Hello everyone, Welcome to my blog! Harper’s Character Selection Screen is a blog that analyzes characters from movies, books, and video games to shed light on interesting interpretations or theories associated with said characters. While many options initially interested me, I thought it would be a good starting point to talk about I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Charlie Kaufman, a movie about a couple who go on a road trip through a storm while reality becomes increasingly confusing and disjointed. This character analysis will spoil the entirety of the movie as well as the novel it was based on. It also mentions suicide and mental illness in its themes. I highly recommend watching the film first before reading this not only because it’s a great film, but also to have a better understanding of this analysis in general. The film is incredibly dense, and I won’t be able to go over everything that happens in the story, so some background knowledge will make this make more sense. With all of that in mind, let’s talk about a high school janitor.
As I mentioned before, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a movie that revolves around a ‘young girl’ (that’s her name in the subtitles) and Jake going on a road trip to meet Jake’s parents and have dinner as a couple. While this is initially what the movie is about, that idea very quickly falls apart with all of the strange events that happen at Jake’s childhood home and beyond. For one, most of this movie takes place inside a car during a snowstorm following the conversations of the young girl and Jake, which randomly cuts to a Janitor going about his cleaning duties at a high school in the middle of nowhere for brief moments of time. When the couple does finally make it to Jake’s house, the young girl faces Jake’s parents aging rapidly and then becoming young again in every other scene, a dog that shakes for just a couple of seconds too long to get the snow off its fur (who we later find out has been dead and has been cremated for quite a while now), dead lambs in the barn out back, and many other things. Many people write this movie off as something only a film student would enjoy because of its abstract narrative decisions that make the entire film feel like a bad fever dream, but I think it demands more interpretation than most movies do, especially when it comes to the janitor in this movie.
The Janitor in I’m Thinking of Ending Things initially plays a rather minor role in the story that mainly centers around Jake and his girlfriend. The janitor appears randomly in scenes that largely have nothing to do with what the couple is doing, but we can infer that he has some sort of connection to Jake, as he shares experiences and memories with the janitor that are incredibly specific. The largest example of this is when Jake turns on the radio and lectures his girlfriend about the musical Oklahoma, which causes the point of view to switch from the car with the couple to the school where the janitor sweeps the floor while listening to the theater kids recite a song from the play. Jake also mentions an entire repertoire of other musicals played in the high school where the janitor works in an alarmingly specific way, a way that he wouldn’t know unless he was the janitor. This, along with a couple of other events in the movie, essentially confirms Jake being the younger version of the janitor. The movie forces us to piece this together as it moves along and never explicitly states that Jake is the janitor, but the book version that this movie is based on confirms this theory in its final sentences at the end of the book.
This revelation opens some doors for interpretation of the janitor’s character. Many popular theories involve diagnosing the janitor with schizophrenia and dementia since most of the scenes that happen in the movie occur entirely within the janitor’s mind, and his mind is full of disturbing daydreaming sequences of his younger self interacting with his “girlfriend” (the young girl.) All of the scenes with Jake and the young girl aren’t actually happening because all of those scenes are simply scenarios playing out in the janitor’s mind. This doesn’t initially seem solid enough to support itself, but all the scenes that occur in the janitor’s head are constantly warping, such as the young girl having a different name every couple of minutes, the age/behavior/memory of characters changing rapidly, hallucinations of dead pigs, and so on. There’s plenty of material that covers that interpretation if you look for it. An interpretation that is rarely covered in this movie, however, is how the ‘young girl’ that Jake dates in his mind is the janitor’s/Jake’s true self. Bear with me.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is centered around the young girl’s point of view (we’ll call her Lucy for now. Her name changes multiple times over the course of the film because of Janitor’s inner thoughts rapidly assigning her names that he heard from movies or poetry elsewhere, but this is how we are introduced to her.) Throughout the movie, we frequently tune into Lucy’s inner thoughts and actions. Knowing that Jake is the janitor that this is taking place inside of, why would Lucy be the character that the audience is forced to stick with? Wouldn’t it make more sense to be connected to Jake since he truly is the main character? While technically true, Lucy is the amalgamation of what Jake sees as his ideal self. We know this because when Lucy and Jake are at the house, Lucy very often takes on the attributes and memories of Jake, utilizing information that should be unknown to her in order to create a persona that Jake’s parents like. Lucy would briefly be a painter, a physicist, and a poet one after the other, and we learn later that Jake was the one that created all of the paintings that Lucy showed Jake’s parents as her own, studied science, and owned books of poetry from different authors that Lucy thought she created herself. Throughout the film, Lucy has no original sense of self because she is the same person as Jake and the janitor. This is further cemented by Jake trying to stop Lucy from going down into the basement, where she finds janitor uniforms in the washing machine, an action that ultimately cements Jake’s connection to the janitor. Jake likely doesn’t want her to find this because he doesn’t want to give up hope that he could still be his ideal self that presents like Lucy and has a career in science, something the film hints at being his expertise with consistent references to studies as well as the physics and science books in Jake’s childhood bedroom.
The title of the film initially revolves around Lucy wanting to break up with Jake, then evolves into Jake having suicidal thoughts due to his depression (which is heavily highlighted throughout the film, either through dialogue where he mentions that life doesn’t get any better or in the scene where Lucy visits his childhood bedroom and finds DVD cases labeled “The ways people have looked at lost/abandoned friendship”, “Lost memories of sorrow”, and “Futile efforts at success”, along with others that are too blurry to make out.) But where does this depression stem from? If we take it a step further, the cause of Jake’s depression could be seen as wanting to end things with the male portion of the self since Jake, Lucy, and the Janitor are the same person, but Lucy is the one in control of the janitor’s/Jake’s thoughts. The janitor’s existence means that ultimately, Jake remained in the outer perception while Lucy remained in the mind.
While we don’t have a good way of knowing if Jake ever took any action to bring out Lucy to the forefront, we do have evidence that suggests that Jake’s father pushed against whatever effort Jake made. When the younger version of the father says goodbye to Lucy, he tells her that “Jake’s a good boy. A good man, I should say.” While he could have been correcting his mistake to call him a boy since he is grown up at this point, he could have also been making a point to purposefully push against the idea that Jake could be anything other than a man. This is also backed by Jake noting that Lucy was the name of the girl in William Wordsworth’s poems, who he says is a beautiful, idealized woman who dies young. If Lucy is Jake’s idea of what he could have been, the detail about Lucy dying young connects to how his plan to take that form was halted in some way (most likely by his father.) The culmination of the efforts made to stop the true self drove the janitor to freeze to death in his truck of his own volition at the end of the film, implied by a shot that overlooking his truck covered in snow with the couple’s car long gone like it never existed.
While this characterization does admittedly skip over many details that the movie offers such as the pig infested with maggots and the entire theme of idolizing youth, the director Charlie Kaufman has apparently always written movies with a layer of LGBTQ+ themes in them. While I haven’t seen his other movies, I do think that knowledge gives this interpretation a bit more weight, especially because the novel doesn’t lean in this direction and is more focused on Jake’s perspective than anything. I felt compelled to bring this theory to light mainly because I couldn’t find any other article covering this topic even though it felt so incredibly obvious. I have a feeling not many wanted to pick apart this movie and its characters the way I did because it was released to Netflix in 2020, a year when we didn’t really need any more horrendously depressing movies to think about. Regardless, I think the conversation around a “trans” reading of the film should be explored more overall, perhaps in tandem with the other ways it could be interpreted. I’ll be back with another (hopefully more lighthearted) character next time. See you then!
-Harper Saglier, Blogger.
Harper Saglier – Asst. Prose Editor: Harper is a junior at Lewis University majoring in English with a concentration in Writing. They are currently employed at the Howard and Lois Adelmann Regional History Collection. When they aren’t reading academic material, they enjoy watching movies and reading books from their endless growing backlog of recommendations. They hope to use the analysis and writing skills gained from Lewis to further drive their interest in literature beyond graduation. Some of their favorite authors include Neil Gaiman and Oscar Wilde.