My wife loves watching movies.  She especially loves romantic comedies, but she likes anything about love and romance.  Happy endings are particularly important in her enjoyment of these movies and she really dislikes sad endings.  Sometimes she will even avoid watching a movie if she knows in advance that the ending isn’t a happy one.  Sad endings disturb her surprisingly deeply, and I’m not certain that she has ever seen a sad ending that she thought was the best ending for a movie; she virtually always wants a movie to end happily, consistently expressing disappointment at sad endings.

My wife explains her preference this way; there is already too much “bad” in the world.  When asked why she so strongly prefers happy endings, she turns the question back on me asking, “Why would I want to watch a movie for two hours and end up feeling sad, or bad?”  Her question seems reasonable enough to me, and I certainly don’t argue with its reasoning. 

Well, while my wife loves watching movies, I’m less a fan, and my reaction to movie endings is very different compared to my wife’s.  While I can certainly enjoy happy endings, often do, I sometimes find myself a little uncomfortable with happy endings.  Sometimes happy endings leave me feeling a little vacuous, a bit overly soothed, as if the production of the happy ending was intended to numb me to reality, or perhaps dissuade me from any real thought.  Of course, becoming numb to reality is sometimes the very reason I watch a movie in the first place, so happy endings certainly have their purpose.  But, for me, anything artful serves more than merely to soothe me.  I like art that inspires me to thoughtfulness. When I address my wife’s reasoning for preferring happy endings, the only response I usually have is that sad endings sometimes indicate to me that I am not alone in seeing the sadness that I see, and somehow that knowledge brings a certain sort of melancholy comfort.

Sad endings are often far more thought-provoking.  I find this to be true in all aspects of life; it is, more often than not, the sadness in life that compels me, the sadness that inspires my thinking, my creativity in writing, whether blog posts or songwriting.  I think part of the explanation for this is that a preference for happiness seems more easily understandable, and actions and events that lead to happiness are more commonly accepted and associated with reasonable human preferences; it feels good, as my wife so aptly points out.  And it not only feels good to experience happiness, but it feels good to cause happiness in others.

The same is not true for sadness; neither feeling it nor causing it feels good, so it is more of a mystery when it occurs.  I think sadness is more mysterious, somehow; both, because it is so prevalent, and because there seem to be individuals who feel no noticeable remorse over causing sadness.  Another aspect of sadness for me is that I think I respond to the sadness of others more than the happiness of others.  For instance, I can see a person experiencing sadness in a movie, and I can feel sadness in myself very quickly, but when I view a happy event in a movie, it does not conjure happiness in me to the same extent.

There is one scene (not an ending) that I have difficulty watching without almost shedding a tear every time I see it, and I also have difficulty discerning whether the scene is happy or sad; I think it combines both sadness and happiness in a way that, for whatever the reason may be, just moves.  The scene occurs in the movie The Patriot.  Mel Gibson’s character’s family has been moved to a coastal settlement to protect them from the British, and he has come there to visit them, and is leaving to go back to war, and his youngest daughter who would not speak to him throughout the movie, suddenly breaks down and runs after him pleading with him not to go.  The sad happiness of that scene gets me every time; I’m not sure why.  The scene occurs about two minutes in:

Another example of sadness that still manages to leave me inspired is the ending of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Mac meets an end that is tragic in more than one way, but out of his tragic end, Chief finds the motivation to take back his life, and takes back Mac's life, as well.  It gets me every time.

One characteristic of mine that probably plays a role in my movie-ending preferences is the fact that I tend away from formulaic approaches to things like movies, stories, songs, and probably almost anything artistic.  It seems to me that most of the movies that end happily have a fairly formulaic progression, especially romantic movies, even if this may not be an entirely accurate assessment.  I find, though, that when I am watching them they are quite predictable in the main aspects of the stories, although some of the details might vary, in the same way that so much of the newer pop music is almost entirely formulaic in composition, with only some variance in details like lyrics and studio production.

Speaking of music, this idea plays out, also, in the apparent differences in the music my wife and I gravitate towards.  She likes a lot of the highly commercialized, song-oriented musical acts, while I tend more towards the instrumental acts that push the limits of musicianship.  There are, of course, a lot of areas where her and my ears overlap, allowing us to find a lot of common ground, but there are undeniably dominant differences in much of what we both most prefer for our listening pleasure.

So the point there is that I tend toward less conventional formats, and I think that sad endings, hanging endings, create greater opportunities for unconventional story lines, with their endings leaving more room for creative thought.  My wife?  Er ..., not so much.

Neither my wife nor I are especially fond of endings that don’t resolve, endings that leave you hanging.  However, as one might expect from what I’ve said so far, unresolved endings have a greater negative impact on my wife than they do on me.  Not knowing with certainty what happens next seems to disturb my wife more than me; for me, not knowing allows for more possibilities of endings, and considering different possibilities is not necessarily a sad or bad thing.  But there are times when being left hanging feels like I’ve been cheated.

What about horror films?  They’re notorious for hanging endings, but my wife really likes a lot of them.  Interestingly, she likes vampire movies and usually she finds herself cheering on the vampires, one recent example being the movie Twilight.  She was very disappointed in how the movie left us not knowing what happened next, which I considered might be a set up for a sequel.  Unfortunately, I found the entire movie a disappointment, a waste of viewing time, and so the thought of a sequel is not necessarily a good thing to my mind, while my wife hopes there will be a sequel.

Whatever it is that determines our preferences in movie-endings, it is seemingly not related to an individual’s intelligence.  Intelligence might play a role in preference, but what that role might be, exactly, I can’t even guess.  I just know that people of seemingly obvious differences in intelligence often agree on what makes a good ending. 

So …, what is it that determines our preferences?

Is it perhaps a form of self-validation, a sharing of perspective, which we seek through the movie-endings we prefer?  Is it purely escapism?  Is it a desire for deeper human understanding?  Is it dependent on mood-of-the-moment?  What else might determine our movie-ending preferences, and what does it reveal about us?