In order to teach my students about methods for writing essay conclusions, I ask them to think about the ending of the last film they saw. If it was an ending that left them wondering what was going to happen to the characters next or pondering some large question about their late-teen-early-twenties lives in the Universe, then we have something to talk about. We can have a decent and sometimes even enlightening discussion about the virtue of ending with something that's not another dull summary. More likely than not, though, the last film my students saw is something awful, some predictable horror film or trite romantic comedy, something where every loose end is neatly tied up and knitted together, which is exactly the opposite of what good writing should do.
Last semester, one of my students made a valid point about the inherent problem with this exercise. Someone in class had seen A History of Violence (2005) recently and commented on the ending, where Viggo Mortensen's character returns to his family with his gangster past revealed to them, and they sit silently around the dinner table. The End. Knowing a little more than my students do about David Cronenberg, I explained that the director was trying to get them to think about the breakup of the family unit and secrets and identity and how they damage people. But one of the girls in my class had a more succinct answer to the question of why Violence's ending left her thinking: "Indie movies always have weird endings," she explained, "because they don't have very big budgets." "And what would they do if they had big budgets?" I asked in a moment of Socratic desperation. "Do you think they'd all live happily ever after?" "Nah," she replied. "They'd blow stuff up."
Now, I'd normally have defended Cronenberg at that point, but subconsciously I knew that blowing stuff up would have tremendously improved the endings of a lot of the indie films I've seen over the years, possibly including A History of Violence itself. After all, the guy was a killer; why couldn't he have blown up his brother's mansion, thereby getting William Hurt and his awful facial hair off-screen a lot faster? What if Max Fischer blew up Rushmore Academy? What if Ennis Del Mar exploded his trailer at the end of Brokeback Mountain (2005)? What if Miranda July's car collided with a brick wall in a fiery inferno at the end of Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)? Any one of these possibilities would have worked fine for me.
This is not to say that I think every indie film should end with stuff blowing up, but that indie films, often working against tiny budgets, often seem to have endings just as rote as Hollywood films. At times, indies all seem to have been constructed in the same writing workshop, where the teacher tells his or her students to send their characters through some sort of trauma, and then to end the film with their exhausted/puzzled/quizzical faces staring off into the middle distance. My cable provider features both Sundance and the Independent Film Channel, and inevitably when I flip by the ending of some indie movie, I find that same shot of exhausted/puzzled/quizzical faces staring off into the middle distance, and I either toss the remote across the room in disgust or flip to Bravo and watch Project Runway reruns. My writing friends and I have been known to say to one another that you have to earn your ending; if the same is true for filmmakers, why is it that reduced budgets so often force them into relying on the money shot of people looking sad? Does that really leave the audience with something to think about?
In some ways, the Hollywood ending, while it has become a trope and a cliché, is so much more satisfying. I've never left a theater feeling as wrung-out as I did after The Return of the King (2003); even though I knew what was coming, Sam's "Well, I'm back" had me in emotional tatters. And in spite of the fact that I hated 90% of 1997's Titanic (the 10% exception being Kate Winslet's creamy shoulders), when that necklace dropped into the water at the end, I was pretty sure for five minutes that James Cameron was a genius.
I watch about 99% of the films I see on DVD, because I am cranky about movie talkers and open-mouthed popcorn eating, so there is a sure test to decide whether or not I like the movie I'm watching. If I like it, I'll sit through the whole thing. If not, after about fifteen minutes, I walk into the other room, grab my laptop, and watch bits of the rest of the movie while messing around on the internet. I do, however, always watch the end. Even if it's a bad movie, I want the satisfaction of knowing how bad, and for me the badness of movies is measured by their endings.
Admittedly, I am pretentious about many things, and was raised to deeply appreciate film as craft, so I am the indie directors' idealized viewer: college educated, a reader of the New Yorker, an eater of imported cheese. However, when I stick an indie film into my DVD player, I usually end up online very quickly, clicking through clothing boutique sites and glancing up now and then, waiting for the money shot of people gazing off into the middle distance, squinting like they need some eye drops and a new prescription for their contact lenses.
The post-traumatic-middle-distance-gaze (PTMDG) is a trope for the shoe-gazing type of indie, usually directed by thirty-ish dudes out of the Ivies. But what about the indie comedy ending? Equally dire. Saving Face, a 2004 indie comedy I really enjoyed, ruined my goodwill by not only having a happy ending, but having the happiest ending I think I've ever seen (spoiler: happy lesbians), other than Finding Nemo the year before (spoiler: Nemo found). The oeuvre of Wes Anderson has been beaten to death in the pages of this magazine, so suffice to say the endings of Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) have blended together in my memory, a protein shake of Bill Murray's hangdog (middle distance!) gaze. Broken Flowers (2005) was arguably a comedy and definitely an indie, and had an ending so unresolved that it did not leave me thinking, but left me close to physical rage in its pretentiousness -- and I like Jim Jarmusch.
I have no desire to become a filmmaker, but as a potential audience member, my advice to indie film directors is succinct: blow something up, get your characters into a fist-fight, end with a sex scene… do something, anything other than sweeping that camera away from the faces of your leads and over the cityscape. Quit wasting your budgets on licensing songs sung by guys with feelings about stuff, and spend them instead on your final scene. Heck, bring in a deus ex machina in the form of a Rip Taylor cameo or recreate the great San Francisco quake of 1906. Who cares if it's completely nonsensical or totally out of context? Just give me something to think about.
The movie of Kaya Oakes' life is going to end with a scene of her making pancakes with Leonard Cohen in a darkened kitchen while fireworks in the shape of bunnies go off outside. She is a senior editor of Kitchen Sink.