In the movies with happy endings tacked on thread, I brought up Rent, which ends with Mimi just about to die of AIDS, but is miraculously brought back* to give a big, happen ending.
Only Mimi still has AIDS. She may have survived this one bout, but she isn’t likely to live to a ripe old age (given the time frame).
Another example is in Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun. The main plot involves a Black family about to move into a white suburb. In the final scene, the suburbanites send a representative to talk them out of it.** They tell the representative off and go to move into their new house. Good feelings all over.
Except that they’re moving into a group of neighbors who don’t want them there. They’re likely to face some very ugly times. I actually would love to see something written about that.***
What other movies, plays, books, etc. show this.
Note: I’m not counting (“But the killer might survive!” sting to set up a sequel).
*Leaning heavily on a scene from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman arc “A Game of You.”
**Karl Lindner, played by John Fiedler. You might know him as the mousy Mr. Peterson in The Bob Newhart Show and the voice of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh. Fielder also played the role in a revival. His persona is exactly the type of person that is easy to stand up to.
***Clybourn Park actually is a sequel; the first act has Lindner from Raisin going to the house to convince the seller not to sell. The second act is 50 years later, and the neighborhood had turned into the nightmares of the whites in the neighborhood, but is undergoing gentrification. But it does not cover the transition.
At the end of The Prince and the Showgirl, the lovers part ways. They are both making plans to reunite later, but from the looks on their faces, they both know that it probably won’t happen.
The Thing. Only MacReady and Childs are left. Maybe one of them is a Thing. Maybe not. Even if they are both still human, they are both stranded outdoors in the Antarctic.
In the first Kingsman movie Samuel L Jackson is trying to fight global warming by population control, basically having everyone kill each other except a select few. He tried to achieve this by giving away free phones that could be activated to make a sound to drive everyone around into hyper aggression. Right before the climax the protagonist manages to make a call to his mom to tell her to lock away her baby sister in a room and hide the key so she wouldn’t harm her. During the final battle the hyper violence ring tone is shown to have been on for several minutes with scenes of fighting all over the world intercut with protagonists’ mom trying to break into the room where baby sister is to kill her. They finally manage to cut it off but by that point you have to assume every single baby and small child in the entire world has been brutally murdered by their own parents. That’s basically a world ending event, specially considering the mass suicides that would inevitably follow.
The Burt Reynolds black comedy The End is about a guy with a terminal disease who decides to commit suicide. Various hilarious hijinks ensue as he unsuccessfully attempts to kill himself. At the end of the film, he starts swimming out into the ocean, intending to drown. But at the last minute, he changes his mind and shouts “I want to live!” and swims back to shore. Yay, happy ending.
Uh, did the writers forget their premise? He still has a fatal disease and he’s still going to die the slow painful death he was trying to avoid by suicide.
Several people have pointed out that there would have been a terrible aftermath in Avengers: Endgame.
It’s still a fairly recent movie, so:
[spoiler]In the end of Infinity War, half of the all the living creatures in the universe disappeared. In Endgame, five years had passed since then and we saw society had adjusted, albeit poorly, to the new population level. Then all of the missing people and other living things were brought back. This would have been a disaster as big as the previous disappearance.
We saw in Spiderman: Far From Home that people apparently reappeared in the same location they had disappeared from five years earlier. This means there were people who had disappeared from airplanes and ships that are no longer there when they came back. There were people who disappeared from high rise buildings that no longer exist. There were people who were reappearing in the middle of traffic. And there were people who must have reappeared in a location that was now occupied by somebody else. Or maybe just some object that have been moved into the space.
What happens to the people who survive the reappearance? Society has adjusted to serve a population that’s half the size. There won’t be food to feed a suddenly doubled population.
What happens with species that breed fast? Animals like mice and insects must have bred back up to their normal population in the five years since the disappearance. With the return of all the missing animals, we’re going to be overrun with vermin.
On top of these immediate disasters, how will society adjust to assimilating these returning people back into a society with all of the people who didn’t disappear for five years? If you disappeared, your bank accounts were closed and all your possessions was disposed of. Somebody else took over your job and moved into your home. And maybe your spouse met somebody else and has remarried.
And at least on the MCU Earth, people would understand what happened. They’d know about Thanos. But what happens on a world like the real Earth; one which is isolated from intergalactic society and doesn’t know anything about events happening on other planets? All these people would know is that one day half of the world disappeared and then five years later they all came back. With no explanation. For all they know, these were natural phenomena that will be happening every few years from now on. Or the work of some angry deity, sending them a message.[/spoiler]
Although it was portrayed as a happy ending, Pat and Tiffany starting a relationship gave me a feeling of foreboding and seemed to be doomed from the start. They both still have mental problems, and I couldn’t help but thinking that one or both of them would be dead in six months, or at least institutionalized again.
And Pat Sr. still has his gambling problem. He’s bound to lose his restaurant eventually.
The Nora Ephron romance movies with Meg Ryan. Not a single one of those relationships is going to work:
-When Harry Met Sally: They’ve known each other for years. Romance never blossomed between them for years. Nothing has changed by the end of the movie, they just got sort of desperate.
-Sleepless in Seattle: We can all agree Meg Ryan’s character is a mess in this one, right? Like, medically. Tom Hanks is a sensible grown up, he’s not going to bring crazy into his house.
-You’ve got Mail. Uh-huh, Meg, Tom Hanks declared his love to you as an actual person and you rejected him for your pen pal. You don’t get to be “I hoped it was you” because you totally didn’t. Which may be good news, since Tom Hanks and his weird mind games aren’t a healthy way of dealing with relationship issues either.
‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Footloose’ - all those happy A-holes dance dance dancing their troubles away. And there it ends…are all those kids in the farm town going to be all that much happier now that they can have barn dances, or something? And isn’t Jennifer Grey just going to go home, really, with her family? I can’t imagine she would seriously stay with Patrick Swayze, give up a pampered life in Forest Hills and eventually marrying a doctor…Not that those are unhappy endings, really, just realistic. But the singing and dancing and clapping along, whee, what fun! The ‘movie problem’ is solved, lol, but real life will go on. The dancing kids’ lives won’t change for the better, the farmland will be sold to developers. Jennifer Grey will go on with her pre-ordained life always looking back wistfully to her first love. (the Catskills resort today is no doubt that abandoned one, with trees growing up through the swimming pool.)
I hadn’t thought of that - but what I think is more significant is that a very high percentage of the CEOs, presidents, kings, prime ministers and other high value people all had their heads blown off. There may not be any indispensable person, but I’d guess that things are going to be in chaos for quite a while.
A few days back I watched a youtube comedy video dealing with terrible possible outcomes of that scenario. One that struck me as particularly horrid was the woman who had lost a baby still in the womb to the Snap. “We’re sorry, the human body is not capable of standing that sort of sudden growth.”
As far as Endgame goes I don’t think it would be too bad. The person with the gauntlet has the powers of a god. You have to assume stuff like that is considered. Hulk even says “I tried everything I could to being her back” regarding Black Widow, so they are individually aware of every person.
But the movie itself doesn’t portray that as a happy ending. The final scene makes that exact point, that Benjamin and Elaine acted recklessly and were now regretting what they had done.
I didn’t say the movie made any kind of different point, just that “lovers reunited” is generally considered to be a happy ending and I like the way it subverted that trope.
I don’t feel it’s that simple. Ben fell in love with Elaine when he realized he felt comfortable around her, something that didn’t happen to him with women, and after all the mess, that sort of easy going friendship they had going on is missing. I think that was what Mike Nichols tried to tell.
Those don’t necessarily include cliffhangers, spinoffs, sequels, other non-endings. Any supposedly happy (or not) end can presage something else. A mere glance into the distance can signal a following free-for-all. The only definite finales invoke pandemics, planetary explosions, etc. Even then, we can still write of ghosts.