Three Charlie Kaufman characters rest their foreheads against a window. One feels increasingly hollow as she recites a poem she knows she didn’t write on the way to meet her boyfriend’s parents for the first time. The other replays the letter of an old lover in his head while flying to Cincinnati, desperate to understand why things fell apart. The final rides a train bound for Montauk after spontaneously calling in sick, fueled by a compulsion — and a void — deep within his heart.
From Being John Malkovich to Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s screenplays are more than a bit cerebral. But between his surreal logic and reality-bending premises lies something overwhelming human, sincere, and ultimately, real. Because for Kaufman, the power of love isn’t when it’s visible, tangible, and convenient, but when it’s gone.
In honor of a “holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap,” let’s explore three of Kaufman’s most moving films about love lost, love found, and love that never really existed.
But not in that order.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Kaufman’s most recent film may be his most disorienting. Largely a conversation between a young couple, Lucy (Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons), I’m Thinking of Ending Things illustrates the memory of a relationship — or several — as the mind that holds them falls apart.
Whereas Jake reflects a dying janitor’s inflated self-image, Lucy, whose name changes constantly, is a combination of every woman he’s ever seen. Gradually Jake unwinds and accepts his identity while Lucy tries to piece her experience together, neither reaching a very fulfilling conclusion.
In essence, the film outlines a crumbling template. Even as Jake’s faculties fail, barring him from separating dreams from reality, he pieces together his ideal girlfriend. But Lucy, much like Jake’s lifelong aspirations of winning a Nobel prize or becoming a poet laureate, can’t satisfy him. He’s blocked by a combination of his own insecurity and faint, yet nagging awareness of his dementia.
Lucy, for her part, pieces together Jake’s demise, knowing she’s just as much of a prisoner to his waning psyche as he is. She’s the “wife-shaped loneliness” alluded to in her (or Jake’s) poem at the film’s onset. She eventually transforms from Jake’s makeshift date to a sort of Charon, ferrying him to his fast-approaching death.
Yet their relationship, albeit entirely imaginary, is ultimately what gives Jake the gumption to accept his fate. This cobbled-together romance may only be informed by an impression of love, but it at least serves an undeniably important purpose: to come to terms with the tragedy of a lackluster life.
Anomalisa
Michael Stone (David Thewlis) is a particularly unmotivated motivational speaker. Everyone in his life, including his wife and son, share an identical, irritating voice (Tom Noonan). Haunted by the notion that they may all, in fact, be manipulated by some unseen demon of infatuation, he struggles to connect with anyone.
That is, of course, until he meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a timid call center employee who came to Cincinnati with an extroverted friend to see Michael’s lecture on customer service. But Lisa is, as the film’s namesake implies, an anomaly. Her voice is distinct, and even though Michael takes virtually no interest in the substance of her words, this jarring change of pace is enough to compel him.
Unfortunately, Michael fails to consider that he isn’t trapped in a world filled with mediocre people and their annoying habits, but that he creates it himself. Shortly after he arrives at his hotel, Michael calls Bella, who he abruptly left over a decade ago. Soon after they meet in the hotel’s bar, she asks him why he left. Realizing he never really asked himself this question, the only response he can muster is:
“I have mental problems.”
Bella storms off and, in an attempt to meet virtually anyone that doesn’t remind him of himself, he knocks on the door of every room on his floor. And when he does inevitably meet Lisa and her friend, Emily, it’s not her uniqueness that propels his curiosity, but his desperation.
Michael’s status overwhelms her, and over the course of a few hours, they sleep one another. Over breakfast and seconds, after Michael declares he’ll be leaving his wife, Lisa’s voice begins to sound just like everyone else’s: grating, nasally and painful. He then quickly starts to dissect all of her worse habits, unable to stop the cycle he’s repeated ad nauseum.
Michael can’t accept anyone else because he can’t accept himself. His idea of a perfect partner doesn’t exist, at least not in any sustainable way, and thus his own self-hatred pollutes every interaction he has. In the films closing moments, he sits on the stairs of his house staring at an antique sex doll, the only other entity with a unique voice. He sees himself in the automaton and, finally, acknowledges that he’s at the root of his inability to love.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
After ending their relationship, Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) undergo operations to wipe away their memories of one another. While technically Clementine opted for the procedure first, the chronology is somewhat irrelevant by the film’s onset. Because at the point, Joel feels he’s the same as he’s always been:
Introverted. Aimless. Lonely.
But he’s not empty. His spur-of-the-moment decision to travel places him right back in the path of Clementine and, oblivious to their past interactions, the two hit it off. Eventually, they make their way onto a frozen lake, laying between the tangents of an enormous crack in the lake.
The moment’s tender, but the shattering effect of their past trauma is within arms’ reach. And as Joel tries to fight off the effect of his treatment, this image grows even more telling. As he desperately clings to his memories of Clementine, Joel begins to painfully realize that though resentment and love seem at odds, they do co-exist. To try and do away with one forces the sacrifice of the other.
And, even the love Joel and Clementine shared yielded a distaste for one another, it by no means nullifies the value of their relationship. Eternal Sunshine reminds us that we’re living impressions shaped by every experience we have. Love shapes one piece of us while pain molds the other, forming us into imperfect wholes.
A relationship may be short, long, exceptional, volatile and everything in between, but it still exists. There is no real erasure for an experience, just as much as there’s no real erasure for who we fundamentally are.
Such is the effect of love:
Momentary yet infinite.
