Or to be more precise why do so many authors and movie-makers believe the American public wants happy endings because I’m sure they are plenty of Americans who can get on fine without them.
There are many examples of movies or books with their endings changed or reworked for an American audience to make them more upbeat, three that spring to mind are the movies Brazil and Army of Darkness (which also had one of the best lines changed!) and the novel Down to a Sunless Sea by David Graham (having only read the downbeat ending I’m not sure how it could be reworked to be more cheerful without losing the ‘twist’ ending) but there are plenty more examples. I’m just wondering why this is the case.
Just to add I’m not a fan of needlessly depressing endings myself but some stories do suit them.
In the case of movies, they get shown to test audiences. If the test audiences say “This sucks, we want the hero to fall in love and save the world” then that’s what’ll happen in the final cut, faithfulness to the source material be damned.
Lots of reasons. For me, I tend to prefer happier endings because entertainment is escapist fantasy. Why would I want to spend two plus hours of my life being horrified and depressed? Enough of that occurs on its own in real life. I KNOW that terrible things are happening all around me, just watch the news. I want to be entertained.
Also, movies are an ESCAPE. If I want to see people die needlessly, unloved, unfed, and/or unwanted, I’ll pick up a copy of the newspaper and save myself 10 bucks.
Yes, it’s not an American thing, it’s a human desire.
Many people write sad books and sad films with deeply tragic endings, and reviewers often praise them for being artistic. Unfortunately, the ones with happy endings for the protagaonists usually sell most. Like all rules this has exceptions.
Only over-protected teenagers (and people who never had to grow up) enjoy wading in black sorrow. Most people see tragedy in their real lives, and they don’t need to watch it or read it too.
I prefer to watch a “chick flick” than a horror film or one full of blood and guts. I’ve seen real people dying and got blood on my hands. Why would I want to watch some over-paid idiot faking it?
Also, it makes tragedy and misery and evil in the bulk of the story less oppressive if I believe that there’s going to be a happy ending or a facsimile of one. There’s a payoff at the end where the hero(ine) finds their true love or nails the villain through the skull or whatever.
The exception being horror, where a “bad end” works fine because after all horror is the whole point.
And that’s the truth because you said so? I’ve seen plenty of movies with less than happy endings and I’ve enjoyed a lot of them. I could buy that because I suffer from a mental disorder I don’t count as a human in this context, but that would not explain why they keep on making movies and books with a spectrum of endings from horrible misery to insuling-shock inducing delirious happiness. There’s hardly enough of my fellow loonies to be a viable target audience.
From my point of view, if every movie, book and TV series always ends happily there’s a lot less suspense over the fate of the protagonists. If you know everybody’ll live happily ever after, where’s the tension?
I’m not at all convinced that it is not an American thing. Sure, a significant proportion of audiences the world over like happy endings, but I have never heard of a French or Australian or British or Spanish film being recut to give it a happy ending because the producers or a test audience didn’t like the sad. One hears it of American movies all the time. I’m hardly an authority so if you have evidence to the contrary, I’m happy to hear it.
And I think this is the reason that it is an American phenomenon. Much of the rest of the world has more of an artist culture which says that art and artists must be respected, but America has more of a money culture which says “fuck that, if we make it a happy ending we’ll make more money”.
You point out an important distinction – tragedies have a long tradition as a highly respected literary form, but they are tragedies because the story and characters are, well, tragic, and that does NOT mean just that the protegonists suffer great pain or end up dead or homeless or crushed by the State or whatever. It’s hard to do well and to get a good audience response.
For all you people who prefer happy endings, I’m with you. I really am. But sometimes it really does damage the source material to tack a happy ending. It is very difficult to find any movie of I Am Legend with the correct ending, and I really wanted to see it. The book was dark and a shocker and hard to read but I loved everything it made me feel.
Sometimes it is more important to have a complete ending than a happy ending, and I feel in our never-ending quest for happy endings, we lose sight of that sometimes.
Often the “happy ending” is totally tacked on, and sometimes comes out of nowhere. Pair the spares is a good example…really, those people would not have gotten together if the author didn’t feel it necessary.
But then when they go to tragedy they go way too far in the other direction, so I am with you guys.
I think the OP is complaining about films with tacked-on happy endings, at odds with the rest of the story, rather than feel-good films as a genre. An operatic version of Romeo and Juliet was given a happy ending, which may have slightly undermined it as a tragedy. It’s not respectful to the source materiel or the audience to change the author’s intent like this. Schindler’s List would not be improved by a dance scene at the end. There Will be Blood ends with:
Daniel Planview beating the priest to death.
It’s the right ending, it would be wrong if:
He was reconciled with his adopted son.
There is nothing wrong with feel-good endings. However, it would be pretty ghastly if every story was conceived with escapism as the only goal. A good film is an immersive experience, and emotionally engaging. Storytelling can and should encompass the full range of human experiences. However, there is a fine line between genuine drama and melodramatic schlock.
The way I’ve always understood it, some countries, especially in continental Europe, have state-funded arts grants for making movies. The filmmakers and ‘investors’ are therefore not terribly worried about the box office, so they work with not-necessarily ‘popular’ themes, constructions - and endings.
The end result is usually a whole heap of pretentious dreck that nobody ever watches, and the occasional gem that surpasses all expectations and conventions.
Which raises an interesting dilemma: while the free market drives innovation and development in a commercial sense, in an artistic sense it seems to be counterproductive - why invest in a superlative script, characterization and amazing acting when you can CGI in a load of explosions instead? It is, after all, what the masses demand.
Yes, that’s what I meant, I like feel-good films as much as the next ruggedly handsome Irishman. For example Independence Day wouldn’t really have worked with a ‘everyone dies’ ending because that wasn’t the tone of the film but depending on how it was done the Spielberg War of the Worlds movie may have been able to get away with one (yes I’m aware the ending in the film is directly from the original book).
I was a little reluctant to post this thread because I knew it would likely get peoples backs up but it is something I’ve wondered about.
Well I think the three examples I mentioned in the OP could work as cites, as far as I’m aware all three had different endings for the American audience than that for the international audience.
I agree to an extent, I don’t like much of contemporary or recent British science-fiction because of its oppressive and depressing cynicism about reality and human nature.
A small correction: Brazil was released in the US theaters without the happy ending. The happy ending version (called the “Love Conquers All” version) was shown on US TV. The studio fought hard to get the happy ending, but Gilliam fought back and managed to get his version to the theaters via his own promotional campaign stirring up positive press - among other methods, he conducted unauthorized private screenings for reviewers.
Personally, Brazil is among my favorite films, and I think the ending actually is happy, in that it is the best possible ending for that character which is believable.
I agree with the theory that movies being a big money-making industry may affect this more than anything else. I wonder - I know many Bollywood films are more “sanitized” and light than many American films… do they have a tendency toward happy endings for financially-driven reasons?
Question: Do I have to spoiler box this? If the original came out in 1988 and the remake, eight years ago, has the statute of spoiler limitations expired? Stop reading now because I am going to talk about the ending(s).
The European version ends on down note (literally) with the boyfriend being buried alive and the bad guy coming out on top (sorry). If you look beyond that though, the film explores the wrenching psychological torture the boyfriend endured as he searched for years for his girlfriend. In the end he insists that he has to know what actually happened to her and the villain obliges.
In the American version, all that is done away with. The boyfriend (Keiffer Sutherland) escapes the burial, hunts down the bad guy (Jeff Bridges who had adopted some unidentifiable pseudo-European accent) and chops his head off. I’m surprised the filmmakers didn’t bring back the vanished girl friend (a then unknown Sandra Bullock).
I would have to postulate that the filmmakers decided American audiences wouldn’t understand the psychological nuances of the protaginist’s struggle, couldn’t have evil triumphing over good, and had to have a more proper resolution to the conflict. If you compare the two versions there is no comparison. The Dutch film is a taut character study that explores the thought process of hero and antagonist. The American version is utter crap, a by-the-numbers, soulless psycho-thriller that has to qualify as one of the worst remakes ever. It didn’t have to be that way.
But with Army of Darkness, the studio was right. The apocalypse ending is dumb. And the new ending gave us “Hail to the king, baby” and “Yo, she-bitch!”