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This article has given me much to think about. I know just what the author and those quoted mean (also notes 3 of my fave endings from: The Dead, Tristan und Isolde, and The Searchers). For me, finally writing just the right ending to a story or poem has usually been the most satisfying part. - Perdita
Endings are a catharsis. They give meaning to what comes before, and change us from the way we were.
- Steven Winn, SF Chronicle, January 1, 2005
When I was a junior in high school, our English teacher showed the class a film called "The World, the Flesh and the Devil." Or rather, I should say, he showed us most of it. Fifteen minutes before the credits, Mr. LeFever turned off the projector and told us to get out our binders. The assignment was to write an ending for the film. The story, set in New York City after a devastating nuclear war, turned on three survivors. After the woman (Inger Stevens) chose a black man (Harry Belafonte) over his white rival (Mel Ferrer), presumably to replenish the species, a deadly manhunt through the vacant streets of Manhattan ensued. At the peak of suspense, the screen at Springfield High went blank. If students can riot and still remain in their seats, that's about what happened.
As it turns out, the ending of "World," a 1959 Cold War artifact, is something of a letdown (the three stars wind up strolling off into the Atomic Age sunset together). But none of us knew that at the time. And in that pre- video store era, we weren't about to find out. In an inspired twist to his stunt, Mr. LeFever refused to show us the last 15 minutes of the film, even after our assignments had been handed in. He rewound the last reel and put it back in its canister for return. Whatever else this high school exercise was meant to do, it drove home some important truths about endings that all of us, even children, know intuitively. Endings, by their nature, are exquisitely torturous. We're all psychologically primed to crave resolving climaxes, and simultaneously inclined to doubt, mistrust, reject and even fear them.
Catharsis -- in drama or a therapist's office -- is both. Aristotle called it recognition and reversal. Theater audiences, readers, music lovers and filmgoers feel it in their bones, their flesh, their communal DNA. Endings define and disappoint, gratify and frustrate. They confer meaning and confirm the structure of what's come before -- in a movie, a sonata, a work of fiction. But they also kill off pleasure, snap us out of the dream and clamp down order on experience that we, as citizens of the modern world, believe to be open-ended, ambiguous and unresolved. It's a delicious paradox. Fairy tales, adventure films, mystery stories and Mozart symphonies all gain velocity by pointing us at one ending, toying with our biology of anticipation and racing off toward some new false conclusion and then another and another before finishing themselves off. "We enjoy, it seems, teasing our tensions," writes Barbara Herrnstein Smith in "Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End," "deferring the immediate fulfillment of our appetites and expectations."
The box office hit "National Treasure" is a little more than a series of false cadences, one door in the plot opening into another and another until we finally reach the treasure room. We see it all coming and recognize how we're being handled. But we're also hardwired for this stuff, and every Hollywood director knows it. Patently artificial as they may be, fictional endings behave in satisfying ways that events in real life often stubbornly refuse to. Deaths, divorces and assorted other partings happen -- suddenly (or sometimes far too late), messily, incoherently. Even innocently arithmetic endings often remain opaque. The last day of the year comes whether we're ready to make sense of it or not. We bully ourselves into musing retrospection and halfhearted resolutions, inventing a story to fit the end.
A great artistic ending, by contrast, is both startling and inevitable, mysteriously certain. It clarifies even as it complicates, crystallizes and expands. Think of the snow that falls across Dublin in James Joyce's short story "The Dead," or the ravishing last scene of "Der Rosenkavalier." Think of Rosebud in "Citizen Kane" or "Ode to Joy," that exultant crown of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. "The finale of 'Tristan,' " says Robert Cole, director of Cal Performances, without a pause. "It's the ultimate ending." His explanation touches on the opera's subject matter, on its synthesis of Wagner's score and settles, finally, on the ineffably glorious orchestration of the final chord.
For David Thomson, author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, the last image of John Wayne in "The Searchers" comes to mind. The shot of Wayne silhouetted in the doorway, deciding whether he might stay or must move on, telescopes the film's action to a single moment. "Extraordinary," says Thomson, his voice hushed. "When he walks away and that door closes, we know this man is an endless wanderer, doomed to never live indoors."
"The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read," wrote John Updike in his introduction to "The Best American Short Stories 1984." "It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph."
...
We all have our well-stocked private libraries of treasured endings, and plenty of exasperating ones as well. Who hasn't felt that total-body shiver as the lights fade on a play's beautifully made last scene or when a piano concerto races toward its triumphant exclamation point? And who hasn't fumed, like a spurned lover, over some book or film that defied our yearnings? I hated the ending: It may be the single thing that gets said more than anything else about works of art.
...
Be that as it may, artists have probably always struggled with endings, adding codas, epilogues and postscripts or dodging the matter altogether by setting up sequels. When Shakespeare harshly punishes Malvolio at the end of "Twelfth Night" or divides the couples by means of an offstage death in the last act of "Love's Labour's Lost," he sends a complicating cloud into otherwise sunny skies. Beethoven agonized mightily over his endings, rewriting many of them. He strongly considered replacing the choral "Ode to Joy" with an instrumental last moment of the Ninth Symphony. By leaving it in place, says McGegan, symphonists who followed had a formidable model of endings to match. "It screwed up Brahms terribly. Mahler's solution was to write great big slow movements or great big choral movements."
Endings took on a special cast in the 20th century, when world wars and the specter of nuclear holocaust gave finality a darker shade. Every ending, however distant, held the seeds of ultimate destruction. Beckett spun out an infinite, unresolved slow fade in "Waiting for Godot." Charles Ives composed his "Unanswered Question." Joyce spooled the last line of "Finnegans Wake" to the first, as if to evade the essential anxiety of beginnings and ends. Endings became provisional, fraught and charged with deeper meanings. Frank Kermode, in his 1965 book "The Sense of an Ending," sees the conclusions of "Othello," "Macbeth" and "King Lear" as a kind of obligatory punctuation, "human periods in an eternal world." In her study "Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels," Joyce Rowe calls the ending of a good story "a mixed blessing." Even as it completes a narrative arc, "an ending, like its real life counterpart, also entails a sense of loss, of emptiness -- a little death, as it were."
...
Thomson believes that film endings are inherently wrenching. "One of the reasons I think movies are often reluctant to end," he says, "is that we're so reluctant for them to end. It's not just the story, but the complete sensory immersion of the form that's so compelling and absorbing. Because the audience is encouraged to participate on the level of fantasy rather than on an intellectual level, there's always this sense that the story might linger on. It's no wonder sequels are so prevalent."
...
In a lovely poem about failing to record the end of a movie on her VCR, Mona Van Duyn laments:
'I can't bear it! I have to see how it comes out!'
For what is story if not relief from pain
of the inconclusive, from dread of the meaningless?
The poem ends with a wishful vow to follow "past vacancies of darkness" and in doing so, "to find the end of the story."
full article
Endings are a catharsis. They give meaning to what comes before, and change us from the way we were.
- Steven Winn, SF Chronicle, January 1, 2005
When I was a junior in high school, our English teacher showed the class a film called "The World, the Flesh and the Devil." Or rather, I should say, he showed us most of it. Fifteen minutes before the credits, Mr. LeFever turned off the projector and told us to get out our binders. The assignment was to write an ending for the film. The story, set in New York City after a devastating nuclear war, turned on three survivors. After the woman (Inger Stevens) chose a black man (Harry Belafonte) over his white rival (Mel Ferrer), presumably to replenish the species, a deadly manhunt through the vacant streets of Manhattan ensued. At the peak of suspense, the screen at Springfield High went blank. If students can riot and still remain in their seats, that's about what happened.
As it turns out, the ending of "World," a 1959 Cold War artifact, is something of a letdown (the three stars wind up strolling off into the Atomic Age sunset together). But none of us knew that at the time. And in that pre- video store era, we weren't about to find out. In an inspired twist to his stunt, Mr. LeFever refused to show us the last 15 minutes of the film, even after our assignments had been handed in. He rewound the last reel and put it back in its canister for return. Whatever else this high school exercise was meant to do, it drove home some important truths about endings that all of us, even children, know intuitively. Endings, by their nature, are exquisitely torturous. We're all psychologically primed to crave resolving climaxes, and simultaneously inclined to doubt, mistrust, reject and even fear them.
Catharsis -- in drama or a therapist's office -- is both. Aristotle called it recognition and reversal. Theater audiences, readers, music lovers and filmgoers feel it in their bones, their flesh, their communal DNA. Endings define and disappoint, gratify and frustrate. They confer meaning and confirm the structure of what's come before -- in a movie, a sonata, a work of fiction. But they also kill off pleasure, snap us out of the dream and clamp down order on experience that we, as citizens of the modern world, believe to be open-ended, ambiguous and unresolved. It's a delicious paradox. Fairy tales, adventure films, mystery stories and Mozart symphonies all gain velocity by pointing us at one ending, toying with our biology of anticipation and racing off toward some new false conclusion and then another and another before finishing themselves off. "We enjoy, it seems, teasing our tensions," writes Barbara Herrnstein Smith in "Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End," "deferring the immediate fulfillment of our appetites and expectations."
The box office hit "National Treasure" is a little more than a series of false cadences, one door in the plot opening into another and another until we finally reach the treasure room. We see it all coming and recognize how we're being handled. But we're also hardwired for this stuff, and every Hollywood director knows it. Patently artificial as they may be, fictional endings behave in satisfying ways that events in real life often stubbornly refuse to. Deaths, divorces and assorted other partings happen -- suddenly (or sometimes far too late), messily, incoherently. Even innocently arithmetic endings often remain opaque. The last day of the year comes whether we're ready to make sense of it or not. We bully ourselves into musing retrospection and halfhearted resolutions, inventing a story to fit the end.
A great artistic ending, by contrast, is both startling and inevitable, mysteriously certain. It clarifies even as it complicates, crystallizes and expands. Think of the snow that falls across Dublin in James Joyce's short story "The Dead," or the ravishing last scene of "Der Rosenkavalier." Think of Rosebud in "Citizen Kane" or "Ode to Joy," that exultant crown of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. "The finale of 'Tristan,' " says Robert Cole, director of Cal Performances, without a pause. "It's the ultimate ending." His explanation touches on the opera's subject matter, on its synthesis of Wagner's score and settles, finally, on the ineffably glorious orchestration of the final chord.
For David Thomson, author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, the last image of John Wayne in "The Searchers" comes to mind. The shot of Wayne silhouetted in the doorway, deciding whether he might stay or must move on, telescopes the film's action to a single moment. "Extraordinary," says Thomson, his voice hushed. "When he walks away and that door closes, we know this man is an endless wanderer, doomed to never live indoors."
"The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read," wrote John Updike in his introduction to "The Best American Short Stories 1984." "It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph."
...
We all have our well-stocked private libraries of treasured endings, and plenty of exasperating ones as well. Who hasn't felt that total-body shiver as the lights fade on a play's beautifully made last scene or when a piano concerto races toward its triumphant exclamation point? And who hasn't fumed, like a spurned lover, over some book or film that defied our yearnings? I hated the ending: It may be the single thing that gets said more than anything else about works of art.
...
Be that as it may, artists have probably always struggled with endings, adding codas, epilogues and postscripts or dodging the matter altogether by setting up sequels. When Shakespeare harshly punishes Malvolio at the end of "Twelfth Night" or divides the couples by means of an offstage death in the last act of "Love's Labour's Lost," he sends a complicating cloud into otherwise sunny skies. Beethoven agonized mightily over his endings, rewriting many of them. He strongly considered replacing the choral "Ode to Joy" with an instrumental last moment of the Ninth Symphony. By leaving it in place, says McGegan, symphonists who followed had a formidable model of endings to match. "It screwed up Brahms terribly. Mahler's solution was to write great big slow movements or great big choral movements."
Endings took on a special cast in the 20th century, when world wars and the specter of nuclear holocaust gave finality a darker shade. Every ending, however distant, held the seeds of ultimate destruction. Beckett spun out an infinite, unresolved slow fade in "Waiting for Godot." Charles Ives composed his "Unanswered Question." Joyce spooled the last line of "Finnegans Wake" to the first, as if to evade the essential anxiety of beginnings and ends. Endings became provisional, fraught and charged with deeper meanings. Frank Kermode, in his 1965 book "The Sense of an Ending," sees the conclusions of "Othello," "Macbeth" and "King Lear" as a kind of obligatory punctuation, "human periods in an eternal world." In her study "Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels," Joyce Rowe calls the ending of a good story "a mixed blessing." Even as it completes a narrative arc, "an ending, like its real life counterpart, also entails a sense of loss, of emptiness -- a little death, as it were."
...
Thomson believes that film endings are inherently wrenching. "One of the reasons I think movies are often reluctant to end," he says, "is that we're so reluctant for them to end. It's not just the story, but the complete sensory immersion of the form that's so compelling and absorbing. Because the audience is encouraged to participate on the level of fantasy rather than on an intellectual level, there's always this sense that the story might linger on. It's no wonder sequels are so prevalent."
...
In a lovely poem about failing to record the end of a movie on her VCR, Mona Van Duyn laments:
'I can't bear it! I have to see how it comes out!'
For what is story if not relief from pain
of the inconclusive, from dread of the meaningless?
The poem ends with a wishful vow to follow "past vacancies of darkness" and in doing so, "to find the end of the story."
full article
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