People are like glass jars: some are closed up tight, some rest easy with the lid loose and ready to open up to anyone willing to put in a small amount of effort, and still others are out there with no lid at all, sharing everything with everybody nearby, the contents of the jar always ready to spill out and over at a moment’s notice. I’m somewhere on the spectrum between an easy twist and a sealed tight jar, willing to open up over time, but also with just enough self-awareness that not everyone is going to want me to tell them an uninterrupted stream of puns or talk to them about the adventures of fictional PI Tex Murphy unprompted. There is the fear of overburdening people with more than they want to know, and the fear that the sudden revelation of excess personal information would simply become too much, pushing people away before any sort of connection could be made.
Little Jar (2023) is about a woman named Ainsley. Ainsley is an introvert whose main goal in life is to avoid people, so when a lockdown is ordered due to a flu pandemic, she’s overjoyed. Her dream quickly turns into a nightmare as the days and the weeks go by, as the unending lockdown gets extended time and time again. It’s the sudden, but irreparable, death of her phone, and the loss of her internet that causes even this introvert to break down from a lack of any sort of social connection.
It’s no secret that Stephen King doesn’t like the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of The Shining (1980). He’s spoken about it, written about it, posted online about it. Of the various things that he’s said, one of them is that he didn’t care for Jack Nicholson’s casting, that Nicholson made Jack Torrence seem like he was always crazy, even before arriving in the Overlook Hotel.
Ainsley is like that. She is already a bit mad before isolation. She starts off a touch mad and descends into deeper throes of madness. Talking to herself quickly leads to telling knock-knock jokes to tape recordings of herself responding to the knock-knock jokes, which quickly leads to impromptu meetings with coworkers who aren’t even there.
That’s about when the mouse shows up. The mouse, the dead mouse, mind you, is found inside the back of a craft drawer, its body trapped inside a little jar. She tries to dispose of it, but the neighbor’s coughing while standing outside on his patio, the garbage bin and the toilet don’t look quite right, and the sink’s garbage disposal feels like it would be too much.
So the dead mouse stays in the little jar, looking out with its beady eyes. A passing glance leads to a word here, a comment there, but it’s only after she designs a tiny suit for him to wear that the conversations begin. His name is Ulysses, by the way. They’re friends, and if things work out they could even be best friends.
Early on in the film, in the imaginary impromptu conversation with her co-workers, their voices are heard to fill in their parts of the conversation. Talking to Ulysses doesn’t function like that. He isn’t given an imagined voice to fill in his side of the conversation. Instead, the camera points at the mouse for a beat, the music shifts, there’s a specific set of notes that reflects the mood of what might be said, and the camera cuts back to Ainsley. She responds and the camera cuts back, except now he’s moved on his own, he’s in a different place and the music shifts again.
There’s a moment in the movie where the curtain is pulled back, and what’s really happening is revealed, but that’s not the point here. The fast cuts make the pacing of the movie fun, and spending more time lingering on what’s going on, even after that’s been revealed, would’ve stalled the story, the dialogue, and the jokes. It would’ve also taken a quirky, whimsical film and emphasized the sadder, more depressing elements of the narrative.
Ainsley’s tale is a sad story, behind the absurdity. There’s sadness implied by a former boyfriend who had treated her poorly, by a life growing up alone, unable to connect with the people around her. At the same time, there’s a heartfelt optimism, that it’s fine that she doesn’t have to connect with everyone, but that there might be someone out there who’s capable of connecting with her. Soulmates is the wrong word, but it’s in the neighborhood, down the street.
It’s an absurd concept, to say the least, but the absurdity doesn’t exist for the sake of itself. Little Jar is about loneliness and making friends. It’s about the fear of never making a connection, the damage making a connection for the sake of it does, and the hope that even isolated you are not alone.