This final rebroadcast for the year stitches together blog posts from 2005, 2008, and 2011 to where we leave the audience when the credits roll.
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner makes an interesting point about endings:
[Stories] can end in only one of two ways: in resolution, when no further event can take place (the murderer has been caught and hanged, the diamond has been found and restored to its owner, the elusive lady has been capture and married), or in logical exhaustion, our recognition that we’ve reached the stage of infinite repetition; more events might follow, perhaps from now till Kingdom Come, but they will all express the same thing–for example, the character’s entrapment in empty ritual or some consistently wrong response to the pressures of his environment.
Resolution is of course the classical and usually more satisfying conclusion; logical exhaustion satisfies us intellectually but often not emotionally, since it’s more pleasing to see things definitely achieved or thwarted than to be shown why they can never be either achieved or thwarted.
Observed: very few Hollywood movies take the logical exhaustion route, but you find it all the time in indies and foreign films.
What’s the commercial potential of movies without happy endings? I’m tired of every movie having to end in a good way, even if that’s a main character surviving a slasher flick. Does a movie automatically fail if it ends with the world blowing up? Forrest Gump wouldn’t quite be the same movie if Forrest suddenly went mad and killed everyone, but surely not every single movie has to end on a good note.
Movies can certainly end with everyone dead,1 and it’s not at all uncommon to kill off key protagonists (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Titanic). Even a comedy can end on mixed notes — The Graduate being a good example. But your basic assumption is correct: the commercial potential of most movies is going to be stronger if it ends happily, simply because people will walk out of the theater happy. So you need to decide how important a happy ending is to your story, knowing the extra challenges you face with a downbeat ending.
I’d also challenge you to remember that a happy ending doesn’t necessarily mean everyone skipping off into the sunset. From The Godfather to Aliens, many great movies end on a note of uncertainty. The immediate threat may have passed, but the road ahead is dangerous.
I know you were brought in late on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and from what I gather, weren’t responsible for much of the story, but I’m curious about your thoughts on one particular story element.
Is the ending a happy one for Victor?
The way it plays, it seems as though it is intended to be a happy ending for him when he winds up with Victoria, but from the audience’s perspective, I’m not sure we see evidence that he would be happier with Victoria than he’d be with the Corpse Bride. The inclusion of the scene where Victor connects with the Corpse Bride while playing piano with her is of course necessary to propagate the plot, but seems to indicate that he’d be just as content living among the dead as he would be with Victoria.
— Rob
Los Angeles
You point out one of the real challenges with Corpse Bride. Generally in a fairy tale like this, you’d be really clear about which woman the hero is “supposed to” be married to at the end.
At the start of the movie, it seems pretty straightforward: Victor meets Victoria, and both of them are surprised how much they like each other. Corpse Bride seems like a monster when she first appears, but is quickly revealed to be funny and sweet. She’s rotting, but not rotten.
As we worked on the story, Corpse Bride kept becoming more and more likable, to the point where we started to wonder exactly the question you ask, “Shouldn’t, maybe, Victor end up with Corpse Bride?”
The solution wasn’t to diminish Corpse Bride, but rather to beef up Victoria. Over the drafts, we made sure to give her more initiative (such as escaping the mansion to plead for the Pastor’s help) and make her situation more dire (the wedding to Barkis was a surprisingly late addition).
Through it all, we never wanted to back away from what was unusual about the story: it’s a love triangle in a kid’s film, and you’re sort of rooting for all three characters.
Corpse Bride’s decision to stop Victor from drinking the Wine of Ages (added in the last draft) is less about saving his life (after all, death isn’t so bad) and more about seeing herself in Victoria. It goes back to want-versus-need. Corpse Bride wants to be married, but what she needs is to free herself from her self-imposed curse. While we’re deliberately unclear about the exact cosmology of the afterlife, the Land of the Dead seems to be a kind of goofy Purgatory. Her transformation at the end would seem to be the next step in the process of life.
But is it a little wistful? Yeah.
And I wonder if that lack of clearly happy ending limited the upside to the film — which I have to say, performed much better than any movie called “Corpse Bride” could be expected.
But I wouldn’t change it. To me, it’s nice to be able to show kids a movie where everything resolves well but not perfectly. I think it’s more honest to show that you can be happy and sad at the same time.
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Consider The Blair Witch Project, or Cloverfield. If either of these are spoilers, you’re officially behind on popular culture.