No, It's About the Destination Too
This is the third on our series of guest articles. This one is by Nick Wance, and also happens to be our first rebuttal! Check out Chris Clark's "It's About the Journey, Not the Destination" if you haven't yet.
Chris Clark is incredibly, absolutely, entirely incorrect. The old saying, “it’s about the journey, not the destination” is and always has been a simple way to attempt to motivate people to appreciate small everyday events rather than focusing on the future. It is what we would call “grounding” oneself. While I am very much in agreement that this outlook is appropriate in our lives, when it comes to movies, this could not be a more incorrect way to think about how we view them.
Before speaking to Mr. Clark’s points, I will explain the personal reason as to why I place such high value upon the movie ending. In order to do this, we must first explain what exactly I am speaking about when I say “good ending.”
What makes an ending “good?” Is it being unpredictable? Sometimes. Sometimes not. Just because something is unpredictable does not make it good. If I ended this blog post in the middle of a sentence, that would be unpredictable, but it would not be good. A movie that I will bring up multiple times during this post is one that I do not think
could have been predicted, and had, in my opinion, a god awful, horrendous excuse for an ending. This movie is Now You See Me (2013). The movie leads the viewer on a fun, charismatic adventure, assuming that all the “magic” that is being done, is actually sleight of hand and elaborate tricks. I can, and did, suspend disbelief throughout the movie, even when the tricks were so extreme as to be unbelievable. Because it’s a movie and that’s what you have to do.
But in the end, it was Mark Ruffalo’s character who was behind the entire scheme, and they all disappear on a magic carousel as it spins wildly out of control in the middle of Central Park. This is a dumb ending. This is an ending that attempts to continue to be
mysterious, but in a movie which utilizes the transparency of what happens as a plot point, I can say that this ending does not bode well with me as a viewer.
Does a movie have to have a complete ending, full wrap up, in order to be good? No. HELL NO. The non-ending is in fact an ending. Inception, Shutter Island, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, American Psycho, and The Shining are all classic examples of this. And because of the non-endings, discussion is a must, making them even better. The non-ending is also a horror movie must, which I will avoid completely in this post because horror movies fall into a very specific category with very specific rules (they were laid out in the movie Scream if you would like to know them). But some examples of bad non-endings are: the entire Matrix series, The Source Code, Mulholland Drive, and Interstellar. Feel free to argue with me about any of those.
A good ending is a feeling. It’s the feeling we get when we leave the theater elated, speechless, and sometimes even angry. Where does this story lead you, and does it make sense? Do the final five minutes of this movie wrap up the first one hundred and fifteen in a way, the only way, that seems possible? A bad ending feels lazy, it feels like a waste of time, it feels like the writers didn’t care, like the characters didn’t matter, like the story was pointless, and if the story is pointless then the journey feels pointless too.
Mr. Clark argues that humans are so enamored with the ending because of recency bias and our nociceptive modulatory system. Yes, the ending is the most recent part of a movie, which in turn, if it is a bad one, may spoil the entire movie for the viewer, but that’s because a bad ending feels lazy, it feels like the writers didn’t care, like the characters didn’t matter. It feels like a waste of time. And time is everything. Time is the most important thing to all of us, whether we realize it or not.
If we are speaking about a movie in terms of cost vs. benefit, Mr. Clark argues that having most of a movie be very good is worth it even if the ending is not, that the journey the movie takes you on is more important than the destination. But as I mentioned above, time is critical. Even during this quarantine, where it would seem as though we all have an abundance of time, it is still time that we all treasure, as
it is shown on the news, social media, and everywhere that we look that in the end our time is limited.
Watching a two hour movie only for the disappointment of the ending creates a feeling of wasted time, and whether we realize it or not the time off our final clock is crucial. Mr. Clark provides the example of having a five course meal, with dessert being bad. If the rest of the meal is delicious, then dessert shouldn’t spoil the entire thing. I would argue that a bad ending is like watching a chef prepare your whole meal, the food looking increasingly delicious each step of the way, only for you to finally dive in and it taste like a shoe found in the dumpster. The end matters.
(On the “nociceptive modulatory system” that Mr. Clark mentioned, I found nothing relating to his points and could only find articles discussing how this system is integral to our pain management and how we behave in regard to pain.)