![]() This is where the nuance of Oklahoma! comes in. He ends his acceptance with a performance of "Lonely Room" from Oklahoma! He takes one final form as an elderly version of Jake, accepting a Nobel prize for physics to a black-tie audience of his peers. The delusions devolve into a cartoon, and then an animated pig appears and leads the naked janitor back into the high school. The dance leads to them to a gym where another, more svelte janitor (I know, hang in there), dance battles New Jake and eventually stabs him to death and leaves him to die in the snow, which has since started falling from the gym ceiling.Īfterward, the real janitor goes to his truck outside and gets completely undressed as he watches flashbacks of his life unfold in front of him, unable to tell which were imagined and which were real. ![]() Instead, when Jake and his girlfriend find themselves at the high school, the two of them take form as another couple that engage in a contemporary dance routine that outlines the rest of their life together. The film never gets as overt as the book does (which is saying something because the book ending is still pretty nuanced). It's important to note that in the film, Jake and his girlfriend drove up in a sedan. Kaufman takes some wildly fun liberties with that book ending. Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020 How Does The Movie Ending Line Up With That? Jake was the manifestation of the man he could have been. His girlfriend was a woman he once met at a bar that he never approached. ![]() Jake was a brilliant student but became unraveled and lonely, living a life full of regrets. In the end, when his body is found, they discover that Jake, his girlfriend, and the janitor are all one in the same. This ultimately means that Jake, too, killed himself. They meet in the janitor's closet, and soon after, the janitor himself appears and hands the girlfriend a clothes hanger, which she uses to fatally stab herself in the neck with. What it all ends up culminating in is a moment where the girlfriend realizes that she and Jake are the same person. His girlfriend follows him in after a while, but feels like she is being followed. In the book, when Jake and his girlfriend leave his parents' house, they make a stop at a high school, where Jake goes in. Another time, he's watching students rehearse for Oklahoma ! at the high school. At one point, he is in a break room watching a romantic comedy starring two people who look an awful lot like Jake and his girlfriend. Or a poet.īut the linchpin in all of this story is that intermittently, the film shifts to a lonely janitor at a high school. Lucy's profession shifts-sometimes she's a physicist. His parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) shift in age throughout the entire film. Once they arrive at Jake's home and family farm, the surrealism intensifies. Actually, her name shifts throughout the entire film. Oh, and the reason she's "his girlfriend." It's never quite certain what her name is. In a seemingly stream of conscious voiceover, the girlfriend says, "I'm thinking of ending things." But that voiceover is often seemingly herd by Jake, even though his girlfriend never said it out loud. The film starts with Jake (Jesse Plemons) picking up his girlfriend (Jessie Buckley) for a trip home. ![]() The subtle clues about what (might be) happening are all over the place from moment go. Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not a film you watch with a phone in hand. Of course, be warned: moving forward, there are massive spoilers for the book and film, I'm Thinking of Ending Things. All of this is to say, we have some major theories, backstory, and questions to break down. It is dependent on where you are in life and where your brain and psyche is, you know?” But that doesn't change that the source material might have set up expectations-fans of the book might also have some doubts about the film's ambiguous ending. In our profile of Jesse Plemons, he suggests that much of the film is left open for interpretation, saying, “Watching it again, it felt different.
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