What Makes A Bad Ending?
+ crashing the plane and a November movie diary
First: I wrote about Jordan Peele’s Nope for Bright Wall, Dark Room and the radical idea that Black and Brown people should get to traverse and enjoy the natural world.
Second: I appeared on the Trylove podcast to talk about what might be described as my favorite movie, Footloose (1984).
Third: I wrote about why so many contemporary books have bunnies on the cover, and what it might say about a literary climate saturated with femme anxiety, for Lit Hub.
What Makes a Bad Ending?
It’s easier to think of horrible movie endings than great ones. I loved the endings of recent films Passages and Rotting in the Sun, frantic denouements that are satisfying both to the world they’ve created and to the audience watching. But the balancing act required to achieve a decent ending is rare and difficult. Most of the movies I see in the theaters have two to three endings, unable to commit to a conclusion until the gods of reasonable run time force them to finally land the plane and let the audience leave.
The bad ending is woefully common across genres. At best, a bad ending is forgettable. At worst, it taints the previous enjoyed hours. To talk about film endings without spoilers is a fool’s errand I’ll gladly run: nothing you couldn’t get from the trailer will appear below. So what category of bad endings do these recent releases fall under? Read on to find out more….
American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, in theaters)
Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a Black writer frustrated by his middling success (Jeffrey Wright), writes an over-the-top memoir of #ThugLife that accidentally becomes a runaway bestseller.
American Fiction reminded me a lot of CODA, a movie I was told was an Oscar frontrunner despite being aesthetically and narratively hideous. It’s unimpeachably ugly to look at, with flat lighting and seemingly deliberately dull camerawork—the kind of visual landscape I would associate with the Netflix drama a dentist puts on before a teeth scraping. Personally, I prefer the scraping.
As someone who has worked in book publishing for eight years (yikes), I say with confidence that this depiction of the book world is at least twenty years out of date—fitting since the Percival Everett novel the film is adapted from was published in 2001. American Fiction pokes fun at novels like Push that became movies like Precious: stories about gutsy American Blackness that appeal to white readers looking for salacious confirmation of their worst prejudices.
It seems important to recognize that the genre of “urban novels” like Push are not particularly mainstream and they were never very critically acclaimed: Push was not winning National Book Awards. The books by Black writers that do win National Book Awards bear no resemblance to Monk’s ivory tower ramblings or his pen name’s streetwise melodramas. American Fiction is a satire of a thing that doesn’t exist, which would be forgivable if it had a single joke.
American Fiction fits comfortably in the genre classified by Still Processing as “Blaxplanation:” films with Black characters that obviously exist for white audiences. The movie doesn’t ask, or even seem to care, why there are Black people, and Black women, who like the books it derides. Nor does it explore some very visible family and colorist dynamics in Monk’s Black Boston Brahmin lifestyle. It’s too busy making Tumblr-era jokes about what “white people be like.”
The ending of American Fiction confirms its structural incoherence, crudely ripping off The Player without borrowing any of its irony or humor. Because the corny projects that win major awards for their broad appeals to white audiences are not books, they’re movies. When American Fiction gets a Best Picture nom, I will throw up blood.
Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, in theaters)
Oliver (Barry Keoghan), a poor scholarship student at Oxford, develops an obsessive friendship with the wealthy Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) and spends the summer of 2007 at his family’s country pile, Saltburn.
People assume female directors have something to say: Fennell boldly bucks this notion. This was the critical failure of Fennell’s debut Promising Young Woman (2020), a movie I quite liked but that many people look back on as an embarrassing pandemic experiment in home-viewing a la Tiger King. Like Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is a frothy, superficial concoction: an oversized carnival whip of cotton candy chased with a shot of malt vinegar. Also like Promising Young Woman, it has such an absurdly cloying ending that it makes the whole thing feel like a comically pointless waste of time.
As Oliver, or “Ollie,” as the Cattons come to call him, Keoghan gets a full showcase of the canny oddness he’s been known for since The Killing of the Sacred Deer. A bonafide character actor in an increasingly TikTok-ready pool of young actors, it’s thanks to him, and the Catton matriarch played by Rosamund Pike, that the ship remains righted as the movie devolves into soap opera territory, complete with multiple overheard conversations and illicit bedtime rendezvous.
Saltburn does not have much to actually say about class or the homosocial, except that they make a fun dollhouse for Fennell’s obvious obsession with aughts tackiness and kitsch novelty: the family watches The Ring on a silver flatscreen while their footmen stand by, Felix only takes off his Livestrong bracelet for the nightly black tie dinners, everyone is constantly reading Harry Potter while lounging by Saltburn’s many water features. By the end, the movie is so drenched in its own syrupy nonsense it’s a little hard to stomach, with a “reveal” so obvious it becomes insulting. The Highsmith comparisons seem apt, if lofty. Saltburn feels more like if the CW made Rebecca, but everyone was Mrs. Danvers.
Dream Scenario (Kristoffer Borgli, in theaters)
A mild-mannered professor (Nicolas Cage) with publishing aspirations becomes the world’s strangest celebrity when millions of people start seeing him in their dreams.
A charming premise proves surprisingly watertight for much of Dream Scenario. Cage plays Paul with an inscrutable soulfulness, mercifully avoiding full-Caginess and reminding us that before a decade of one-note novelty performances, he was once an actual actor. Like the discarded husband at the center of this year’s Anatomy of a Fall’s, Paul’s unmet publishing aspirations are eating him alive. Too bad he’s too much of a cuck to do anything about it. Even in the dreams he’s inert, an odd bystander on the outskirts of the action.
The second act twist, where Paul becomes a violent instigator in these dreams, feels inevitable. It’s the milkshake ducking that awaits most oh-so-wholesome viral phenomenons, or at least the ones centered around white men. A shame then, that the movie chooses to focus on what is perhaps the least interesting part of this sensation: how Paul is personally and unjustly aggrieved. His daughters disappear, his wife turns against him. The specific cause of his celebrity becomes completely irrelevant as the movie wanders through various cliches of male canceldom: the self-serving apologies, the public humiliations, the niche overseas fandom. Dream Scenario ends up a confusing and preachy comment on cancel culture and capitalism, so confident in its boldness it never stops to consider if it’s still funny.
the ending of Erasure had so much more bite. as did the entire book/story--all of its nihilistic edges smoothed out in the film version. still can't get over how "warm" American Fiction was.
I also really hated the ending of Dream Scenario! Well I hated everything after that dream tech commercial. I think it should have either ended after that as a joke or ended on Cage in his wife's dream in the suit.