I'm Thinking of Ending Things
<PERSON> compared this to Eraserhead on Twitter, which got me thinking about why this doesn't work for me when <PERSON> does.
<PERSON>'s work, much like his characters, is extremely self-conscious. He's the exemplar of what <PERSON> called the "mind game film," which are more colloquially recognizable as the critically acclaimed, usually semi-independent films with twisty or ambiguous narratives that tend to attract cult followings. <PERSON>, unlike <PERSON> (and also <PERSON> or films like The Usual Suspects) is self-conscious of his place within this field; his films tend to deal with artistic creation or pound away at the fourth wall (even if they stop short of breaking it). I'm Thinking of Ending Things central character is poet and painter, and productions of Oklahoma! figure into the narrative. The protagonist quotes <PERSON> at length in discussions of A Woman Under The Influence, and she and her partner discuss <PERSON> and <PERSON> and <PERSON>. They even briefly argue about the politics of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." I don't think the film is encouraging a particular have a point of view on <PERSON>'s criticism or <PERSON>'s proclamations about "happy families." At times they reinforce the film's Big Theme, the Unstoppable March of Time, but more than underlining his theses, I think <PERSON> knows that his audience will delight in seeing their own interests reflected back at them on screen, and I think that is why <PERSON> works for me and <PERSON> does not.
When <PERSON> uses <PERSON> in Mulholland Dr and <PERSON> in Lost Highway, or Nine Inch Nails and <PERSON> mere minutes apart, it is evidence of authorial perspective and diversity of interest that marks his entire body of work. 80
Eraserhead plunges you deep into the psych of its protagonist, and although its women are noir tropes, those are tropes whose power Lynch believes in earnestly (the prevailing theme of <PERSON> work, exemplified in the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Dr, is that there is something genuine and real and powerful in what is false or imaginary).
<PERSON>'s work is instead marked by a deficit. His interests show up in the things his characters discuss, and the are never deployed with the specificity so remarkable in <PERSON>. It's telling that the "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" allusion, a pop/lowbrow one that is unusual for <PERSON>, is in Anomalisa, a film that formally asks us to see its characters as something "less than." It keeps us so firmly rooted in the protagonist's subjectivity that we are unable to break out and appreciate a very earnest love for a silly pop song as something genuinely liberating for the character. I'm Thinking of Ending Things' sin is no more forgivable;, it invokes other art primarily as affectation. The narcissistic insecurity of <PERSON>'s characters seems to reflect the same trait in <PERSON> himself, desperate to prove the critics his novel Antkind parodied that he does, in fact, have something to say.
Perhaps he does. My challenge to him would be this: say it. 285