Meek's Cutoff, I'm Thinking of Ending Things
"I was listening to a beautiful podcast the other day."
Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
Directed and Edited by Kelly Reichardt
Written by Jonathan Raymond
Starring Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano, Rod Rondeaux, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Zoe Kazan
Meek’s Cutoff reminds me of those early last decade comics no one really talks about but represent in work and stability the kind of stories that shouldn’t have gone out of fashion. Those comics of a certain grimness that made the comic strip stretch the gag into a flattening agony. Given over to a dexterity in the labour. Noticing the effort but not quite the reason. A total commitment of the perpetual second act engrained in sequential art and how it longs to be authorless while even in static fostering a steady rage that doesn’t shout but echo in how the work performs. Not exactly marketable but treasured when found in a markdown box below the shelves and initial asking price. One of those things I make a home for on my own pile.
Realizing in finally watching this instead of just hearing murmurs Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond’s ongoing encapsulation of American personal theatre is more Herriman than Beckett. Less about the strictness in useless action but how it dwarfs in canvas and the promise of gesture gives purpose to feeling be that violent or loving or the confused combination. In the awkward motion unsurely striving for a direct result in another person who tries to take what’s indirectly meant. Crafting a cycle pushed along through a warmer belief it could alter instead of always fail. The dangle along of reading Krazy Kat rather than Happy Days confirming the prescribed doom of living. Maybe meaner depending how long the run is and how the hope becomes the tool for more dread but with a wider capacity to latch on to a truer sincerity as it feels eventual and intimate.
Reichardt placing Michelle Williams as a decoder and responder. Playing women held within certain standing in American life coming across or having to be convinced of the passed-on mythology of these believed prospects. In Wendy and Lucy finding a given kindness that comes off mythic in a man watching a near empty parking lot. In Certain Women casually abusing that kindness as a means to build from what’s forcibly wanted as the taken idea or model for living. In Meek’s Cutoff how adrift and null the legend and promise amounts in total desolation and how attitudes solidify in self-preserving conquests and offer the emblem to a cruder ideal. Not a revision to the western just in presentation but what it always meant in stature as Bruce Greenwood’s Meek confines in a consistent prejudice coming from comfort as his memories waver into an unenhanced sense of truth that he’ll never argue against as it shines on him and whatever he has in presence. Something Michelle Williams’ Emily Tetherow can demolish immediately saying “You don't know much about women, do you Stephen Meek?” Forging an opposition within perimeters and archetypes that an earnest western never questions and a western in response does louder even when the cut to Mrs. Tetherow with that rifle feels thunderous.
Revising instead with clear ironic posturing and rewriting this routine—those hard cuts to how the sun reflects on dull sand after deteriorating conversations and whispers in fading lantern lit night that measure these days harsher—into accepting a forced upon sense of compassion instead of manifest destiny (a term coined the same year the film takes place). Having to upend closed-off piety to accept the help from an indigenous person a settler’s presence trekking across this land deems to delete for a subscribed convenience. Working around language and the barriers that cement with rhetoric slowly coming to terms with the practical need and having no choice but to trust the gesture as it is instead of what it might entail.
But in knowing history—seeing the title of the film, seeing the name on the map, knowing what America’s foundational sins are and how they’re thought of as boons—the film isn’t doing this for a happy ending but for that Herriman maneuverer. Much like how First Cow is framed, knowledge leads us along to what’s definitive even when these performances talk about endeavour and hone onto a future. Wondering if it’s going to change and then feeling the brick hit.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman
Based on one of the those books people have read in a vacuum so they can go “that’s not how it is in the book!” now. Look I’m reading Conversations with Friends because of the eventual tv show but you bozos have a lot of nerve.
Starring Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis, Oliver Platt ?
A screenplay of total transparency in craft to the point where you can see the room where it was written, what was on the bookshelf or beside the laptop, and know the door was closed, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a broad stroke with not much to go on but an academic idea of human absurdity and the slow burn tragedy. Baroque and serious in its comedy but using a boxed aspect ratio because it was destined for television and looks about as ok as an FX drama even when they flew in a Polish cinematographer to make it snow-soaked and Old Country coal black. Writing like it’s throwing a fridge into a typewriter because it can only go off with the energy of writing everything and everything being written. Going for maximal operatic expressions of always hovered-over depression but only finding music in incessant monologues that flush out patience.
I get it and ironically feel too old for it. The way it talks in quotes there is something unchanging in this style that hasn’t escaped the discovery you take with “art” when you’re younger. Trapped in the high school assignment nightmare and thinking it has power outside the dream. Cloistered in the same scope a teenager romances death, uglies families without a true excuse, insecurely wiggles its way to make meek losers triumphant without consideration or warming up to the possibility of caring, and the hard gum arrogance of a kid without the experience of a part time job thinking they’re given something for breathing and that carrying over into adulthood. The film can only presume an outside world and what it hates about it and latch onto a prescribed and smug outlook without going further. The bare championing without fully comprehending Cassavettes or what it sees that’s lame in late period Zemeckis (the easiest target that’s probably 80 yards wide it manages to miss because it really wants to take down Ron Howard but gets too shy) that’s not based on an actual criticism but a write-off.
When it comes out as a total sprawl and always keeps up being annoying, I’m not sure what’s to gain in the experience. It doesn’t have a pace and doesn’t trust what else it could be. It wants to be above reproach while constantly repeating the not-subtle attitude. Drifting around the vortex of a tragedy in how an interesting woman (Jessie Buckley amazing) has to give over all her energies to a loser sinking in cement (Jesse Plemons steady) with a branch to free him and prove his worth as not only a functional person but a genius and protagonist to his morphing-in-age parents (Toni Collette and David Thewis offering no surprises) who always see him as a child. An act that sinks her further in the dive and rescue and toward the annihilation of an identity that can’t exist without the pressures of his association. Which might be on its way to being a moral but also in a work of one solid mood of inevitability not meant to challenge but relax in these attitudes. Room for a Pauline Kael review but not for a genuine argument for the craft as it necessitates that these are the ultimate conditions that have no fix and must be because they are.
Again, I get the intention. A Kaufman script without an eased-in gimmick of a science fiction object in a modern ecology and without a filter embracing the immorality of a repugnant man in orbit around a woman who meets the criteria of being beautiful but also knowing genius enough to ignore what’s in front of her. The scope might be narrowed deliberately to make it feel worse. Cosmic desperation and the limiters of the references that are coming from someone who never graduated a senior year canon of what they singularly value and using these obsessions to lure and decimate those they love inherently or in trying to manifest what they want in another person who appears without flaw at first sight. Whose world is only one empty road either going to their house, their job (their school), or their parent’s house as a void howls and time conjures the eventual with the now as place unchanges. An imagined community theatre production that forms realistically in the idle emptiness of redundant trekking. Of course an imagined woman could survive here and of course she can’t conceive of enjoying Wordsworth.
Closer to a janitor than an artist, seeing the Pauline Kael books and Norton Anthologies on my shelf, recapping Normal People, I can understand this topography of thinking. The pandemic has only accelerated bleakness and how isolated we’ve been as the landscape around us deteriorates. I’m not cheery and I’m not in the mood for promises that probably won’t happen. Winter is not going to be good. But when a lot of my angst has come down to the pressures that have tighten because all my responsibilities have focused into tasks that have to mend or have to happen with me being there, how I have to keep up a steadiness that has to produce a momentum, how I can’t accept a pessimism because I have to force myself to believe that’s not what I’m here for, the absurdity of I’m Thinking of Ending Things comes out too purposeful. The writing offers an allowance to think like this without genuine stakes even when it rejects those screenwriting tips and tricks but bullshits verisimilitude because it only thinks in screenwriting because it’s all the screenwriter has for oil. Motor-mouthing a philosophy that only works if you’re cornered and deliberately all that’s there in roundabout nihilism. Not belaboured over but automatic. An interior frustrated mind of a janitor made external without real characteristic even when everyone in the dream is him. Generally sad not for the economics or what actual suffering endured looks like passed Toni Collette accepting the attractive cliché as an always crazed mom and David Thewlis mushing around like an anteater who thinks he’s an alligator but for the sake of it. Not giving way to communicate an anxiety that’s actually universal because it goes about cutting off the root for burden and can only be deprecating as it takes pleasure in the just-effects of the whole experience without attached history that actually makes all this genuinely sad instead of maudlin. Too satisfied to be tragic, it suffocates under a pompous and fake modesty—“the Chaplin disease” as Orson Welles puts it when talking about Woody Allen*—of a work that loves itself and hates itself. Only functioning under the perimeters of genius and the “toil” genius takes but still wants to be “for your consideration.”
A horror movie for NPR listeners that still tries to orchestrate that Bush Jr. era flyover country view a David Sedaris or the one guy who was cheaper but effectively more insufferable could whimper through that benefits them because of an authorial absolutism**. Controlling their meekness and allowed poetic license over how the world chaotically expresses itself in a K Mart. Something I grew out of and lived without fine. Which it could’ve got away with if it wasn’t for what’s done with the “Young Woman” and how that makes this less than profound and cocky. There isn’t really an onus to stay with this guy in the scenario even when it’s gripped into being and so much of this comes off as a fetish if we look at the career that makes this the average romantic sentiment. Imagining women as seers of masculine hang-ups as the turn on they can’t get off on as “equal” participants and hooked to the anchor of a loathing not even theirs. This tragedy fading for a corny pastiche to make the erasure accepted as is without sorrow. Maybe the supposed feeling but a place where the art neglects an actual intention as the artist waits for the cue for the audience to burst out in applause even when everyone is watching this at home. Whatever, brah.
Next Time: Trigun and The Grand Finale of Normal People
Comics That Remind Me of Meek’s Cutoff
-Black River and Cockbone (found in The Furry Trap) By Josh Simmons
-Copra #14 by Michel Fiffe
-A lot of what Gilbert Hernandez does recently. Those ones based on movies that don’t exist that are these weird…exercises that will mean something in the end.
-Laid Waste and Black is The Color by Julia Gfrörer (haven’t read Vision yet in full but that too?)
-The Blood of The Virgin entry by Sammy Harkham that was in Kramers 10 next to comics about whitewalling your hands at the local library or army men fighting with their penises coloured in marker. That’s maybe the latest entry in what I mean.
The End Notes
*I have books too.
** “I have the gift of writing and being witty so that must mean God favours me over people in the Carolinas.”