I am finicky about those pesky endings. If the ending isn’t nearly perfect, it ruins the whole story for me.
I am a sucker for a happy ending. Especially one in which the girl gets her man or vice versa and everyone lives happily ever after. Or at least until the sequel.
I have found that some books very carefully craft the romance subplot so at the end when the hero and heroine get together it is a wonderful moment in the story. Others that I have read don’t seed the romantic relationship well enough through the story and when they get to the end they randomly pair up everybody. Like the end of The Pirate Movie, “You and you, and you and you…” etc. I prefer a romance to be a fully realized subplot and not an afterthought.
Years ago I read a book by one of my favorite authors which should have ended fifty pages earlier than it did. The book was about 200 pages long and the day was saved and the problem solved by page 150 but instead of ending it, the book continued on for another 50 pages in a grand celebration of their victory over their problems. I didn’t need to read about the characters patting themselves on the back for that length of time and almost didn’t finish the book because of the lack of tension or action.
Another ending I am disatisfied with is the one for The Lord of the Rings. You can join the line right behind my husband in calling me a “blasphemer” for not liking The Lord of the Rings. And the problem for me was the ending. If the ending drives me crazy, it ruins the whole story for me. Seeing Frodo whine and wish for his return to home, both his physical home and “normalcy,” was part of Frodo’s appeal. He was thrust into events for which he was unprepared but he had to participate in for any hope to return to home. However at the end, after just a few months home, he leaves again. This time for a more permanent destination. If he left again to travel the lands and see his friends from the fellowship, I could see that. The events just past did change him. But he leaves everything and everyone he knows behind and I just can’t reconcile that with his character. And so the books are ruined for me.
The movie Titanic also had one of those endings that just barely saves itself from being ruined for me. I expected both Jack and Rose to either both die or both live. Since the story was set up as a very long flashback, of course one of them had to survive. And really it doesn’t make sense that both would survive that tragedy but as I said before, I am a sucker for a happy ending and I wanted Jack and Rose to end up together, alive or dead. The dream sequence at the end of the movie puts the two together again and just barely saves it for me.
What are your favorite endings? and what endings bother you?
August 7th, 2009 at 9:03 am
For “Lord of the Rings,” I think Tolkien (and then Peter Jackson) wanted to put some “closure” on the work that had consumed so much of their lives while they were working on it–they wanted to spell out what happened to everyone (I think this is the same thing that happened, to some extent, with J.K. Rowling’s Epilogue in “Deathly Hallows”).
Personally, I think that sometimes it is best for the author (movie maker, etc.) to leave more of the “happily ever after” (or not) up to the reader/viewer. I agree that the ending to “Titanic” was annoying, too. It suffered from the “Charly” (that really cheesy Mormon romance novel from the 80′s) syndrome: Basically, “romances” can only be successful if at least one of the members in the romance is dead! With the character development that they did in the movie, you KNOW, that as soon as they got to New York, Jack would be sneaking off with some floozy and Rose would be missing her aristocratic life too much, so as soon as the first (okay, maybe second) relationship challenge arose, they would go their separate ways. But no, since Jack died, Rose held on to the romantic ideal of the “happily ever after.” I suppose that’s not an ending issue, though.
I have only read and seen a few of Stephen King’s works, but several of the ones I have seen/read leave off with a very unsatisfying ending (e.g., the book/movie has been dragging on for a long time now, will just have the Langoliers eat the world!).
Good luck finding satisfying endings!
August 9th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Ok, so part of my love of horror movies is that they don’t have those nice tidy endings that make my nose wrinkle. Life is never nice and tidy, and I think that books need to have some of the angst that life really has, and that the ending should reflect that as well. One of my favorite endings is when the bad guy ends up winning. I love the ending in “The Secret Window” – I love how Mort finally becomes the evil guy that has been haunting his thoughts, and through living out his books ending through his dark desires (i.e killing his ex-wife and her husband), he is finally is able to find the inspiration to finish his story. You take a perfectly normal, reasonable goal and find the solution through a really twisted means. It’s beautiful. I think that part of what made the story feel so complete was the goal – it was tight and well defined – none of that save the word crap.
On the other side, I hate endings where there is a “happily ever after” and the characters get their hearts desires (unless they are pretending to be fairy tales, so Stardust was ok, but Breaking Dawn was dreadful). I also hate stories that reset (e.g. Narnia). I could probably go on for a long time listing dreadful endings but I won’t flatter myself thinking that people would actually want to read my gripe list.