Everybody loves a happy ending right? Well, not always. In this postmodern age sometimes writers like to throw us a curveball and give an unhappy ending. It’s a risky move – we have spent the past couple hours getting to know these characters, seeing them struggle, and if they fail in the end, we will probably be leaving the theatre feeling miserable. In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, Cecilia leaves home believing that she will be out of the Great Depression and living in Hollywood with the star that she loves. Unbeknownst to her, she’s been duped, and will be stuck in New York with her abusive husband. We spend three and a half hours rooting against the Romans in Spartacus, only to watch our hero die on a cross. Many other films – Midnight Cowboy, Chinatown, Brazil, The Empire Strikes Back, to name a few, employ unhappy endings. In most cases, I am a fan of the unhappy ending, but sometimes it just feels tacked on. Any writer can tell you that it’s extremely difficult to write a satisfying ending, and I think in each of the following cases the unhappy ending did not add anything to the story.
One of the films I brought with me to Africa was Das Boot, and between this and the last entry it has been giving me plenty of inspiration. It is an amazing film, claustrophobic, thrilling, and the characters are so likeable that we actually end up sympathizing with Nazi soldiers. The version I have is the two hundred minute directors cut, in German with English subtitles. The soldiers spend months in a submarine, facing death countless times, and in the end finally return to Germany. They are now bearded men, hardened and cynical. As the captain gets out of the submarine, allied planes unexpectedly bomb the area, casually killing off most of the characters we just spent the last three and a half hours getting to know. Not everyone will agree, but to me the final scene feels like an afterthought, and a bad one at that.
Very similar to this example is the ending of another great war movie, Apocalypse Now. Like Das Boot, it is a long film with an even longer directors cut. I would also, like Das Boot, call it a masterpiece. In the end of the film, after Kurtz dies (the horror… the horror…) Willard walks out of the chamber, leaves behind everything he has seen, and the audience watches as Kurtz’s base is bombed, without knowing whether or not Willard called for the air strike. Although I love the movie, I hate this ending; I see Kurtz’s character as living beyond the war, beyond good and evil in fact, in his own Garden of Eden, and this ending sort of pushes a reminder to the audiences face that we are watching a war film. If Willard did order the bombing I could understand why he might have, as this place would forever haunt him, but I think it would have been better if he had simply left it, letting the memories follow him forever. If he did not order it, it seems odd that the military would bomb it without waiting for his report.
Finally, I want to give an example of a director deciding to stay away from this type of ending. At the end of Clerks Dante packs up and goes home for the day. However, this wasn’t the original ending Kevin Smith wrote for the movie. If you have the DVD, you can see the alternate ending - at the end of his shift, a man comes in and shoots Dante in the face, killing him instantly. Clerks was Smith’s first movie, and he admits that he wrote this ending because he had no idea how to end it, and that he was convinced by one of his mentors to rewrite the ending. He has said that if he had ended the film in this dark manner he never would have used Jay and Silent Bob again.
I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!
A book I fondly remember for it's unhappy ending is 'The Genocides' by Thomas M. Disch. I love it when Writers and Directors choose the downer endings - I find that much more gratifying, as these are harder to pull off successfully, and satisfyingly, than the typical happy ending.
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