Char­lie Kaufman’s fast food obsession

Char­lie Kauf­man doesn’t eat fast food. But he does dream about it – there’s an oneir­ic qual­i­ty to the 24-hour din­er lit up in neon along the road at night. Kaufman’s lat­est film, I’m Think­ing of End­ing Things, is about dreams. Its struc­ture mir­rors Rogers and Hammerstein’s musi­cal Okla­homa!, the first to fea­ture a dream bal­let. The dance is repli­cat­ed in the film as an unnamed young woman (Jessie Buck­ley) bat­tles with her feel­ings for Jake (Jesse Ple­mons) on the eve of meet­ing his par­ents. It’s a night­mare all new cou­ples expe­ri­ence, which we fear even though we know it’ll nev­er be that bad.

Soci­ol­o­gist George Ritzer observed in 1993 that our soci­ety has come to resem­ble a net­work of fast food chains in a process he termed ​‘McDonaldiza­tion’. These glob­al busi­ness­es oper­ate on a sub­lim­i­nal lev­el, con­di­tion­ing us to asso­ciate them with Amer­i­can val­ues and uni­form qual­i­ty. They offer the plea­sure of pre­dictabil­i­ty. When Jake pulls in at a Tulsey Town, a road-side fast food out­let based on the Dairy Queen in Iain Reed’s source nov­el, he can already taste the ice cream.

The scene’s absur­di­ty is height­ened by the fact Jake’s sud­den crav­ing kicks in dur­ing a bliz­zard. Why does Jake feel so com­pelled to eat an ice ​‘Brr’ that he delays their treach­er­ous jour­ney? A jin­gle pops into his head about the clown from Tulsey Town where ​‘ice cream grows on trees.’ Fast food cul­ture has entered his sub­con­scious and dic­tates his actions. Jake doesn’t want an Oreo Brr. He needs it.

In Kaufman’s debut nov­el, ​‘Antkind’, pub­lished short­ly before the release of I’m Think­ing of End­ing Things, film crit­ic B Rosen­berg­er Rosen­berg under­goes a sim­i­lar rit­u­al. There are bugs on his win­dow, so he pulls into a Slammy’s to get some paper tow­els. The serv­er tells him she’ll only give him tow­els with a min­i­mum $5 pur­chase. He buys a ​‘Big­gy’ Cola and a burg­er he doesn’t want. By the end of the nov­el Slammy’s has (at least in B’s imag­i­na­tion) tak­en over the Unit­ed States under Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trunk and broad­casts its adverts direct­ly into the brain.

Kauf­man is fas­ci­nat­ed by men­tal manip­u­la­tion. His sec­ond screen­play, Human Nature, applies BF Skinner’s oper­ant con­di­tion­ing to a prim­i­tive man called Puff (Rhys Ifans). Dr Bronf­man (Tim Rob­bins) trains Puff to order at ​‘breas­t­au­rant’ Chester’s with­out dry-hump­ing the wait­ress. Kauf­man high­lights the fine line the fast food mod­el draws between hired women and the processed meat they serve in the customer’s gaze – the Chester’s uni­form depicts a burg­er over each breast. McDonaldiza­tion holds up patri­archy, posi­tion­ing men as con­sumers and women as sex­u­al products.

As Wal­ter Ben­jamin observes in ​‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­duc­tion’, things lose their ​‘aura’ when they’re mass pro­duced. Kaufman’s char­ac­ters sim­i­lar­ly fear the loss of indi­vid­u­a­tion. Enter­ing anoth­er mind in Being John Malkovich stim­u­lates iden­ti­ty crises and gen­der dys­pho­ria. The uni­for­mi­ty of food and peo­ple are aligned in Spike Jonze’s 1999 film by set­ting a scene in which Malkovich enters his own mind in a restau­rant. All the cus­tomers are Malkovich. Close-up on the menu: ​“Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich” ad infinitum.

To Michael Stone (David Thewlis) in 2015’s Anom­al­isa, every­one has the same voice (Tom Noonan’s). In a night­mare, Stone runs through an office of monau­r­al sound ema­nat­ing from near-iden­ti­cal pup­pets. His mouth falls off and he realis­es he is part of that same mass pro­duc­tion. They tell him he can’t have Lisa, who has a unique voice (Jen­nifer Jason Leigh). She’s an anom­aly, a word Lisa learnt from Michael’s book on cus­tomer ser­vice – anoth­er mass-pro­duced way to mon­e­tise the uni­for­mi­ty of the McDonaldized cap­i­tal­ist mod­el. Lisa’s voice dis­torts and becomes like the oth­ers. It’s no coin­ci­dence this hap­pens while Michael and Lisa eat their stan­dard­ised room ser­vice breakfast.

In I’m Think­ing of End­ing Things, Jessie Buck­ley is cred­it­ed as ​‘The Young Woman’. Jake doesn’t even know her name – Lucia? Louisa? Ames? Amy? – but she knows his. It’s on the paint­ings she finds in the base­ment which look uncan­ni­ly like the pho­tos of her own paint­ings on her phone, paint­ings which posters on the walls reveal are actu­al­ly by Amer­i­can tonal­ist Ralph Albert Blakelock.

Is any­thing orig­i­nal? Kaufman’s female char­ac­ters nev­er cre­ate – they imi­tate, as Buck­ley imi­tates Pauline Kael and Gena Row­lands in the car. She quotes Emer­son and Wilde to claim all life is mim­ic­ry, cita­tions with­in cita­tions. What does she do, any­way? Is she a painter? A physi­cist? A film stu­dent? And how exact­ly did these two meet?

Jake tells his father (David Thewlis) that she’s a din­er wait­ress; he asked her about the San­ta Fe burg­er. We’ve seen this scene in a film-with­in-the-film. It’s a rom-com about a man who declares his love for a wait­ress which gets her fired. She’s a veg­an, a trainee ani­mal rights lawyer who aged five was hor­ri­fied to learn a burg­er was ​‘ground-up cow’. She sees through the veil of igno­rance McDonaldiza­tion relies upon, its dis­re­gard for all life from the ani­mals it destroys to the cus­tomers it fat­tens and the servers it exploits.

Then comes the irony. The rom-com ends and the cred­its roll: ​‘Direct­ed by Robert Zemeck­is’. In ​‘Antkind’, B lam­poons direc­tors like Christo­pher Nolan and, well, Char­lie Kauf­man while applaud­ing Judd Apa­tow. They’re know­ing winks, align­ing the recur­ring appear­ances of fast food out­lets with Apa­tow and Zemeck­is movies. Don’t buy it, Kauf­man tells us.

Then anoth­er lay­er of irony. The three-month-long cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­piece B watch­es in ​‘Antkind’ before it burns in the Slammy’s park­ing lot is repro­duced from his sub­con­scious as a Net­flix series, dimin­ish­ing the original’s aura. Net­flix rep­re­sents the McDonaldiza­tion of cin­e­ma – the effi­cient churn­ing of Kiss­ing Booth sequels and Vanes­sa Hud­gens Christ­mas movies. Per­haps Kauf­man has made I’m Think­ing of End­ing Things for Net­flix for the com­e­dy of their reg­u­lar con­sumers unwit­ting­ly sink­ing their teeth into his absurd dra­ma. They’ll bite off more than they can chew.

It’s know­ing­ly pre­ten­tious, but that’s Kaufman’s take-it-or-leave-it shtick. When we arrive at Tulsey Town in I’m Think­ing of End­ing Things, we’re offered a choice. Our serv­er tells us we can stay there, that we don’t ​“have to go for­ward, in time.” We can switch off now or, to para­phrase Mor­pheus in The Matrix, we can take the Oreo Brr and see how deep the rab­bit-hole goes.

This free will is an illu­sion, our ​‘deci­sion’ is dic­tat­ed by cin­e­mat­ic nar­ra­tive con­ven­tion. Our need for res­o­lu­tion, an expla­na­tion and a roman­tic pair­ing, sat­is­fies the same hunger that road-side fast food out­lets offer the weary dri­ver. We’re pup­pets, actors in a giant synec­dochic the­atre. Our strings are being pulled by McDonaldized con­glom­er­ates, but Kaufman’s films offer a way to tug back.