Charlie Kaufman Has No Idea How to Write Women as People

In the filmmaker’s new movie, ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things,’ he’s still using women as props for neurotic men

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
GEN
Published in
7 min readSep 4, 2020

--

The young woman played by Jessie Buckley in the film I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Photo: Netflix

For the past 20 years, Charlie Kaufman has been making movies about the same guy. If you’ve seen a Kaufman movie, you know him: white, approaching middle age, with shabby clothes and…

--

--

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
GEN
Writer for

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.