I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a Sequel to Synecdoche, New York

This essay is full of spoilers for both movies — do not read until you’ve watched both.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a sequel to Synecdoche, New York, and their relationship is made unusually clear by Charlie Kaufman, who has a well deserved reputation for making complex movies that do not try to make their messages clear — in fact, movies that make their messages clear are one of the things Kaufman rightly attacks in this movie.

If Synecdoche, New York is about a man who cannot write a play as he lives his life, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is about a man who cannot live life as he watches plays and movies. By the end of the movie, the janitor has died a miserable, lonely death like a pig being eaten alive by maggots because he could not make any connection to anyone. Instead, he toils alone, insulted and mocked by young students for being old when he is not outrightly ignored. But he sees them, observes their lives as they develop, just as he sees the lives of characters in movies and plays without ever actually living.

Synecdoche, New York, for all its existential horror, is about a man who does a lot of living. The main character, Caden, has a wife and a daughter, and a woman he has a crush on, and then a second family, all the while a dizzying number of people come in and out of his life. The horror of the movie isn’t that it is about a life unlived, but that the life he lives happens so fast. We too must acknowledge and accept that life is tragically short, and we can spend our entire lives working towards our great masterpiece that we never finish. But that doesn’t really matter; in the end not only will we die but so too will everyone and everything we have ever known, until there is nothing left.

Kaufman has said that the idea for Synecdoche, New York was to make an existential horror film — a movie about terror, but not of a monster or nightmares or anything like that. Rather, a movie about the horror of life — because what could be more horrific than life itself? I’m Thinking of Ending Things gives a very depressing answer to that question: a life with no life in it, as the janitor experiences. A life living unnoticed when not mocked that ends dying alone in a freezing car after cleaning a school for students who will either ignore your toil or mock you for it. If Caden’s end is sad, the janitor’s ending is soulcrushing — and everything before it was not much better.

While Synecdoche is a movie about grand scale, with cinematography and a dizzying complexity of details that fit, Ending Things is near minimalist. We have very few characters, and only four settings: the car, the farmhouse, the ice cream shop, and the school. If the play at the end is not in the school, that would make five; but given the interior logic of the movie, I take that final scene to be the janitor’s final fantasy, a play occurring in the school’s auditorium where he feels the love and social connections he never had just as he is dying alone.

But in terms of plot, the movies are largely identical. They are about a man experiencing several stages of life before dying alone. In both, the man fantasizes about a woman he wants to be with, but he cannot and is not, until she disappears, too.

The crucial difference is that Caden is a producer of art and the janitor an endless consumer of art. But here “art” must be taken loosely; we see hints of his knowledge of classic film criticism of canonical but now obscure movies, and a love for poetry and abstract paintings; we also see him watching a dumb romantic comedy by Robert Zemeckis, a pivotal clue for the ending of the movie, itself a reference to A Beautiful Mind and a clue that even in his last moment the janitor cannot live life for himself. He can only fantasize what life is like through the simulacra that he has filled his time with.

And this, I believe, is the ultimate divergence between the two movies. Synecdoche is about the frustration of an artist unable to recreate life in art; Ending Things is about a frustrated life unable to enjoy the fantasies of crappy entertainment in reality. From that perspective, Ending Things is much sadder, and a much dire warning to live life and not lose oneself in the stupid, vapid art we find ourselves surrounded by.

Kaufman’s contempt for Hollywood in the movie is obvious, and it is a well deserved contempt; the rom-coms have ruined healthy relationships for millions of people over several generations, and the parody in the middle of this horrible genre is a righteous attack. The ending recreation of that incredibly stupid and historically inaccurate Nobel Prize acceptance speech from A Beautiful Mind turns the knife; Kaufman uses hilariously bad makeup (with very noticeable scalp lines) to punctuate the point of the scene: it is fake, it is stupid, it is ridiculous, and anyone living with this as an ideal for life cannot help but be disappointed.

Thus the movie is more than an attack on bad, dumb cinema; it’s an attack on taking cinema seriously. The word-for-word takedown of A Woman Under the Influence by Pauline Kael in the middle of the movie serves dual purpose: to make fun of the pretentiousness of cinema and the pretentiousness of people who take cinema far too seriously.

Before watching the movie, I read an interview with Mr. Kaufman in which he said, much to the distress of the interviewer (and myself), that he is not too bothered with whether he will make another movie again. The thought of the most genius moviemaker alive abandoning his craft is horrific, but unsurprising; after Synecdoche, New York, a movie about all of life itself, where does one go? The man has said more about life than most of us live; what more is there to say? In Ending Things, Kaufman seems to be addressing this question directly, telling us perhaps that we should not take his (or any) movies seriously, that we should go live life while we still can, before we are too old and frail, lest we die alone like pigs being eaten alive by maggots. If we’re lucky, we will die in our beds being tended for by a dutiful son, as Jake’s mother is — and ultimately, it is those human relationships that matter more than any movie ever could.

Despite the truly horrific turn of events for the janitor, Ending Things is thus thematically a movie about hope — something Kaufman explicitly addresses in the script. And a youth spent enjoying life rather than a youth spent consuming media is a much better one, which is a message perhaps more essential than ever in a social-media obsessed world, although an ironic and painful one to receive during a global pandemic.

And this is where I have to differ with Mr. Kaufman. Watching Synecdoche, New York had a profound impact on my life. I watched the movie when I was 30, just as I was beginning my career as an academic — a career I had spent over 10 years working to get, and an identity and purpose that meant a great deal to me. That movie was not the only reason I gave up that career to pursue other things, but its carpe diem message had more urgency than anything I’d ever seen before, and I can’t say my aggressive pivot to a different life path was not partly influenced by watching that movie.

Not everyone will react the same way, of course. I watched the movie with my then wife, who had something of an existential crisis and nervous breakdown after watching it, and which she blamed her breakdown for over the few years afterwards until our divorce. I cannot say with certainty how much the movie influenced her and our marriage, but it was not entirely ancillary. And the influence was very much for the better; it made me realize the life I was living was the wrong life for me, and life was too short to keep reliving the abuse I had grown up with. Since my divorce my life has been wonderful, happy, and full; I don’t think it’s silly to credit that movie in some small part, even if other people (including Kaufman) think it is.

Kaufman’s dismissal of cinema and art as ways of understanding and looking at life is ironic, in that he is stating this in a movie. It is also an act of great humility that is undeserved. Kaufman is such a genius moviemaker and writer that his work defies classification, analysis, and valuation. You cannot say whether these two movies, which are unspoiled by the dilution of other voices from outside directors, are good or bad. Kaufman’s genius transcends such simplistic concepts. In a sense, his movies are good because they perform exactly what they are designed to do — but to describe his work in this way is insultingly oversimplifying.

A better way to think of Kaufman’s movies is whether you are psychologically designed to benefit from experiencing them. As I experienced very first hand, some people are mentally a good fit for Kaufman’s violent and aggressive anti-naturalist realism — he forces you to look at your mortality, your relationships, and your life and ask whether you are living the life you really want to live. Some people benefit from being asked this question; others will break down. Many, if not most, may simply not understand the question — or try their hardest not to understand, better to avoid reality.

Ending Things is about such a man who tries his hardest to avoid reality, and dies alone and unloved with nothing but a fantasy so fake that it is laughable to everyone else. I think people who see themselves in this will find it very hard to watch and very distressing; some will react defensively by hating the movie or simply refusing to understand what it means. Others will get the message, turn the screen off, and go try to live life (even if that’s not very easy to do right now). But for people like me who already learned from Synecdoche how important it is to live life, we may want to push back at Kaufman. “No, Mr. Kaufman,” we should say, “we don’t want to turn the screen off. Because there are a lot of Zemeckises out there, but there’s still a Kaufman, and that is the voice we need to listen to. Because not all art is fake and hollow and dumb, and a good life is one where we can have love and family mixed in with the endless existential dread.”