Cinema Ruined My Life: or, How I learned to keep worrying about the ending

Cinema has ruined my life. Ok, maybe a shade of hyperbole there, but if you'll hear me out I'll try to explain. Cinema has not entirely ruined my life, but it has certainly affected my enjoyment of it and helped shape my somewhat warped perception reality. I love films, and I've spent much of my life watching them instead of doing something remotely useful. It's got to the point where I base entire conversations around stuff I've noticed in films that references stuff I've noticed in other films, and for this I apologise to anyone I regularly talk to. Watching a film is one of the most enjoyable things I ever do; I enjoy it more than I do most conversations, most interactions, and normally feel more enriched by the experience. And herein lies the problem and my arrested development.

Endings. Movies have them, life is ongoing. This has created a schism in me between expectation and reality and it's all come down to endings; after the ending, a character doesn't have to do anything else and whatever was a problem is now no longer so. In life, you still have to get the bus home and pay the gas bill. Imagine for a second that you've resolved an issue in your life that meant you could start a new relationship, or save an existing one. You celebrate by going out on a date. A final compromise is made, tensions are resolved, epiphanies had by all, and to finish you kiss in the rain or look longingly at each other across a table. It might also help to imagine that you're Emma Stone or Ryan Gosling. In a film, the camera pulls away and leaves you to it, credits roll. In reality, you're soaking wet in the rain and end up with a cold, your starter ends up stuck in your teeth, and when you inevitably jump into bed later on, you inevitably don't look like Emma Stone or Ryan Gosling. Endings are bullshit and life pales by comparison because the evening burns out rather than fades away.

Take the ending of Die Hard as an example. John McClaine, reunited with his wife, drives away in a beaten up limo. It's a perfect, if a little tongue-in-cheek, Hollywood ending. In reality, he's been beaten up, shot and his feet have been cut to shreds. There's no way that evening isn't ending in a long queue at A&E, and he's definitely not getting laid. If you extrapolate that narrative, as you would in real life, endings are bullshit.

The happiest endings often leave the biggest black holes if you look beyond them. Elliot from E.T. is surely to be subjected to a barrage of tests and interrogations from the same government agents who were apparently willing to shoot him just ten minutes from the end. It's A Wonderful Life's ending, while not condemning to George Bailey to “prison and scandal” still leaves him condemned to a life in Bedford Falls, never daring to leave lest everything falls apart in his absence.

Even films without particularly happy endings are prone to leaving frustrating voids if you care to look beyond the credits. In Apocalypse Now, does Capt. Willard stand any chance at all of making it back down the river in that fucked up boat alive? And while the unknown advice from Bill Murray is rather the point of Lost In Translation's ending, the natural assumption is that they both go back to their miserable lives. One happy ending that I do like is that of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia; a cat's cradle of a film about interconnected lives which ends with a slow zoom culminating in a very well earned smile from Melora Walters' downtrodden character. It leaves you believing the next episode of her life will be good.

I like films where the ending either forces you to think about what happens afterwards, be this directly (despite it kind of cheating, I'm a fan of Inception's ending as it forces you to choose between optimism and pessimism), or indirectly.

The ending of John Carpenter's peerless The Thing is brilliant because it has primed you with the knowledge that for there to be any sort of victory, both remaining characters have to die. A victory for humanity, but not so much for Kurt Russell and Keith David, either of whom could be an alien interloper.

The Coen Brothers' brilliant Cormac McCarthy adaptation, No Country For Old Men ends with Tommy Lee Jones' sole moral character reminiscing, having withdrawn from a world which is too brutal and immoral for him to cope with. While it's sad to think that a good man couldn't defeat the evil in his world, at least we know that he's safely away from it. I'm also a fan of Burn After Reading's ending, which basically tells you that nothing you've just seen really mattered and the joke's on you for trying to work it out.

David Fincher is great at leaving you to deal with with weight of the climaxes of his films. Seven, like No Country leaves the moral veteran character, and therefore us, to ponder and cope with John Doe's complete act. We aren't supposed to think that the good guys have won and everything is ok, we are supposed to still feel the gut punch as we leave the cinema. Fight Club, a modern equivalent of The Graduate IMHO (more on this later), leaves the distinctly unromantic pairing of 'Jack'/Tyler Durden and Marla Singer watching the world burn, pondering what the hell to do next. Wouldn't you do the same? The ending to Gone Girl leaves more planted in the viewer's mind than it shows on screen: Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike's reunited couple are held together by the web of lies spun throughout the entire film, the only thing that keeps them as man and wife is their fear of each other, and as it ends you're meant to wonder about your own relationship and what lies beneath its surface. The ending plants that seed.

Stanley Kubrick's pitch black comedy Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb (the film after which this article is named) features what I consider to be one of the best, and darkest, endings ever to feature in a comedy (originally to feature a custard pie fight). Imagine if you will, the events that would follow the end of that film: America nukes Russia because of an unhinged General, Russia's 'Doomsday Machine' retaliation destroys the rest of the world. We are invited to laugh at the man riding the bomb like rodeo bull, and the President and his advisers bickering about how to survive the holocaust and repopulate the world. Very dark satire of the highest order and one of my favourite endings, although I do wonder that that says about me...

My favourite ending, however, and one which silently addresses the notion of 'what do we do after the ending?', comes from my favourite film. The Graduate addressed contemporary countercultural issues but also expressed the kind of detachment and ennui experienced by many people in the age bracket of Dustin Hoffman's titular ex-student, Ben. You've spent years building your life towards something and not knowing what that something is can drive you in the opposite direction. The youthful impulse is to rebel against the expectation and do something destructive. In Ben's case, this means to screw the legendary Mrs. Robinson, alcoholic wife of his father's business partner. Much like Fight Club expressed the anxiety felt by many purposeless 30-something men and the impulse against a life of inertia, the impulse to destroy overtakes the one to create. After Ben 'rescues' Mrs Robinson's daughter from her ill-conceived wedding, they escape at the back of a bus full of nuns. As the smiles fade from their faces, their laughter gives way to the realisation of what they've just done. The look on their faces says more than dialogue ever could. The camera pulls back, leaving them to ponder the question that's written all over them: what the hell do we do now?

I think I've had that look on my face for most of my life.