obesity. The small space of the car is the transit point of time and space, and he passes through here to arrive at the sites of memories one after another. The school is the beginning and the end, a dream and a reality. Lucy must meet the elderly Jake, and also frankly with the reality that cannot be escaped.
"I want to end it all" presents the inner struggle of sensitive individuals, the ultimate human experience of loneliness. We have been trying to overcome the cowardice, anxiety and fear of the soul all our lives. Time is flowing water, passing through our bodies with everything and everything in it. We can't keep anyone. Parents, brothers, and lovers leave one by one. We worked hard, thought about it, made many wrong decisions, and ended up alone and naked. So we can only weave a grand ceremony with the remaining consciousness when we are about to die, and those people who flow through our lives gather here to stand and applaud for us. We pretend to be the protagonist and accept the praise of life in the face of nothingness. This is also the climax of the movie. It seems to be complete, but in reality it is sad and desolate, absurd and cruel.
The beginning and ending of the film are still life. At the beginning are old things covered in dust in the old house, and at the end are cars covered in heavy snow. Neither of these two sets of shots can feel a trace of life—in this snow-covered landscape, there is no exit except death.
I thought about the ending of "Drunk Step Man", which can be the commentary of the film to some extent:
"What the hell am I?" You are a sacrifice.
"Why can people live in stability?" Because the wave function can collapse.
"What is torturing me?" It was an irresistible fate.
"Why can't one give up hope?" Because the wave function can diverge.
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