I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Film Review): A Study of Our Cognitions

According to the theory of radical constructivism, one’s perceptions of the real world depend on one’s own opinions and knowledge. Since the brain is an operationally closed regulator of beliefs creating its own structural order, the cognitive system doesn’t directly absorb information from the external world but instead generates the information it processes. In other words, one understands what one understands and not what the subject of information means. An elementary example would be this: if the speaker discusses how Caesar got murdered, the listener wouldn’t understand a thing when they think Caesar is just a salad.

By mentally wandering around a messy version of his past, Jake (Jesse Plemons) reminds himself how unsuccessful he was in finding somebody to understand his thoughts. After his father (David Thewlis) asserts that he doesn’t see how a landscape “is supposed to make him feel something if there’s not a person in the picture feeling something”, his “girlfriend” (Jessie Buckley) argues that our sensations aren’t inherent to the object we’re seeing, but rather to the persona who brings their own view to it. Since the “girlfriend” is an amalgamation of Jesse’s perception of women — I will explain this in the next paragraph — this motif denotes his own quintessential life issue, which writer/director Charlie…