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A Short Discourse on Fake Happy Endings…

Douglas Sirk is the great German fim émigre, who made some of the most successful Hollywood melodramas of the 50s. This included Imitation of Life which remained the top grossing film for Universal Studios until 1970’s Airport. Some of his films, A Time to Love and A Time to Die was praised by Jean-Luc Godard in Cahiers du Cinéma. Nevertheless it came as a surprise when the publication of Sirk on Sirk(edited by Jon Halliday) and other interviews published around this time revealed Sirk to be a serious intellectual. One who thought deeply about the effects of his films, and moreover conscious of the traditions of narrative expectations and its operating ironies. This along with the championing by great 70s Punk Ironist Rainer Werner Fassbinder, led to a greater degree of awareness of what we now call “the fake happy ending”, the shallow, fake promise of restoration and order in Old Hollywood movies that is about as convincing, on reflection, as the closing speech in Shakespeare’s MacBeth. 

Sirk’s inspiration was the great Euripides, arch-parodist of the Deus-Ex-Machina. His plays, as per Aristotle in his Poetics exemplified the worst, most obvious and least convincing endings in tragedy. Which is in fact the point of the “fake happy ending”, to be obvious, direct to a fault and unconvincing. The great mode is ironic, a tradition rich in Europe but not as much in America, at least in Sirk’s opinion. The fake happy endings of Sirk are actually fairly direct, especially the case in the bitter near-Chekhovian There’s Always Tomorrow, with its nasty, ringing, final lines sounding like it was uttered by the most bullying of all heavenly cherubs. In fact, the only way one could truly appreciate Sirk’s films emotionally, that is relate to the characters, is to engage with its ironies which are dramatic and painful.

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There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) – A toy-maker(Fred MacMurray) has the same freedom as his creations.

Even the most touching of happy endings, the most convincing shall we say, contain within itself a sense of futility. We see this in Vincente Minnelli’s wonderful Meet Me in St. Louis. Meet Me in St. Louis is a musical with a deftly paced vignette style narrative where the main “plot” of the family moving to New York doesn’t come in until a hour into the film. The main focus of the film is the coming of age of the daughters, with the eldest (Judy Garland) finding love with the boy next door and the youngest Tootie (the unforgettable Margaret O’Brien) in thrall to the heightened world of discovery that exemplifies childhood and most visible in the film’s Halloween sequence. Her imagination is so great that the powerful moment where she dramatically destroys the snowmen registers as especially heartbreaking, suggesting a child killing her childhood. At the end of the film, the father decides not to go to New York and stay in St. Louis and the girls attend the famous World’s Fair, but the film’s focus on growing up, on attacking childhood suggests only a momentary delay of the deeper problem. On the film’s DVD introduction, Liza Minnelli, daughter of director Vincente and actress Judy Garland notes that her parents met during the making of this film and at the end she suggests, with a tone of wistfulness, that the reason why the film is so successful is that “we would all like to have a family like that.”

A more notable unhappy happy ending is another film by Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz. The revelation that Oz was a dreamland and dreary, drab Kansas the reality which Dorothy accepts for all time and which she seemingly prefers to vibrant, magical Oz. Salman Rushdie in his BFI Monograph fulminated against this ending as a conservative Hollywood cop-out where happy, multi-cultural Oz was somehow considered inferior to drab, rural Kansas. In fact, one rumour about the film is that many audiences remember seeing a version of the film where the final shot of the film shows Dorothy in sepia-brown walking, back to audiences, with ruby red slippers. I am not entirely keen to dismiss this rumour because when I first saw The Wizard of Oz on TV as a small child, I remember distinctly seeing the film ending like this . The second viewing on TV, years later I might add, showed otherwise but my memory and powers of recollection are fairly good, nigh-eidetic, in fact.

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The Departed (2006) – “The rat symbolizes obviousness…” truer words were never spoken.

The wistful longing and false promise of Happy Endings is the subject of a grand spectacular music number in Martin Scorsese’s New York New York (1977), which Robert DeNiro’s character jokingly dismisses as “sappy endings”. He himself chases his own version, which he calls, “Major Chords”(the name of his cool night-club at the end of the film), mocked in turn by Liza Minnelli, who dedicates the title song song to her friend who’s “a great believer in major chords”, right before her performance. Famously, according to myth or legend, George Lucas told Scorsese that the film would be a success if it had a happy ending and then the film opened in the same week as Star Wars. Scorsese wouldn’t supply a sarcastic finish in the high-Sirk tradition until the last scene of The Departed, where a belated God in Track Pants, and the most perfectly placed rat in film history finishes a film whose main point is the absence of any driving moral force to barter justice. This finale thereby suggests a world so corrupt that the film itself cannot escape what it decries. A far cry from the genuinely tragic Casino and the mock-heroic Goodfellas which remain triumphs free of compromise.

So, the important question of happy endings is whether the film-maker is able to offer sufficient resistance or critique and place it into bold relief so as to(in the case of Sirk and Fassbinder) enable the audience to neither demand or ask for such hollow denouements in the first place.

Sirk has the final word: “In tragedy the life always ends. By being dead, the hero is at the same time rescued from life’s troubles. In melodrama, he lives on — in an unhappy happy end.”