Some thoughts on the ending…

I’ve had a remarkable run of films lately. The last four of five films at the cinema I’ve seen had unambiguously downer endings. Now, going to see a Steven King horror film, you might say that I had this one coming. And fair enough.

But dammit, I really don’t like the ending. Again! I must be getting soft. If I’d been in charge, I’d have left the ending of the film as Steven King wrote it - they’re driving into the mist, hopeful but fearful, and we don’t know whether they live or die. That’s fine. But noooo, instead they’re idiots and commit suicide when they don’t have to. Aargh!

Now that I have that out of my system, I suppose I can live with the ending - it is in keeping with the rest of the film, but it requires me to modify my thinking about the good guys.

The film shows us three distinct groups of thinkers, and proceeds to show the fatal flaws in each one (they appear to represent three of the five stages of grief: denial, bargaining, and depression, though that interpretation may be a bit of a reach)

The first group are those in denial: the arsehole next-door lawyer and those he convinces. These are the ones who rationalise too much, refusing to believe in the supernatural even when it’s right there eating their legs. We know that they are wrong, and they walk to their (probable) doom, though we do see one of the in-denial people alive at the end (she left before it was too obvious how bad things were, and she was obviously very, very lucky to have survived).

The second group are those trying to bargain: the religious fanatics cast about for blame and attempt sacrifice to appease their angry god. As negatively as they’re portrayed, the film occasionally toys with the idea that they may even be correct. Their prophet is, after all, quite accurate! And it’s probable that most of them survive the disaster, too, so huh. I’ll mark them as being flawed because they a) lose their leader, and b) are all nutty and murderous, and c) it doesn’t appear to be end-times after all.

The third group - the ostensible heroes - fall victim to despair, which is most clearly and explicitly shown to be wrong. After driving for half a day or so, within a minute of the protagonist killing his companions (as you may recall, they had four bullets and five people, and obviously a not-terribly-powerful pistol that can’t kill two people with one shot), he’s rescued. That’s lousy timing. Let’s look at some of the options that group in the car had:

1. Wait until the last possible second, when the car is being attacked by nasties and is about to be overwhelmed, before committing suicide.
2. Protagonist gives the gun to one of the other four, then going out to look for more petrol. If he dies: oh dear! If the car gets attacked in the meantime: yowza! Not a worse outcome.
3. Oh, I don’t know. Take a few minutes to think about it? Hold a little debate? List the pros and cons?

Yep, they fell into despair, alright. And that’s the point, I suppose: they see how overwhelming the nasties are - that enormous six-legged thing - and assume the worst. They’re wrong. Lesson not-learned. Audience shouts at the screen in frustration. It’s a bit disappointing because this group did seem like they might work their way out, but this was not the only time they were too thick to live: they had a distressing tendency to stand and gawp at the nasties instead of running a lot (the pharmacy!), to attempt to save people who were clearly unsaveable, and to walk slowly but not with particular efforts at quietness or armourment. One might argue that these are merely horror movie cliches, and they are, but I think the more complete view is that they just aren’t coping with the unknowable. There are some elements of denial, but mostly a whole lot of despair. I’d like to call them idiots. And yeah, I’ve done so several times, and mentioned to the world at large that Steven King can go fuck himself, though I should probably revise that to Frank Darabont, since the ending wasn’t in the King story.

But really, if I’d seen that tentacle, would I be much more coherent? Which fatally flawed group would I be in?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Horror, M, Slash'n'dash, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.