Charlie Kaufman
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A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Directed by John Cassavetes
influenced I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Themes
Consider her monologue on the drive home, where an unexpected reference to "A Woman Under the Influence" results in Louisa reciting Pauline Kael's critical review of the film and Gena Rowland's celebrated performance.
In the second half of the film, on the interminable trip back from his parents’ house, Jake says that he likes John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence , which the young woman essentially characterizes as a fake-feminist work of masochism, claiming that Gena Rowlands gives an exhausting tour de force, and that “nothing she does is memorable because she does so much.”
A discussion of Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence devolves into Buckley slipping invisibly into a recitation of Pauline Kael’s negative review of the film .
The Young Woman and Jake talk endlessly about Wordsworth’s poetry or John Cassavetes 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence (Buckley not only mimics Gena Rowland’s performance, she recites famed critic Pauline Kael’s dismissive review).
The two engage in epic conversations, touching on everything from William Wordsworth to the aforementioned Kael’s review of the 1974 John Cassavetes movie, “A Woman Under the Influence,” which Lucy recites from memory (it seems).
In another scene, the pair debate the quality of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, a clear spiritual cousin to I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Death of a Salesman (1985)
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff
influenced Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Themes
Yet the most surreal segment of the production is the incredibly massive city-size theatrical extravaganza Caden undertakes after obtaining a MacArthur grant for his enormous success with a rejuvenated reworking of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman cast entirely with young people.
The title is both a term meaning a part that is used to refer to the whole, or vice versa, as well as a wordplay on the upstate city of Schenectady, where Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is staging an avant-garde production of "Death of a Salesman."
Caden is currently putting on a revisionist play of "Death of a Salesman," casting young twenty-somethings in much older roles as a way of telling the audience that these actors, too, will end up alone and gasping their last breath like the characters they are portraying.
On Kaufman, rather than any one film
Alexander Payne’s Kaufmanesque crowd-pleaser…
They seem to be aiming for something Charlie Kaufman-esque…
Kaufmanesque high concept…
…a quirky Charlie Kaufman-like sci-fi political tale…
Charlie Kaufman, the mind-bending writer of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…
Perhaps Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jones would've made this film would've been more wildly entertaining, clever, and imaginative.
Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Directed by Ari Aster
influenced by Synecdoche, New York (2008), I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Themes Visuals
The film feels inspired by everything from Kafka to Albert Brooks to Charlie Kaufman’s postmodern masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York , but never derivative.
It recalls films as eclectic as The Ninth Configuration and Jacob’s Ladder in its use of symbolism, tone and imagery and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York in the way Aster plays with ideas of artifice – particularly the overtly theatrical scenes in the forest and the sound-stage setting of the final “trial”.
Sospeso allora tra Synecdoche, New York di Charlie Kaufman e The Truman Show di Peter Weir, con un tocco di inconcludenza alla Under the Silver Lake di David Robert Mitchell (la nostra recensione) o alla Southland Tales – Così finisce il mondo di Richard Kelly, Beau ha paura manca di una chiave di lettura univoca che ci permetta di definire, quantomeno, una prospettiva da cui interpretare ciò che viene messo in scena.
Waarbij Aster met Beau is Afraid dus ook wel z’n meest ‘grootse’ film maakt, want op dit moment schiet zelfs Charlie Kaufmans Synecdoche, New York door m’n hoofd heen.
Charlie Kaufman’ın 2008 yapımı Synecdoche, New York filmini andıran Beau is Afraid filminin son katmanı düşsel olduğu kadar yıkıcı bir yana da sahip.
The ever-changing world and energetic sequences recall an odd blend of Lynchian 70’s horror and Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things .
There is an old man janitor who appears throughout the film and reveals his true nature at the end, and then we seem to go fully into Jake’s fantasies as he imagines winning a Nobel Prize—and delivers John Nash’s acceptance speech from A Beautiful Mind—in front of an audience of young people in obvious high school theater old person makeup.
There’s a hilarious blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke about Robert Zemeckis and a delightful visual reference to “A Beautiful Mind.”
Where and how these two apparently disparate narratives converge is only made clear by the film’s finale (and even then, it’s not really certain), which goes full-blown “it was all just a dream” hallucinatory strangeness, complete with musical numbers from Oklahoma! and speeches from Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind .
Also in play are a talking pig, a snowbound ice cream shop, a speech from "A Beautiful Mind" and David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."
Alain Resnais’ time and memory fractures; dramatizations of the climactic scene of “A Beautiful Mind”; Pauline Kael’s review of John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under The Influence”; lightly lugubrious Swedish comic director Roy Andersson’s constructed horizons, palette deracinated and dimmed, gray to green to dun; “Fight Club”; all within a ragingly boldface ET CETERA.
It will help to be familiar with the musical "Oklahoma" especially the dream ballet; with Gena Rowlands' performance in John Cassavetes's "A Woman Under the Influence" and maybe Pauline Kael's review of it; and maybe with the ending of "A Beautiful Mind."
mother! (2017)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
influenced I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Characters Themes
Tonally and structurally, it reminds me a lot of mother!
Her performance in conversation with roles like Jennifer Lawrence in mother!
Una reflexión que, en su pretensión es mucho más que un compendio de citas y una mal encausada farolés teórica (cof cof te hablo Mother! ).
All four build incredible socially awkward tension not unlike Darren Aronofky’s mother!
El desconcierto recuerda también a mother!
It gave me a distinct mother!
Both are intelligent people, with knowledge ranging from an academic understanding of science, to poetry, to classic cinema (be ready to hear references to both Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence AND Forget Paris , starring Billy Crystal).
…whether Mussolini got too much credit for the trains running on time, movies ranging from “Forget Paris” to “A Woman Under the Influence,” the poems of William Wordsworth and a painting by Andrew Wyeth?
In any event: I don't know where or whether it's appropriate to say yes, it's tempting to wish that Synecdoche, lensed by Blue Velvet's Frederick Elmes, looked a bit more polished or had a visual imagination to match its verbal and structural and philosophical aspirations.
He’s like David Lynch if Mr. Blue Velvet dropped the dream logic and applied a more analytical angst to his projects.
I do wonder in a rhetorical way whether the film would be received differently were it a lost Kieslowski or a Godard at the peak of his narrative aggression, though it reminds more as a whole of David Lynch's "Hitchcock" pictures ( Blue Velvet , Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive ), which found in their rhythmic Americana banality the dull thrum of existential horror.
Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1945)
Directed by Robert Bresson
influenced I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
During the return trip (with the chains on the tires), the couple’s discussions take on a tenser tone—and Kaufman makes notable, noticeable use of the sound of the car’s windshield wipers, a sidelong reference to a famous line of film criticism, from a 1951 essay by André Bazin and referring to Robert Bresson’s 1945 film “Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne”: “The sound of a windshield-wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took to turn it into Racinian dialogue.”
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Plot Visuals
The conceit might remind you of the finale of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the theme of time shifting is italicized by the fact that at one point a television is shown playing an old Mr. Peabody and Sherman cartoon.
And then there’s the ending, one which may prompt as much confusion and conversation as the conclusion of “2001: A Space Odyssey” did a half-century ago.
The surreal final half-hour — departing drastically from Reid’s book while remaining strangely faithful in spirit — defies any logical description save to say it’s a depressive’s equivalent to the stargate sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” by way of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Still, the story's twists and turns maintain our interest throughout, with the narrative taking on a cleverly deconstructed play-within-a-film format reminiscent, at times, of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.
Synecdoche stands in relation to Kaufman's best previous screenplays (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ) in the same way that David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE stood in relation to Mulholland Drive, which means that Synecdoche is, on the surface, a less seductive work with less lubricated points of audience entry, and yet it has the chops and the conviction to amplify while also deconstructing the earlier films.
Like David Lynch's Inland Empire, there will be people who tell you they understand every twist and turn and what it all means in the grand narrative.
There's another film I thought of a few times while watching this one: David Lynch's Inland Empire , in which an artist even more trapped in his head than Kaufman got to make a movie almost completely without outside interference.
It happened in 1961, with that high-society puzzle obscura Last Year at Marienbad, and in 2006, with David Lynch's through-the-looking-glass bore Inland Empire.
I’m thinking of the dream logic of David Lynch with “Eraserhead” and Charlie Kaufman with “Synecdoche, New York.”
…it’s something like The Blair Witch Project spliced with Cube blended with Synecdoche, New York, mostly shot in liminal spaces lit in queasy mono-yellow.
The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972)
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
influenced I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Visuals
One thinks of a film like R.W. Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972).
In the beginning of the film we see Cotard staging Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" using actors deliberately chosen to be too young for their roles.
Eraserhead (1977)
Directed by David Lynch
influenced I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Visuals Themes
The dinner at Jake’s parents’ house might be the most awkward since the one in Eraserhead, and the film’s resonance with David Lynch movies doesn’t end there.
It’s a sequence for everybody who ever wished the chicken dinner scene in “Eraserhead” had gone on for an hour, full of ominous portents, offhanded insults and boisterous belly laughs that act as pressure release valves for an almost unbearable tension.
His mother and father, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis, are vaguely unhinged caricatures of lonely, chipper, culturally removed American parenthood; they tilt I’m Thinking Of Ending Things into a grotesque, distended sitcom farce of social discomfort, like the Eraserhead dinner-table scene kicked into a new tragicomic register.
Por eso inventaron la esperanza”, se le escucha reflexionar internamente a “Lucy”, perdón, “Louisa”, no, “Lucía” -sí, ese es su nombre-, al llegar a la finca de quienes jamás serán sus suegros -encarnados inquietantemente por Toni Collette y David Thewlis- quienes los invitan a la cena más incómoda desde que el protagonista de Eraserhead compartió la mesa con los papás de su novia.
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Directed by Alain Resnais
influenced Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Themes
It happened in 1961, with that high-society puzzle obscura Last Year at Marienbad, and in 2006, with David Lynch's through-the-looking-glass bore Inland Empire.
Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
influenced Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Themes
The extent to which he pushes the warehouse scenario goes beyond the work of legendary directors like Jacques Rivette on the ‘film within a film’ (CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING) and takes the audience on a journey that is more than a formalist foray into the meaning of film (or indeed theatre) production for its paricipants.
Compare Dennis Potter’s great mini-series of the nineteen-eighties, “The Singing Detective,” and you will see much the same setup—a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch—rendered with unstinting vigor.
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Directed by David Lynch
influenced I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020), Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Themes Visuals Plot
I don't feel up to writing about Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (hereafter Synecdoche), because, as with something like Mulholland Drive , it's in the writing about it that one is bound to discover one has said altogether too much about oneself and altogether not enough about the film.
As in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive , the horror-movie tropes of I’m Thinking of Ending Things—irrational editing, collapses in time and spatial placement, emphases on a “forbidden place” that reveals all (in this case a basement)—suggest fissures in a psyche.
There are hints of Mulholland Drive as the film treks on into surreal bits of business, such as a pair of almost-identical blondes working the counter at a Tulsey Town ice-cream stand.
Like the pleading, unanswered telephone calls that descend through Diane Selwyn’s layers of feverish denial in Mulholland Drive (2001), these voicemails hint at the unstable character of the universe in I’m Thinking of Ending Things .
If two people in a car in a snowstorm talking about the meaning of David Foster Wallace's suicide sounds like fun; if a long re-evaluation on the feminist shortcomings of John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence is similarly enticing; if you thought David Lynch was a little too obvious in Mulholland Drive – this is your movie.
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a puzzle film, in other words, and like Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” it does have a solution even if the getting there stands to leave a majority of viewers baffled, bored, or angry.