I recently got a query from a movie buff who is interesting in film endings and how they have changed through history. She had found my article "Endings Then and Now -- from Taxi Driver to Silence of the Lambs" www.samizdat.com/taxi.html and was interested in further thoughts of mine along that line.
I replied:
Have you read A Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode? It's an essay
in literary criticism that covers from the middle ages to today in very
few, very excellent pages. (If you get into the middle ages part of it
-- and their apocalyptic notion of an "ending", you might also enjoy A
Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman).
I believe that movie endings are characteristic of the time when they were made. In Kermode's language, our "sense of an ending" changes over time, from one cultural period to the next. We need to feel that the movie "ends" for us to be satisfied with it as entertainment; but what constitutes an acceptable ending changes.
In WWII and in the 60s, the ending would have been a matter of the creative collaboration between the writer and the director. Today, it is a matter of test screenings and focus groups -- sometimes several different endings being filmed and then tested on audiences to see what gets the best response.
I'm tempted to go to a videostore with a large collection of DVDs and check the back covers of all of them, identifying those that contain "alternate" endings, then analyzing why the rejects were rejected.
Today (in 2002), we seem to have more tolerance now for films that don't really end, that are deliberate setups for sequels.
Think of the first Star Wars -- which had a great rousing emotional finish. Compare that to Empire Strikes Back, which was a cliff hanger and was nowhere near as satisfying (it was a major disappointment to viewers, though eventually it made money). Return of the Jedi then had a "real" ending, and made the trilogy as a whole work.
Today we have Phantom Menace, which doesn't really end, but was very successful at the box office.
Back in the 70s we had a version of The Lord of the Rings done with
a combination of actors and pseudoanimation which didn't end and was a
terrible flop. Around the same time there were the cartoon-only versions
of The Hobbit and The Return of the King, covering the same Tolkien tale,
but having an ending. (Return of the King deliberately starts near the
end of the trilogy
so it can have an ending.)
Today we have the Fellowship of the Ring, which doesn't end and is an enormous success. We also have the first Harry Potter movie, which only partially ends -- Voldemort is still alive and clearly more needs to be told.
In these cases, the movies are based on books and the books have endings.The movies choose to capitalize on those endings, or not, depending on what part of the story is told and how.
If you have time, you also might want to read The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama (see review of another Fukuyama book at www.samizdat.com/isyn/fukuy.html). That would be important from the perspective of understanding the alternate (but intimately related) meaning of the word "end" -- in the sense of purpose, final goal.
The "end" of a movie is in some sense its reason for being. Change the ending and you change the sense of the whole thing, because we (unaccountably) continually think backwards, reevaluating events based on what they lead to, what the outcome is.
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