Those who've watched I'm Thinking of Ending Things know what happens in it, and those who haven't probably are best served by not reading any kind of plot summary, so I'll refrain from including one. Suffice to say it's unsettling and dreamlike, a narrative of eerie delusion not unlike the works of Lynch. However, the film it most reminded me of was 2017's Ghost Stories (not to be confused with A Ghost Story), in that a disturbing sequence of events is ultimately revealed to be an elaborate morbid reverie on the part of a comatose or dying person, a tradition dating back through things like Jacob's Ladder to the classic Ambrose Bierce short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and probably beyond.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things was almost everything I wanted it to be: intentionally disjointed, dreamlike, discomforting, a musing on the collapsing of identity and reality, as well as being stylish and powerfully-acted — right up until the end. To me, the final sequences somewhat damaged the ambiguity of everything that came before, as it becomes wholly apparent that the protagonist is actually a figment of another character's imagination, and that said character appears to have been living out either an elaborate fantasy throughout his life or just as he dies.
Such narrative conceits are entirely valid. There's nothing wrong with them, even if, considering the examples I've listed above, they're a little tired. Apparently the novel on which this is based makes this concept even more obvious, although I haven't read it. I'm generally reluctant to watch films based on novels without having read the novel first, but I felt like seizing the moment. In any event, they can make for quite moving ruminations on the nature of regret, self-loathing, and the fragility of a sense of self and presence in the world in the space of our short lives.
However, I can't help but feel that Dreamlikes, as I'm terming them, of this stripe, exist in a certain degree of contradiction with their presentation. The Dreamlike tends to be crafted from a consistent set of elements: a shifting sense of time, place and character, the intrusion of otherwise unconnected elements from waking life, the expression of a world which seems to only exist in the immediacy of experience, flowing into a new shape from moment to moment.
There is a reason why Lynch is a master of the Dreamlike, and why many other usages of the mode fall short: they never fully engage with this sense of immediacy. In so many Dreamlikes, things are symbolic, they are clues, they are hints to some terrible secret lurking just below the surface which, when pieced together, demonstrate to us the tragedy of human experience. And yet this in itself provides a somewhat comfortable narrative in which things ultimately make sense: the ghost our hero saw is actually the living person in the waking world trying to revive them, the rambunctious friend is actually a projection of suppressed elements of their own personality, and so on. Note the amusing parody of the conclusion of A Beautiful Mind at the end of I'm Thinking of Ending Things.
What a more Lynchian Dreamlike achieves is the much more unsettling and yet more accurate representation that, in dreams, things largely do not make sense. The "story" of a dream may have a certain direction, but is accompanied by or even assembled from largely disconnected and even random elements floating upon the surface of, or nested deep within, our minds ("We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along it."). And this is, in many respects, a more powerful reflection of reality, because, in many respects, reality does not make sense either.
Just as the dream assembles itself without our control (putting lucid dreaming aisde) from the countless images firing in our resting brains, life is pieced together through the interaction of an external world over which we, as beings with agency, have no external control, and an internal world, the organic jumble of lenses, sensory, psychological, cultural, biological, etc., through which we experience it. In most Dreamlikes, things ultimately come together: there is a stabilisation. But in reality, as in dreams, there is only constant transformation; Jon Padgett's narrator in his short story "Origami Dreams" observes that even death "is only a transition into yet another borrowed reality." This is why the ending of the third season of Twin Peaks has, to my mind, more allure than any narrative revealing a protagonist's dying or deluded imaginings (as another example of the latter, consider also Shutter Island), in that it evokes what I see as the true impact of the Dreamlike in general.
None of this is to say that I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not worth anyone's time. It's certainly worth watching for its own merits and arguments about loneliness, anxiety and fantasy. Ghost Stories, incidentally, is worth it for similar reasons. And I will also say that its use of the Dreamlike is effective in rendering a representation of the constantly rearranged, borderline delirious quality of deeply-involved fantasies and delusions. But things do ultimately settle into a state of equilibrium. I just wish that writers and directors utilising what I have here termed "the Dreamlike" were more willing to engage with what I see as the power it possesses that I feel only Lynch has truly tapped into in the cinematic field. Almost all of the Dreamlikes I've seen have used the mode to produce evocative, through-provoking, unsettling and challenging works, but the mode has the potential to go even further. There is always the inherent opportunity to exceed presenting difficult interpretations of reality, in order to query the notion of interpretability itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.