Of Happy Endings

A friend once told me that groups of moviegoers in India had once burned down cinemas across the country because they were greatly dissatisfied by an unhappy ending of a certain Hindi film. In that film, the hero died at the end - and perhaps more importantly, he did not come back alive. However shocking what the audience did might seem to us, we must at least understand how those people must have felt - as we often do - after watching films with crappy endings.

So what makes a good ending? Obviously it is when evil perish and the good triumph! And who doesn't get annoyed if it is unclear what happens at the end? (e.g Inception). And so we expect movies to have clear and happy endings.

Unfortunately, as what we might have already realised, this does't always happen in real life. For every news event, there's always another event that follows; and for every story we tell our friends about what happened to us, there's always something that has happened right after. And if we really scrutinise the real endings to our stories, we would realise that these can be both unclear and quite often bad, or depressing.

So in real life there are not always happy endings - or are there? If we look at the natural history of an organism, we can say that its life is nothing but an inevitable journey towards death. On the other hand, we can also say that its story does not end with its death, but continues with its posterity (i.e descendants). Seen in this light, we might say that even at the time of its death, this creature has indeed reached a happy ending.

I just saw The Grey, the survival film with Liam Neeson playing a wolf hunter getting stranded by a plane crash with a few other people in a harsh arctic environment - the hunter then became the hunted. Not unlike The Hunger Games, this survival action film has some philosophical significance to it. But unlike the first Hunger Game film, the audience could not really tell whether the hero, after the death of all the other 'survivors', would himself survive at the end (although clearly he would die not long after). The Grey ended abruptly, obscurely, and depressingly - no one survived. But I think that's the whole point: in the end, everyone dies!

* Maybe having recently finished reading a book written by Schopenhauer, that pessimist philosopher, has got something to do with the tone of this post. But cheer up, it's not the end yet.