# Movies without moral redemption: Any? Possible? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 18, 2006, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660 "2006-12-18T17:59:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/21 "2006-12-18T18:56:21Z")
**Se7en**. **Dancer in the Dark**. (I _hate_ movies without redemption.) ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/22 "2006-12-18T19:15:10Z")
I asume you meant to exclude most horror movies in your OP as well, **tdn**. Not a lot of redemption in _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ or _House of a Thousand Corpses_. ---
**Author:** ![cormac262](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f14d63/32.png) [@cormac262](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cormac262)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/23 "2006-12-18T19:27:42Z")
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir] _Memento, Payback_ and _Yojimbo_ (“Try to kill me!” “It’ll hurt”) spring to mind. [/QUOTE] I am going to argue that “Yojimbo” (one of my all time favorites) does not fit the mode. - the hero’s “job” is to hire out to whoever will pay him. Being masterless, he no longer has any allegiance. So there’s no real “selling out” in this case. He further decides to play the two corrupt sides of the town off each other - to his benefit. - there are actually two redemptions: the return of the girl to her family (completely for no benefit, and ends up getting him beat to crap), and the return of the (corrupted) town back to the innkeeper (if he was truly as evil and soulless as he makes out to be, he could have just killed him along with all the rest). ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/24 "2006-12-18T19:41:28Z")
[QUOTE=Evil Captor] At least in Payback the Mel Gibson character was done wrong by his gangster buddies and had ample reason to want to pay them back (hence the title.) [/QUOTE] As I said in the OP, let’s exclude revenge movies, in which the theme is he who is humbled shall be exhalted. My question is more along the lines of he who is exalted (through misdeeds) shall be… what? ---
**Author:** ![VunderBob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/839c29/32.png) [@VunderBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VunderBob)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/25 "2006-12-18T19:58:24Z")
[QUOTE=Evil Captor] At least in Payback the Mel Gibson character was done wrong by his gangster buddies and had ample reason to want to pay them back (hence the title.) The day care center owner’s crime was falling in love. For this she gets gang-raped, beaten repeatedly then strangled to death. It’s not the same thing. [/QUOTE] There was not a classic ‘good guy’ in that flick anywhere, nor was there a case of a bad guy seeing the error of his ways. Sure, it was a revenge flick, and Porter got the girl, but as they drove off into the sunset (actually the dawn, looking for breakfast) you knew they weren’t going to find a quiet town to settle down in and join the PTA. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/26 "2006-12-18T20:00:30Z")
_Get Carter_ (the original Michael Caine version, not the Sylvester Stallone remake). It’s a revenge movie in the sense that Carter was killing the people who had killed his brother, but Carter didn’t actually care about his brother - he was more offended that they had killed somebody related to him and how this reflected on his reputation. Carter then went on a killing spree, got his “revenge”, and never had a redemption. ---
**Author:** ![Dung\_Beetle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dung_beetle/32/7945_2.png) [@Dung\_Beetle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dung_Beetle)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/27 "2006-12-18T20:08:51Z")
A Clockwork Orange? “I was cured, all right.” ---
**Author:** ![Lakai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/9de0a6/32.png) [@Lakai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lakai)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/28 "2006-12-18T20:30:15Z")
\*lilja-4-ever. \* ---
**Author:** ![well\_he\_s\_back](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/3ab097/32.png) [@well\_he\_s\_back](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/well_he_s_back)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/29 "2006-12-18T20:31:03Z")
“Match Point” - spoiler alert (I’ve lost my spoiler tag directions) - Main character kills inconveniently pregnant girlfriend; lives happily ever after. ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/30 "2006-12-18T20:43:52Z")
_Kind Hearts and Coronets_ > **[Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) ⭐ 8.0 | Comedy, Crime](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041546/)** > > 1h 46m | Not Rated “A hilarious study in the gentle art of murder.” ---
**Author:** ![lissener](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lissener/32/6139_2.png) [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/31 "2006-12-18T21:02:52Z")
[QUOTE=tdn] This OP was inspired by _The Devil Wears Prada_, which I saw last night. I won’t spoil any of that movie, but let me make up a generic plot that’s not unsimilar: A nice girl is failing in life, but has good friends, a nice lover, and leads a good and honest life. Wanting more success, she sells out. She sucks up to a materialistic and opportunistic mentor, and soon takes on those qualities herself. She becomes a mean bitch, and screws over her friends. In doing this, she becomes extremely successful. This is often the plot of light comedies. The question is: Can the movie end this way, or must there be a “redemption moment”, when the protagonist realizes the error of her ways and returns to her old life (possibly better off in wisdom) at the expense of success? Is a redemption moment necessary? As an example, in _Rock Star_, that movie would have felt really cheap had Chris gone on to great success upon losing his friends and girlfriend. His fall from grace back into mediocrity gave the movie heart. That was his “redemption moment.” Is it possible for a movie to not have a redemption? Let’s exclude revenge movies, as they are a seperate breed. Screwball comedies as well. And any movie where the protagonist never climbs the corporate/social/fame ladder by stepping on the backs of others. The only example I can think of is _A Shock to the System_, and even that can be interpreted as a revenge story. [/QUOTE] First of all, you’re kind of playing the no-true-Scotsman game; any movie that doesn’t have a happy ending gets defined as a “revenge movie,” or something, so is out of the discussion. Secondly, the way you frame your OP is pretty revealing of what’s wrong with Hollywood today. Well, it’s revealing of what’s wrong with Hollywood since 1934. [QUOTE=tdn] \*\*Can \*\*the movie end this way, or \*\*must \*\*there be a “redemption moment”[?] [emphasis added] [/QUOTE] The reason you’re conditioned to expect such an ending is that such endings were mandated in Hollywood from 1934 to 1967, the peak years of one of the most significant cultural phenomena in the history of mankind. So that mandate, called the Hays code, is substantially responsible for the way your average Western human processes “story,” and thus defines your expectations. Which sucks. Because some of the great films of world _cinema_–i.e., cinema from countries who were, what, mature enough not to have to mandate happy endings for their audiences, do not sacrifice artistic truth for the artificial happy ending. (And just to be clear here: I’m including “the bad guy gets it” as a happy ending, because that’s a happy ending for the audience’s expectations.) One of the reason Douglas Sirk, one of the most interesting figures in movie history, left Hollywood after the greatest commercial success of his career, was because Hollywood was artistically corrupt in its total, unquestioning commitment to the universal happy ending. (People around here tend to give me shit about my love of Paul Verhoeven, but that’s one of my favorite things about him: his hooting disrespect for the convention of the Happy Ending[sup]TM[/sup].) Keep in mind that \*most \*movies get the ending wrong. There are no real endings in life; something always happens next. So the ending of a story is a completely artificial invention in the first place. When your entire story is driven by a foregone and inescapable, pre-determined happy ending–mandated from '34 to '67 by the Catholic Church, and mandated since then by the audience’s expectations (cf. the OP)–then it’s just statistically likely that the movie’s gonna suck. (Insert obligatory reference to [Sturgeon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Revelation).) Lars Von Trier’s _Dancer in the Dark_ addresses this pretty forcefully. The theme of this movie is that if you’re going to be that kind of audience, that insists on neat happy endings where everything turns out “right”–if you’re going to be so emotionally immature that you turn over the maintenance of your emotional life to Stephen Spielberg–then you deserve what you get. A good movie should be an artistically collaborative event between its creator and its audience. A great example is _Bulworth_. _(Spoiler warning)_ In _Bulworth_, a politician who’s faced his own death and accepted it discovers that this gives him absolute freedom to speak the truth–how scary is an insurance lobbyist when you’ve prepared yourself for death? When, at the end, he’s hit by a sniper’s bullet, the movie ends with an external shot of the hospital. Period. We don’t know whether he lives or dies: we only know that the situation he’s prepared himself for has happened. This puts the entire thing in the audience’s lap: YOU have to decide if he lived or died, and in doing so you imagine ALL the possible outcomes of both scenarios, rather than simply swallowing the pat ending–which couldn’t possibly be as good as the ones you imagine–spoonfed to you by Hollywood Committee to Fulfill the Lowest Common Audience Expectations. This ending engages you, and you must participate in the thought experiment that Beatty has offered. . . . I’m sorry, what was the question? ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/32 "2006-12-18T21:18:30Z")
[QUOTE=lissener] First of all, you’re kind of playing the no-true-Scotsman game; any movie that doesn’t have a happy ending gets defined as a “revenge movie,” or something, so is out of the discussion. [/QUOTE] Well, no, not really. In movies such as _The Devil Wears Prada_ and _Rock Star_, no wrong was done to the protagonists at the outset of the movie. These could have easily have had unhappy (or at least undeserved happiness) endings. But that sort of ending is not what we come to expect from Hollywood, as you have correctly said. It’s interesting that we have sort of come to expect the protagonist to end up where he started, though a bit wiser. In a revenge flick, the protagonist does not usually end up with the big bag of money, though sometimes he does. (Ocean’s 11 comes to mind). You are right, though, I am narrowly defining a subset of movies – Those in which a person claws his way to the top by using or abusing his friends, and/or displayng some other moral breakdown on the way up. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/33 "2006-12-18T21:18:38Z")
Well, _Blackadder’s Christmas Carol_ is about as anti-redemptive as it gets. Personally, I hate presto-change-o redemption and it’s just-as-ugly twin, contrived justice (i.e. good guy catches bad guy, can’t kill him because that’d make good guy just as bad as bad guy, bad guy takes a swing at good guy, misses, falls over railing into vat of acid). ---
**Author:** ![Neidhart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Neidhart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Neidhart)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/34 "2006-12-18T21:26:42Z")
_The Bad Lieutenant?_ ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/35 "2006-12-18T21:31:22Z")
[QUOTE=tdn] The only example I can think of is _A Shock to the System_, and even that can be interpreted as a revenge story. [/QUOTE] BTW, they changed the ending from the book … or rather they omitted the ending altogether. In the book: he murders his way to the top. But his mother in law takes poison, and does it in a way that makes it look like he poisoned her. So he gets arrested for a murder he didn’t do. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/36 "2006-12-18T21:37:58Z")
Many of the great mob movies since “Godfather”. E.g., “Goodfellas”. (Haven’t seen “The Departed” yet, but I’ll assume the above mention indicates it fits.) Once you’re in, you’re in for life. Story arcs that take a normal enough guy and he ends up permanently in crime with little or no regret. A variation of the anti-hero theme. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/37 "2006-12-18T21:58:39Z")
[QUOTE=ftg] Many of the great mob movies since “Godfather”. E.g., “Goodfellas”. (Haven’t seen “The Departed” yet, but I’ll assume the above mention indicates it fits.) Once you’re in, you’re in for life. Story arcs that take a normal enough guy and he ends up permanently in crime with little or no regret. A variation of the anti-hero theme. [/QUOTE] I’d say Goodfellas had a happy ending. All the mobsters ended up either dead, in jail or in the witness protection program. As the protagonist makes clear, none of those are happy endings for the mobsters. ---
**Author:** ![Otto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Otto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Otto)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/38 "2006-12-18T22:17:06Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic] _The Talented Mr. Ripley_ (and the Ripley stories in general) features a character who lies, steals and kills his way to wealth and social status without ever suffering any consequences or any redemptive moments. [/QUOTE] I haven’t read the books but the Damon film ends with Ripley killing his lover to avoid being exposed by Meredith which I would say counts as a pretty severe consequence of his earlier actions. Of course by the time he morphs into John Malkovich in _Ripley’s Game_ he’s well over it. ---
**Author:** ![Moe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moe/32/2972_2.png) [@Moe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moe)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/39 "2006-12-18T22:17:46Z")
How about _Trainspotting_? At the end, the protagonist runs off with the money and explains that he did it because “I’m a bad person”. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660/40 "2006-12-18T22:18:48Z")
[QUOTE=lissener] . . . I’m sorry, what was the question? [/QUOTE] The question was, “Why should we go to a theater and pay good money to be brutalized by some clinically depressed director’s nihilism?” Well, that was my question anyway. I don’t see a good answer anywhere in your post. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-without-moral-redemption-any-possible/384660.md?page=3)