So I’m watching Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla last night and just as it’s approaching the thrilling climax, WHAM! I’m blindsided by my least favorite movie ending ever, one of the characters wakes up to realize that everything that just “happened” didn’t really happen, that it was all a dream. Does anyone else hate that out as much as I do? In most cases I find it a cop out at best and an insult at worst. We the audience have spent the time and energy investing in the characters and the situation only to learn at close to the last minute that noe of that investment of time or thought meant anything because the characters weren’t really even going through it to begin with. Yeah, I get that it’s fiction and they aren’t really going through it anyway, but it still pisses me off, like the writers couldn’t be arsed to come up with an actual end so they just have someone wake up.
Another example that truly cheesed me was The Woman in the Window Edward G Robinson as a criminology professor who gets involved in covering up a murder only to have the police consult him on the case and start leading himself to himself as a suspect. Except, oops, it was all just a fantasy that he had while staring at a painting in a window. Bastards.
There are times, though, when it doesn’t bother me, probably because it’s understood up front that what’s following is or at least is likely a dream. The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and The Pirate Movie don’t bother me despite being extended dream sequences, because in all three there are early indications (TWOO and TPM the lead character is knocked out on-screen, AIW talks about how Alice is drowsy). And on TV, the series finale of “Newhart” was genius. But for the most part the convention is truly irritating.
Got other examples, especially well-known films that I might want to see but would now know to avoid because of this horrible device? Not films or TV shows with well-deliniated dream sequences but where the events of the entire film are invalidated by the “it was just a dream” bit?
In the 1930s, one of the story lines in the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” radio serial involved Amos being charged with murder. The resolution was that it had been a dream.
It’s considered very bad form – the lamest possible ending – and writers are usually advised to avoid it. I remember once in a writing group where someone was reading from an ongoing story. She stopped before the end and we asked if she had an end to it. Yup, it was going to be a dream. The disapproval from the group was such that she never returned.
It’s bad for all the reasons Otto mentions. While some older works like Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz can be grandfathered in, no one writing today would ever get a story with that ending published (without changing it).
The last time I saw it was in a John Varley story, and the character apologized profusely for it.
AFAIK, there was only one instance when it was really effective, in Henry James’s The Great Good Place, where the point is that the happiness shown couldn’t exist in reality.
The **Twilight Zone ** had an episode in which we discover that the Earth is rapidly moving toward the sun and everyone is heading North to stay out the fatal heat for as long as possible. At the end we learn that this catastrophe is the fever induced dream of a young woman. The Earth is not falling towrds the sun… it is moving away from the sun and is becoming ice cold!
The final episode of Saint Elsewhere revealed that the entire series was a dream made up by a young autistic boy. As the article linked in my sig suggests, there’s a possibility that, based on crossovers and references, etc., every single show on television is part of this young boy’s dream.
Of course, there’s a similar type of ending which could be described as “it was all a dream…OR WAS IT?” which is sometimes parodied in movies and TV shows by having a character wake up from multiple dream-within-a-dreams one after another.
In Frank Baum’s book, The Wizard of Oz was not all just a dream. That they made it so in the movie is just one of many changes that bother me about the movie.
You know what I hate? Dream sequences in fiction. Almost always they’re just self-indulgence on the part of the author. If we don’t know as we’re reading them that someone’s dreaming, they’re lame for the reasons already explained in this thread. They’re a cheap way for the author to play the “Ha ha, gotcha” game, to get a cheap reaction out of us without having anything happen for real to justify it.
But even if we know all along that what we’re seeing is a dream, I still don’t like 'em. 97 times out of a hundred, they’re just the author showing off, getting all surreal and symbolicky and crap. If they don’t advance the story, they’re a waste of time. And if they do advance the story or reveal something significant, they piss me off because I never have dreams that Mean Something or reveal something significant, so I don’t believe in such things when they happen in fiction.
Married with Children turned Peggy and Marcie’s pregnancies into a nightmere of Al’s. Katey Sagal was pregnant in real life and the writers wrote it into the show. Sagal then suffered a miscarriage. She was willing to continue with the arc and were a prosthetic, but the writers didn’t want to put her through that and dreamed away the entire storyline.
Have you seen the Steve Buscemi film where he’s directing a dream sequence & brings in a dwarf, who then goes into a rant about how every movie dream sequence now has to have a dwarf, and who dreams about dwarves anyway because he’s a dwarf and even he doesn’t dream about dwarves?
It’s not all a dream, but the ending of Brazil was… his happy ending where he saves the girl and they run away to the country turns out to be a dream induced by the psychosurgery he’s undergone to reprogram him into a humming, drooling idiot. It works, and in an odd way, after everything he’s been through, that’s pretty much what passes for a happy ending for him.
Jacobs ladder wasnt so much a dream sequence as him seeing his life and what could have been his life while he was dying. I love that movie.
and if you need a flick to put on with no sound that will creep the hell out of everyone then thats your winner. (used it at a halloween party like that)
An Occurance at Owl Creek tells the story of a Confederate soldier who escapes the hangman’s noose, travels back home, only to discover that it’s all a hallucination as his neck snaps in the noose.
Family Guy did a brilliant spoof of the Dallas fiasco. The Y2K bug causes nuclear weapons to be launched all over the world. Peter and the family survive (Stewie, however, is turned into half an octopus) and at the end, Victoria Principal wakes up to find Patrick Duffy in the shower. She bursts into tears and begins to explain everything that happened in the episode, Duffy calms her down and then says, “What’s ‘Family Guy’?”