Cinematic Cuts

Theorizing Film Endings

Sheila Kunkle

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438461366, 9781438461373
• eBook ISBN: 9781438461380
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Editing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film's ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In Cinematic Cuts, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending's hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator's sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed.

1

Resolution, Truncation, Glitch

HUGH S. MANON

Introduction: “The End of Show Department”

In a late episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (season 4, episode 2, 1974), we follow a shopper named Chris Quinn (Eric Idle) through a series of bizarre encounters as he makes his way from floor to floor in a ten-story department store. The episode is unusual for Python in that it centers on a single protagonist rather than unfolding as a series of loosely connected sketches, and it concludes with an exchange between Quinn and a sales assistant (Terry Jones) who is positioned in front of a large sign that proclaims this to be the “End of Show Department.” Quinn is disappointed by the episode’s “rotten ending,” and the assistant presents him with a series of alternatives, each of which represents a conventionalized set of formal devices that might be used to conclude a television show. The first is a “long, slow pull-out” in which “the camera tracks back and back.” As the sales assistant describes the shot, the camera produces exactly the effect he describes: a long, receding aerial shot of London, along with a musical crescendo, as the speaker’s voice fades away. The shopper interrupts, bringing us back to the department store: “No, no, no. Have you got anything more exciting?” The next option provided is a chase, and immediately two men in suits rush in, chasing the shopper out of the scene in a fast-motion sequence reminiscent of old silent films. Again, this ending is deemed unsuitable. The third option involves two lone silhouetted figures walking off into the sunset as the music swells, the fourth is a “happy ending” in which a beautiful woman enters and joyfully embraces the shopper, the fifth involves the appearance of two jaded football commentators who sum up the big match (i.e., the Flying Circus episode itself), and the sixth is a simple “slow fade.” The shopper rejects each of these in turn. Finally, in a matter-of-fact voice, the sales assistant says, “Well, uh, how about a sudden ending?” At this point the camera abruptly cuts to black and the show is actually over.

In this sequence, Monty Python confronts viewers with their own manipulation by media conventions. Shown in rapid succession, each technique nonetheless triggers an affective response—the slow pull-out connotes timelessness and historical context, the chase produces anxiety, the sunset creates a feeling of romantic hopefulness, and so on. Despite their parodic juxtaposition, each of these techniques really does work. However, in the end, the show concludes with a sudden cut to black, as if to indicate that all of the other ending types we have seen are elaborate sublimations of the one true ending—a primordial ending that, because it is not connotatively embellished, is not really an ending at all but instead a blunt stoppage. The sudden ending is stark, desublimated, all too real. We perhaps expect the camera to return to the scene in the store but just as quickly realize this will not happen. We have entered the void outside the comforting confines of the televisual fantasy. The cut to black produces a sense of textual death and correspondingly a feeling that our subjectivity has come unmoored and that we are no longer being cared for.

Although this sequence, like so much of Monty Python’s work, involves a hilariously surreal critique of modern media and culture, the “End of Show Department” uses repetition and variation to make a valuable theoretical point: that although individual films and television shows can end, they cannot simply cease. To resolve in an ending involves a whole series of courtesies, gestures made to viewers that allow us to exit the narrative in a manner that feels less like a cut. To simply abort, however, is an outlier, relegated to the very end of the list as an aporia that all of the other options work to avoid. Understood in this way, cinematic truncation is an impossibility in precisely the sense that psychoanalysis intends. Truncation is shocking in a way that places it outside the bounds of normative signifying practice, but at the same time it is an impossibility that one nonetheless occasionally encounters.

In the three sections that follow, I examine the endings of motion pictures in both theoretical and technological/historical terms. Beginning with a discussion of Hollywood’s highly conventional “happy ending” and its relation to the psychoanalytic conception of imaginary fantasy, I go on to examine a series of moving image narratives that do not resolve but instead truncate, leaving the viewer in a place of radical ambiguity. Through a series of close analyses, I understand such endings in relation to the Lacanian “short session,” wherein a psychoanalyst abruptly ends a session at a point whose significance is unstated. In such instances—and they are remarkably rare—the imaginary fantasy of cinema comes up against the impossible Real, whose temporality is both unanticipatory and unconditioned by language. In a third section, I examine digital cinema’s fascination with the “glitch”—a messy audiovisual flare-up in which a motion picture appears to be on the verge of truncating but instead fails to fail, leaving viewers with the “look and feel” of impossibility, but not impossibility per se. In this sense, a cinematic glitch is a redomestication of the uncanny—an aesthetic gesture that mimics, and at the same time sublimates, the radical, anxiety-provoking cut of actual truncation.

On Resolution: The Player

Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player illuminates a crucial point regarding the structure and function of resolution in mainstream cinema: so long as the tripartite structure of rising action, climax, and denouement is preserved, the specific plot content that populates these segments does not matter in the least. The test Altman performs has implications both for our understanding of Hollywood’s narrative paradigm, wherein cinematic fantasies must come to a close (and not just suddenly stop), and for psychoanalysis, which actively works to theorize the subject’s imaginary fantasy in relation to the impossible Real. What sets The Player apart from more standard films of its era is that its plot climaxes and resolves by way of a three-minute sequence that belongs to an entirely different film, one that we have not been watching. The fact that Altman is able to execute this bait-and-switch, and that the interjected sequence nonetheless triggers the affective response one expects of a Hollywood climax, is proof that the audience’s engagement depends on a structure in which satisfaction is promised, obstructed, and finally delivered. In other words, it is the structure of the film’s resolution, and not any particular plot content, that catalyzes the imaginary fantasy.

In order to comprehend the full weight of Altman’s subversion, we need to appreciate how far he takes us in one narrative direction before switching to another. Featuring a staggering number of cameos from both Hollywood veterans and newcomers, the highly reflexive neo-noir plot of The Player centers on Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), a studio vice president who receives a series of death threats from an embittered screenwriter whose script he rejected. When Mill believes he has learned the identity of the screenwriter—David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio)—he seeks him out at a revival house in Pasadena. Following a late screening of The Bicycle Thief, Mill approaches Kahane in the lobby. Kahane bristles at Mill’s attempts to make nice, and when Mill says his studio should remake De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece, Kahane snarkily retorts, “You’d probably give it a happy ending.” The two go out for drinks at a karaoke bar. Later, in a parking lot, after the drunken Kahane taunts Mill with the rumor that he is about to lose his job to Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), a young executive brought in from another studio, Kahane pushes Mill through a broken railing and down into a water-filled stairway. When Kahane apologetically offers to help Mill to his feet, Mill attacks and drowns him, fleeing the scene. The remainder of the film alternates between Mill’s pursuit of three goals: to cover up Kahane’s murder from the police, to fend off the stalker (who, as it turns out, was not Kahane), and to retain his position at the studio by preventing Levy from gaining the upper hand.

The concept of the “Hollywood happy ending” is repeatedly invoked in the film, most notably in the pitch offered by Tom Oakley (Richard E. Grant) for a film called Habeas Corpus—a gloomy melodrama about a district attorney who falls in love with a female inmate consigned to death row for a murder she did not commit. Oakley touts the film as a new American tragedy, with “no stars, no pat happy endings, no Schwarzenegger, no stick-ups, no terrorists.” Most notably, at the film’s climax, the wrongly accused protagonist will die in the gas chamber. “She has to die—no fucking Hollywood ending!” Oakley insists. Mill secretly does not believe in the viability of the picture—he describes it as a “completely fucked-up idea with no second act”—and passes the ill-conceived project to Larry Levy in order to sabotage the newcomer’s reputation and career.

Given The Player’s complex plot machinations in acts 2 and 3, its climax is oddly perfunctory. The police strongly suspect Mill is guilty of Kahane’s murder, and when he is called in for a line-up the sole witness identifies the wrong man (ironically, the very police detective that had been shadowing Mill). With that, Mill is exonerated and the film’s major conflict is resolved. However, as if to disown this run-of-the-mill climax, Altman immediately delivers a second climactic scene that is both unexpected and far more intense. The title “One Year Later” appears over a black screen and the music greatly intensifies. We see a group of reporters gathered around a prison gas chamber. The viewer soon realizes that this is the ending of the now-completed Habeas Corpus, which is being screened for the higher-ups at the studio, but in a cynical twist, the film’s ending is the exact opposite of the “no stars, no pat happy endings” approach that writer Tom Oakley demanded.

The camera dollies back to reveal a priest (Ray Walston) reading the Lord’s Prayer to a female inmate—none other than Julia Roberts, the hottest young actress of 1992. She is solemnly escorted into the chamber and just after the pellets are dropped, a call comes in at the guard station. The pace of the music quickens and the guards are scrambling for their keys when suddenly Bruce Willis bursts onto the screen! He grabs a pump-action shotgun from a guard and blasts away the glass window of the gas chamber. Jumping inside, he frees Roberts, and as he carries out her limp body she recovers consciousness, smiles, and asks “What took you so long?” Wills, the badass district attorney, coolly responds: “Traffic was a bitch.” The End.

The small audience in the studio’s screening room enthusiastically bursts into applause. Thanks to a negative test screening, the film’s original ending has been replaced with precisely the ending Oakley reviled, yet even he is smiling and applauding. This positivity carries over into the world outside Altman’s film-within-a-film. In a short denouement sequence, we learn that Habeas Corpus has been a huge success for the studio, Larry Levy now has his career-cementing hit, Griffin Mill has been promoted to studio president and has married the dead screenwriter’s beautiful girlfriend who is pregnant with his child, and the film finally concludes with the couple embracing on a sunny day in front of their lovely home, surrounded by an American flag and red roses.

Beyond Altman’s satirical intent, the sequence is remarkable because it reflexively undermines the paradigm of the Hollywood ending, while nonetheless exploiting its power. Despite the jarring last-minute appearance of Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis—arguably the biggest stars in the film—and despite the fact that the narrative climax of The Player pales by comparison to the hyperbolic climax of Habeas Corpus, we are nonetheless delivered the exact sort of adrenaline-pumping conclusion that every Hollywood film promises, followed by an appropriately calming and satisfying denouement. The fact that neither the Habeas Corpus action scene nor the blissfully romantic denouement seem to belong in this film is precisely the point. Regardless of plot content, we get the same thrill and satisfaction—in effect the same fantasy of imaginary closure—so long as the conventionalized triad of obstacle/climax/resolution is obeyed. We know very well that we are not seeing the climax to The Player, but because it appears in the proper place and obeys all of the preset conventions—staging a crisis only so as to satisfyingly overcome it—the impact of the scene is just the same as if it were the film’s true ending.

According to Lacan, fantasy does not merely involve the subject imagining what it would be like to have immediate full access to some otherwise unattainable goal. Instead, fantasy involves the subject picturing the process of desire’s attainment: “[I]n its fundamental use, fantasy is the means by which the subject maintains himself at the level of his vanishing desire, vanishing inasmuch as the very satisfaction of demand deprives him of his object.”1 When the subject engages in fantasy, he or she envisions a scenario in which obstacles are surmounted and goals are attained—a scenario quite unlike the one we encounter in real life, wherein obstacles sometimes do not yield and, even when they do, attainment is never fully satisfying. The so-called Hollywood happy ending is a crucial site at which the subject encounters fantasy as a prestaged, consumable product. Although the specific contents of this fantasy vary from film to film and from genre to genre, the three-part procedure of obstruction, attainment, and satisfaction is a firm constant—truly a structural precondition inasmuch as it staged our desire in relation to lack.

At the same time, this endlessly repeated formula must be seen as an affront to the “possibility of the impossibility of existence in general,” to appropriate Heidegger’s famous articulation of the subject’s relation to death.2 In Hollywood endings, we repeatedly encounter a scenario in which impossibility is categorically not possible. The abject, unmitigated death of any given narrative is, in Hollywood’s terms, a bona fide impossibility—a castration that is really and truly not going to occur. In place of a (literal or figurative) hard cut to black, Hollywood delivers a (literal or figurative) slow dissolve, the implication of which is that there is an afterlife for these characters—a continuation of satisfaction beyond the frame of the story in which we have been immersed. Such hopeful continuity is, of course, cinema’s imaginary fantasy par excellence and must be understood as implicitly conservative, keeping the viewer in a regulated state of passive acceptance and status quo consumption. In effect, the Hollywood ending is a way to awaken the audience from the dreamlike experience of the film while ensuring that the reality outside the film is passively encountered as just another layer of dreaming. To jar the audience out of the imaginary fantasy, a more radical procedure is necessary—one that does not “dissolve” the film into reality but instead violently kills all forward movement, dropping the viewer into a deathlike abyss. I examine this very rare type of ending—the truncation ending—in the section that follows.

On Truncation: Limbo, The Sopranos, and Martha Marcy May Marlene

Resolution is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On the Subject of Endings
• 1. Resolution, Truncation, Glitch
• 2. The Banality of Trauma: Claire Denis’s Bastards and the Anti-Ending
• 3. The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Played: Desire, Drive, and the Twist Ending
• 4. Retroactive Rupture: The Place of the Subject in Jane Campion’s In the Cut
• 5. Love, Loss, Endings, and Beginnings: A Psychoanalysis of Rust and Bone
• 6. Cinematic Ends: The Ties That Unbind in Claire Denis’s White Material
• 7. When One Becomes Two: The Ending of Catfish
• 8. The Satisfaction of an Ending
• 9. The Too Realistic Cut: Gaze as Overconformity in Blue Velvet
• 10. The End of Fantasy as We Know It: Her and the Vanishing Mediator of the Voice in Film
• 11. Melancholia, an Alternative to the End of the World: A Reading of Lars von Trier’s Film
• 12. Cut or Time and American Cinema of Thought-Affect: Cuts of Failure in John Huston’s Fat City
• 13. The End of (Self) Analysis: The End of Kurosawa’s High and Low
• 14. The Final Failure in The Dark Knight Rises
• 15. The [“End”]
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover