Social scientists insist media consumption only deepens those feelings of isolation and alienation, but cinephiles and TV buffs aren’t about to stop. Netflix has caught me - and, I suspect, many of us - red-handed, as we seek out a balm for our perpetual loneliness. This movie, to borrow its own terminology, is “infecting my brain.” But even now, I cringe recalling the couple discussing the mother as cultural scapegoat and Freudian preoccupation, just as my toddler came barreling toward me, ready to clock me with a board book.
#IM THINKING OF ENDING THINGS HOW TO#
Nearly an hour later, when Jake and Lucy are back in the car and one tells the other, “I don’t think we know how to be human anymore,” and I don’t bat an eye. Charlie Kaufman is not hiding behind my sectional - it just feels like he is. I look around the room, my husband on his phone, and I turn to watch my son sleeping on the baby monitor. You are like a virus, Annie: you also want to live. Is this movie going to be a COVID-19 allegory, a cousin to the climate change torture porn, mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)? Seemingly in response to my mental query, the couple starts to discuss how “viruses are monstrous,” but, then again “everything wants to live.” The conversational mood in the car proceeds to move between tenderness, frustration, and boredom: welcome to monogamy in quarantine. “Huh? Did you say something?” Jake asks in response to Lucy’s unvoiced thought. I’m thinking of ending things, she muses. Lucy has never met Jake’s family and is partially unsure why she is doing this. Writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s latest film opens with a lengthy scene in which Lucy (Jessie Buckley) and her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) drive on a snowy afternoon to visit with Jake’s parents.
I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS might read your mind it did mine.