It also made a very good movie to watch on the night my Boston Celtics lost a golden opportunity (no pun intended) to take a potentially insurmountable 3-1 lead against the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals, failing to score down the stretch to turn a four-point lead with five minutes to play into a ten-point loss.
I wasn't thinking of ending things after this loss -- all that's really happened is that Golden State has gained back the home court advantage they held at the start of the series -- but I did have some dark thoughts Saturday afternoon as I considered how much of my happiness is bound up in the Celtics winning their first championship since 2008.
All sports fans know that the passion of sports has this hold over us, in a way that the passion of movies never could. At least, I personally have never had an experience where a movie not turning out to be as good as I hoped has thrown me into a depressive funk. That could just be because I'm more forgiving than some people about the most recent three Star Wars movies.
But even if you are massively disappointed in a movie, it sticks with you for a day or two at most. I worry that if the Celtics can't find a way to win two more games against the Warriors, it will stick with me a lot longer than that.
Which is ridiculous really. The 21st century has been one of unprecedented success across all Boston sports, with the Boston Red Sox winning four World Series, the New England Patriots winning six Super Bowls, and my beloved Celtics and hockey's Boston Bruins (who I don't follow at all) winning one apiece. And even if the Celtics have had "only" one NBA championship in that time, they have 17 overall, making them tied with the Lakers for the most of all time.
But I love this particular incarnation of the Celtics, and I worry that if they don't win, the inevitable offseason moves will tear this group apart. Who knows if the next group will be able to get this far again, a distinct possibility as the Celtics hadn't gotten to an NBA Finals since 2010. (And you can read this post if you want to see how glum I was after they lost that one. If you do, forgive the wonky formatting, as the multiple posters did not survive the change to my blog redesign some five years ago.)
The bigger issue, of course, is how you start looking inward at your life when you acknowledge what a cloud a professional sports loss casts over you. Of course this is a fleeting moment of disappointment, and everything seems magnified in that moment, but you start to analyze what other absences there may be in your life that makes it so a sports team winning or losing can you cure you or sending you spiraling. You wonder "Once this basketball season is over, what will I have left?"
That answer in my case is, of course, "A lot." So many things that I won't even list them here, because I know I don't need to.
But during moments of mental disarray, you notice all the things you don't have -- the things that are triggering your melancholy and sentimentality. One of those things is that I have a number of friends in America whose children are graduating high school this year -- and in some cases those were children I knew well when they were younger. Moving to Australia has inevitably lost those connections, or at least vastly dulled them. As I've seen these kids in their caps and gowns on Facebook, the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game" easily come to mind. "And the seasons, they go round and round ..."
I get the feeling I'm Thinking of Ending Things was written in such a state of mental disarray, or that Charlie Kaufman is possibly always in this state. Like all of his movies, it's about loss and regret and questions of self worth and ruminations about versions of his life not lived. Cleverly, it's sort of about two different characters experiencing these feelings, though of course you could focus your interpretation down to being just one of them. But it being about two expands the breadth of the mental disarray to encompass all the scattered thoughts of a mind in tumult, even those that are not unique to the experiences of either a man or a woman.
It was comforting to watch it on a night where, in reality, I didn't need to be comforted. The Celtics have gotten this far, they just need to find a way to win two games before the Warriors win two. This series is not over. That would be a ridiculous assessment of a tied series.
And yet when your mind is pecking away at itself and asking The Big Questions, only a subjective sense of how much it needs to be comforted matters.
Another reason it was a good movie to watch last night? It's cold as f--- here right now. Maybe that means it would be better to watch a movie set in the desert or on a tropical island, but I used I'm Thinking of Ending Things to augment my current circumstances, rather than as counterprogramming. Kind of like Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons stopping at Tulsey Town to get a Brrrrr on the most wintry night of the year.
Hopefully the Celtics will be thinking of ending things by winning games five and six and just being done with it.
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