I just watched Boogie Nights again. I love that movie. All these eccentric losers who can’t really function separately, get back together as one happy family in the end, 1984-ish. Of course, people living in that era remember that AIDS was just around the corner and the party was about to end pretty abruptly again, and that “adult” theaters pretty much ceased to exist shortly thereafter. But that was someone else’s story to tell. Except it really wasn’t.
Similarly, Charlie Wilson’s War and The Living Daylights ended with the Afghan Mujahaddeen kicking the Russians out of Afghanistan. Yay good guys! While the makers of the former knew the Taliban, al Qaeda and 9-11 would be the direct result of this plucky little endeavor, the 007 folks found out the hard way with the rest of us 15 years later. Oklahoma! ended with Curly and Laurie gettin’ hitched, the farmer and the cowhand bein’ friends, and Oklahoma becoming a brand new state. The audiences knew the dust bowl was just around the corner, even if the characters didn’t.
What other stories’ happy endings were summarily undermined by history that wasn’t acknowledged in the script?
Oklahoma became a state in 1905, so the musical is set slightly before that. The Dust Bowl is the 1930s, so 25 years later. I never thought of any connection, 25 years of “happy ever after” seems pretty reasonable to me?
Even so, I get you point. My wife has always contended that The Music Man seems to end happily, but everyone with half a brain knows that Harold Hill won’t settle down, and will ditch Marian soon enough.
Return of the Jedi purports to show a happy ending, and maybe that’s true for the galaxy. But we all know that the destruction of a space station that large in orbit would result in devastation on the moon below: Endor Holocaust.
According to the wiki thing Oklahoma! takes place in/around the town of Claremore, which is NE of Tulsa, pretty close to Arkansas. The dust bowl severely affected western Oklahoma, along with parts of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska. Eastern Oklahoma was not nearly as impacted by it, Claremore probably only would have had an occasional eastward-moving duster, such as the kind that carried dust as far as DC and Boston.
Granted, the rest of the state experienced peripheral effects, mostly economic, but the tragedy was primarily confined to the other half of the state.
I often think this when watching Edwardian romances and dramas–my favorite E.M. Forster/Merchant-Ivory type films, for example: All those nice young men will be killed in WWI…
While it isn’t happy, the moment when the 1972 film version of Cabaret ends is darker for the viewer than it is for the characters. After the MC says goodbye, we see that the audience at the Kit Kat Club is full of Nazi officers. We know what’s coming, and the characters don’t.
I specify the film version because Wikipedia tells me that some of the more recent revivals of the stage version of Cabaret end with the MC in a concentration camp.
Curlie and Laurie could be grandparents by the time the Dust Bowl hits. Not to mention “Oklahoma” takes place in Claremore. Claremore is firmly situated in Green Country, a forest area…though there are no mountains in the background as seen in “Oklahoma”
The Gold Rush ends with Charlie Chaplin happy, wealthy, and with his newly-found girl in New York. It was made in 1925. A few years later, NYC would be a bit less happy.
The Wizard of Oz becomes a lot more bittersweet when you pick up on the small details - the dry, unfarmable land around Dorothy’s house, her family’s worried expressions, etc. The Dust Bowl had completely destroyed swathes of land in Kansas.
Roger Ebert wrote a review of A Hard Day’s Night a while back that talked about how strange it was that the arguments, breakup, and eventual murder of John Lennon were all to come when the film was made - it’s just this little happy window into the 1964 Beatles.
The movie “Mary Poppins” takes place in 1910. Michael and Jane are going to see the boys just slightly older than them fed into the meatgrinder of WWI, and Michael may very well end up serving in WWII, while Jane’s children get evacuated away from the Blitz. Chim-chim-cheree!
I doubt they would stay together long enough to be grandparents. Both are egotistical, shallow, cruel, uncaring of other people, and prone to playing mind games with each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if Curly deliberately drove Laurie to suicide, telling her how great her funeral would be for everyone.
Assuming you’re talking about the book, since I haven’t seen the latter two movies:
There’s something like 60 years between HOBBIT and LOTR. Most of the characters of the former have died by the time of the latter. Bilbo’s a character in both, true, but the Ringwar doesn’t really touch him directly. I’d say he and most of the surviving Dwarves got their happy ending.
I remember some story about a guy who was executed in most brutal fashion, then he rose from his tomb and all his company were ever so happy to see him, it all turned out quite nicely. Then a shitstorm that raged on for centuries after, some of which could be counted against the hero of the story.
Most recent obvious one for me is Avatar. I love Cameron’s films but he went overboard with the tree-hugging hippie crap in this one. And here’s what would happen next:
The future Chinese would be a dominant, technologically advanced world power. So they’d send their own fleet to Pandora. And with no one to stop them they would inflict their non-Western, non-Christian, Asian war brutality on the situation. In other words, they would literally slaughter the Na’vi outright, like the Nazis did in WWII, and then mine the Upsodaisium at will.
I didn’t even find *Avatar *itself to have a particularly happy ending. By the last part of the film I was sympathetic towards (and practically rooting for) the military guys…