Im thinking of ending things screenplay12/12/2023 ![]() ![]() There’s also the mutability of identity, which is present in Reid’s novel but magnified in Kaufman’s film. ![]() Strange winters aren’t the only ways in which Ice and Kaufman’s film find some overlap. “We went out together into the onslaught of show, fled through the swirling white like escaping ghosts,” Ice’s narrator observes. Much later in the novel, Kavan continues with the evocative winter landscapes-ones where squalls of snow are less about weather conditions and more about a fundamental breakdown in reality. “Snowflakes turned yellow like swarms of bees round the lighted windows.” I could barely distinguish the nearest ruins, white stationary shadows beyond the moving fabric of falling white,” muses the narrator of Ice. “Both a labyrinth and a mirror” could just as easily describe the landscape of Kaufman’s film-notably, its climax.Īt the most basic level of Kavan’s descriptions of wintry landscapes could just as easily apply to the omnipresent snow in Kaufman’s film. But that’s not simply a case of literary name-dropping: Ice ends up informing Kaufman’s film in numerous ways. A scene in which the narrator and Jake parry back and forth about books and movies-including the narrator quoting from the writings of Pauline Kael-also involves an invocation of Ice. This may give some readers pause, given that Kaufman’s film is already a relatively faithful adaptation of another novel by Iain Reid, with which it shares its name.Īt the same time, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is also a narrative at war with itself-making the contrasts that run through it feel like a feature rather than a bug. It’s almost as though Kaufman was stealthily adapting Kavan’s novel for his film. ![]() “Both a labyrinth and a mirror” could just as easily describe the landscape of Kaufman’s film-notably, its climax, set in a high school, where one character’s frenzied search for another transforms into a meditation on the nature of identity. Though Ice is always lucid and direct, nothing in it is simple, and it gathers to itself the properties of both a labyrinth and a mirror. Lethem writes of the novel’s seemingly noble narrator, who “slowly converges with the personality and motives of the sadistic, controlling ‘warden’ who is the book’s antagonist and the narrator’s double.” And then Lethem makes an observation about Ice that could apply almost as well to the recent film which invokes it: Lethem’s introduction offers a succinct description of the novel to follow. That edition made a convincing case for Kavan as an underrated major writer, and came complete with a Jonathan Lethem introduction and a Kate Zambreno afterword. The edition of Ice on display in the film is the Peter Owen Ltd edition, rather than the 50th anniversary edition released by Penguin Classics in 2017. Later on, as the narrator and Jake drive through a surreal and seemingly unending winter landscape, Jake discusses Kavan’s novel as part of a sprawling and allusive conversation. (Don’t judge me-I was watching it alone.) During a scene in which the film’s unnamed narrator wanders into the childhood bedroom of her boyfriend Jake, the camera briefly shows a copy of Anna Kavan’s hallucinatory novel Ice. Halfway through watching Charlie Kaufman’s film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, my inner literary nerd yelped with glee. Note: This essay contains major spoilers for the film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, to the extent that a fundamentally abstract and nonlinear film can be spoiled. ![]()
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