So you never saw Broadcast News?
The Pledge has a depressing ending.
The biggest money-maker of all time, Titanic, has an ending that is, at least, not SUPER-happy. I mean, you know in the first 15 minutes that the boat sinks and Rose survives, so the big question is what happens to Jack, and he dies. (Although if you view the film as Rose’s struggle against her mother’s view of what her life will be, the ending is quite happy.)
The movie that I think most needed a less happy ending was Return of the Jedi. Lando and the Millenium Falcon should have died in the death star. That way you don’t have this phenomenal struggle against an evil power which every single even-slightly-main character survives, plus Lando atones for his sins, plus Han’s link to his shady smuggler past is gone, plus all the foreshadowing becomes meaningful.
Because I really like going to spend $10 on a movie ticket after a hard work week in a time of political and social turmoil, and watching likable characters get driven into the ground—which also makes me want to spend time and money watching the sequel, which is really easy to write and produce given the circumstances that ended the first film? ;D
That, or the lingering influences of the Hayes code. Possibly the former, picking up as the influence of the latter waned.
(Not that this is a really new phenomenon, I suppose…myths, tall tales, and written works aren’t as nearly sanitized/idealistic as most of Hollywood, but I wouldn’t say that most of them don’t simply build up to a really sad ending.)
Romeo + Juliet (with Leonardo DiCaprio & Claire Danes) arguably has an even sadder ending than the original play. Romeo lived just long enough to realize that Juliet wasn’t really dead. In the original he died before she woke up and never knew they could’ve escaped.
Because of people like my brother. He didn’t like ** V for Vendetta ** because it was too dark. He didn’t like ** King Kong ** because of the sad ending even though I told him it was faithful to the original. Whatever dude.
One of the greatest directors who ever stood behind a camera, Douglas Sirk, left Hollywood forever after his biggest success, to escape “the tyranny of the happy ending.”
At any rate, as **Zsofia **pointed out above, I think it’s largely because we’ve become acculturated to expect a happy ending because, from 1934 to 1967, it was legislated and enforced by the official Hollywood censor under the Hays code. That period spans Hollywood’s “golden age,” and has largely defined what we think about when we think about movies.
There’s a long-standing counter tradition of sadness and bitterness among artists. Ursula K. LeGuin called it the “treason of the artist.” Where only bad things were somehow real to them, and the only way to be authentic was for everything to suck. And it’s true that an awful lot of artists wallowed in misery even when life wasn’t actually that bad, and they sometimes made some great art, but of course it’s biased art.
As mentioned in the OP, this downer ending was largely based on the climax of the off-Broadway musical. Per the YouTube clip, the scale was radically increased from the stage show, but the general story direction and certainly the tone are the same.
Which leads to an interesting observation: Downer finishes, or at least ambiguously not-quite-happy ones, are much more common in the theater than they are in the cinema.
And by both terms, I mean the mainstream productions, the ones “everybody” goes to see. You can easily find lots of fringe independent movies with depressing finales; likewise lots of plays and musicals end with a cheerful button.
But, in general, if you go to a Broadway play with a packed house, whether musical or straight, you are much more likely to be challenged by an ending that refuses to wrap things up with undiluted happiness, punishing all the bad guys and giving all the good guys a well-earned triumph, than you are if you go to a similarly popular movie. Now this, certainly, is an interesting question.
Is it a matter of a sophisticated audience? While it’s true that the average theatergoer is more educated than the average moviegoer, it’s more important, I think, to note that theatergoers are, obviously, more experienced theatrically, so they’re better able to handle a narrative punch to the gut. But that’s circular reasoning: if they can tolerate a sad or morally confusing ending because they’ve learned how over the years, that’s simply a return to the original observation that the theater has traditionally given its audiences that sort of climax, and we’re back to square one.
Is it a matter of longstanding tradition? Look back to Shakespeare, and his contemporaries; it was common for the stage to host a virtual bloodbath, and even the “light” material has dark elements. (Much Ado is as frothy as the Bard gets, and yet Don John stalks the edges of the story.) There’s a waggish summary of Shakespeare’s work: a tragedy is a play in which everybody dies; a comedy is a play in which only a few people die. It’s glib, but there’s something there.
But that tradition far predates Shakespeare. The formal division of drama into comedy and tragedy goes back to the Greeks, whose audiences were just as willing to sit in the bleachers and laugh at men with untreated boners as they were to agonize as a king stabs out his own eyes. Greek dramatists and philosophers came up a whole constellation of theoretical jargon to explain the effects of theatrical manipulation and the desire of audiences to subject themselves to these manipulations, the most important of which is probably “catharsis.” The word means, more or less, “cleansing” or “purification,” and refers to the revitalization felt by an audience after a strong emotional response, either positive or negative. In other words, whether by laughing or weeping, the people in the audience exercised their emotional reactions, and walked out of the amphitheater feeling stronger and healthier.
It’s interesting, therefore, that the modern equivalent form should have so largely abandoned the tragic form, and put such great emphasis on the upbeat story. The Greek philosophers would suggest that we are neglecting half of ourselves, and are becoming unhealthy and unbalanced as a result. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that an audience unwilling to consider negative consequences and that insists on being shown only hopeful endings is an audience that has become spoiled and weak. I shy away from that myself, because it feels more than a little simplistic and condescending, but the temptation to draw that conclusion certainly exists.
The point is, it’s easy to be glib about it, and it’s easy to blame Hollywood for feeding our baser impulses; but in a free market, where there is demand, there will be supply, and right now, we demand to be told that everything will work out for the best. It hasn’t always been that way, but right now, that’s the way it is. It’s not Hollywood’s fault; it’s ours.
On that level, perhaps the best place for this discussion is, in fact, in Great Debates after all.
I don’t know about most people, but for me, if I want depressing and/or thought-provoking entertainment, I reach for a book. If I’m too tired or sad for that and I want some brain candy, I go to the movies. Now, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, and I’ve enjoyed plenty of happy books and sad movies. However, it’s enough of a trend that it makes me wonder how many people have the same tendency.
I haven’t read the graphic novel, but from what I’ve read about it, the movie DID have a happy ending compared to the source material. 
That’s because Disney hates kids and likes to make them cry.
I liked V for Vendetta. I really liked that the army did the intelligent thing at the end.
If you want to look at a time when things ended on a “down” note, why not look at the 1970’s, especially the “populist” movies of the '70’s, when anti-heroes ruled: Deliverance, the Billy Jack movies, **Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (from 1969, starred Robert Redford). And how about Brando’s The Last Tango in Paris. Yuck. Okay, now I’m feeling depressed.
Love, Phil
I did a quick survey of the Oscar nominees (and winners) in the last five years.
No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Atonement, Sweeney Todd, 3:10 to Yuma, Into the Wild, The Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima, Pan’s Labyrinth, United 93, The Last King of Scotland, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, Children of Men, The Prestige, Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Munich, A History of Violence, Match Point, The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Collateral, Mystic River, 21 Grams,* Monster*, and House of Sand and Fog don’t have happy endings.
Audiences might not want to see a downer ending, but it sure gets you on the golden guy’s shortlist.
I would say Collateral has a “happy” ending. It’s not a skipping through the roses ending, but it’s far from being a downer.
I think downer endings are good if they’re done well. Some of my favorite movies have downer endings (Se7en and Fallen come to mind readily) and I think they wouldn’t be favorites if they hadn’t ended the way they did. But movies like The Mist, where the downer ending is tacked on to be SHOCKING!!!™ makes the movie bad. I watched Fallen for the first time and thought “Wow, that movie was AWESOME.” I watched The Mist in theaters and thought “Wow, that movie was okay, but the ending SUCKED.”
It’s probably just easier for Hollywood to make a happy ending that fits in with the story than to create a good downer ending that still leaves the audiences satisfied.
Well, one of my gripes about living in Europe was that it seemed many European films would not have an ending at all - they would simply stop.
Used to drive me crazy, but my friends (mostly German as I lived in Berlin) would all make fun of me and claim I needed my “happy Hollywood ending” at which point I would say,
“No, it doesn’t have to be happy, but it should at least have an ending!”
“But life goes on and real-life situations don’t always have an ending.”
“Then wait until it does before you make a fuckin’ film about it.”
Oddly, people stopped going to see films with me…I wonder why…
Well, I wasn’t going to contribute to this post, but what the hell.
Big Hollywood Blocbusters have the stock ending but I expect more from independant films. I love the gritty films that take note of the underworld, but I suspend my belief at certain Cinderella stories.
Okay, AOL fucking timed out and I wasn’t finished.
I wanted to say I had a problem with the movie Waitress but I cannot find the spoiler button so that’s kinda moot. Why is there no spoiler button here when I had a whole big critique ready to post. Can’t do it otherwise.
You must type (spoiler) whole big critique (/spoiler) (replacing “(” and “)” with “[” and “]”, of course.
Example