![]() Jake’s parents are the same people in the novel and the film, except the film’s janitor has less control over his narrative. ![]() Jake’s Parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette) ![]() In short, there are many more clues in the film than the book that the girlfriend is not quite a real person. Her clothes change color from scene to scene, particularly her striped sweater, which seems to be loosely modeled after the Dress. Similarly, her career is not mentioned in the novel, while in the movie, the janitor adjusts her past to suit his story, changing her into a virologist, a poet, a painter, a quantum physicist, a gerontologist, and a film critic at various points in the film to suit his needs. The girlfriend never mentions her name in the novel, but in the movie it keeps changing-Lucy, Louisa, Lucia, Amy-as the janitor games out what it might have been like to have someone else in his life. In the movie, however, the girlfriend is slightly more hypothetical, perhaps to reflect the fact that the janitor is daydreaming her story, revising it freely as he goes rather than writing it down in a fixed form. Kaufman’s janitor doesn’t seem to be quite as smart: The story about winning the school award for “diligence” instead of the one for “acuity” was added to the film, as was the scene in which his mother marvels that he did so well “with no special talent or abilities.” The effect is to make the story less about failure and more about the way some lives are steered toward quiet desperation from the beginning, a theme Jake (Jesse Plemons) expresses in a monologue written for the movie:īoth novel and film are ostensibly narrated by Jake’s (imagined, hypothetical) girlfriend, and her voice dominates both stories from the beginning: Kaufman opens his film by having Jessie Buckley read the first chapter nearly verbatim in voice-over. In the novel, the janitor was a gifted student who was doing academic research while working at a biochemistry lab until mental illness derailed his career, and after retreating to his parent’s farmhouse after some sort of breakdown, he works as a high school janitor for 30 years, slowly withdrawing into isolation and his mental illness before killing himself. In both versions of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, we only get snippets of the janitor’s life story, filtered through his own unreliable narration, so it’s hard to get a clear picture of either man, but they’re not quite the same person. Sounds and images from the janitor’s day bleed into the road trip story in ways that suggest that the road trip is the janitor’s daydream, but he isn’t writing it down. Instead, he intercuts between the road trip and brief, unexplained interludes from the janitor’s daily routine until the two stories collide. Kaufman doesn’t have this sort of metatextual trick at his disposal-not a lot of Henry Darger types make feature films for Netflix-so he eliminates the notebooks entirely. Between chapters, Reid inserts brief snippets of a conversation between unidentified speakers about a shocking crime, and it eventually becomes clear they are talking about the janitor’s suicide and the discovery of the notebooks containing the story of the road trip. The janitor in the book is an outsider artist and custodian in the tradition of Henry Darger, writing the story of the road trip in a series of notebooks that are found after his death, and the main text of the novel is meant to be the contents of those notebooks.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |