Stories Need Endings

_{Gravity Falls S2, E21 “Weirdmageddon 4: Somewhere in the Woods”}

Over the last year, one of the perennial topics of Discourse in entertainment news has been the faltering fortunes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and whether or not we’re entering “superhero fatigue”. For a last decade-and-half, the MCU has been one of the foundation stones of the franchise-based entertainment model that seems to have triumphed everywhere, much to the lament of many auteurs. Since 2008’s Iron Man, it has grossed an estimated $32.2 billion, and executives at Disney and Marvel Studios have no intention of stopping anytime soon. Attempts to duplicate this runaway success have proliferated; with seemingly every studio trying to find its own Cinematic Universe in its back catalogue of intellectual property. We’ve seen a new Harry Potter franchise (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), two new major Lord of the Rings series (The Hobbit Trilogy and The Rings of Power), a massive flood of Star Wars content, and whatever the hell is going on with DC these days.

But since 2019’s blockbuster hit Avengers: Endgame, the MCU seems to have been struggling to find its footing. Are audiences finally weary of endless CGI spectaculars, featuring familiar characters? Well, I don’t know about that. But I do know something else, and I think it explains the ennui that many feel about the contemporary entertainment landscape.

If stories are going to work, they need to end.

I think it’s worth establishing right off the bat than I am a total philistine when it comes to arts and culture and entertainment. I really like genre trash! I trace most of my media tastes to the week in elementary school when my dad sat down and showed me Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy. I’ve really enjoyed most of the MCU! This isn’t an argument about artistic merits or the value of Great Art, so much as it is an attempt to define and clarify something that I think is very important about the nature of narrative, something that has gotten lost recently. And to do that, I first want to talk about the 2012-2016 Disney animated show Gravity Falls.

I’ve written about Gravity Falls before, because it’s very good. The show follows the adventures of twin siblings, Dipper and Mabel Pines, who spend summer vacation with their great-uncle and uncover the mysteries of the small Oregon town he calls home. It’s the kind of premise that could theoretically lend itself to endless, episodic adventures, but one of the things that makes it so memorable is that there’s not very much of it, only two seasons, twenty-one episodes. That’s a little bit frustrating; it’s a great show, and I’d love to see more of it! But so much of Gravity Falls’ poignancy and emotion comes from the fact that the entire show is intensely aware of the passage of time. Summer vacation only lasts so long. Eventually you go home to California. You grow up, you go to high school, you become a different person. Everything changes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s inescapable, and both you, the viewer, and the characters are always aware that they’re not going to be there forever. That awareness is such an important part of growing up, and it makes everything feel so much more important. Whether the stakes are untangling the mystery of the doomsday device in your basement before it destroys the world, or trying to have your first kiss before summer’s end, you’re always aware that in all too short a time, you’ll be getting back on that bus home.

It’s what makes the screenshot at the start of this post resonate so much with me; it’s a such a perfect snapshot of the aching, bittersweet feeling that hits when you come to the end of an adventure–college, summer camp, vacation, etc–and have to go home to real life once again.

Now obviously, not everything is Gravity Falls, and not every show or movie needs to have the same themes or grapple with the same motifs. But I do think we lose a lot with this attitude of endless franchises and perpetual motion machines of intellectual property reboots.

_wheeeee

I really liked Endgame, a lot more than I honestly expected to. I’ve always been a pretty casual MCU fan, but Endgame pulled a lot of fanboy levers deep in my brain that I hadn’t known were there. It got me deeply invested in the story and characters, but I haven’t seen any Marvel movies since. Because the story’s over. The characters I loved had their arcs, they lived or died or moved on or found catharsis, the world was lost and saved, and the narrative wrapped up. I don’t feel the need to see anything more! One of the things that made Endgame so thrilling was the sense of stakes, the feeling that decades of storytelling was reaching a climax, that what happened now was going to determine everything. The idea of just resurrecting the original cast for a new movie is…….profoundly exhausting.

As I said earlier, I first saw Star Wars when I was ten years old, and it made an indelible impression on my personality. I was, for many years, a huge fan of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe. But despite mostly enjoying it, I lost interest in the Disney Sequel Trilogy after The Force Awakens, when I realized that it was just going to roll back the last few decades and pretend Return of the Jedi never happened.

The Original Trilogy is a complete narrative arc. A simple one, but a deeply satisfying one nevertheless, about going on a Hero’s Journey and redeeming your soul from evil and triumphing over adversity against overwhelming odds. Deciding that a few decades later the Emperor’s back alive and Anakin Skywalker’s grandson is also a Sith Lord and the New Republic got blown up offscreen……..well, it kind of makes all that pointless, doesn’t it?

My favorite new Star Wars media has been the first season of The Mandalorian and Andor, both of which tell new stories instead of just retreading old ground. And that was also true of the best of the old Expanded Universe, too. The Thrawn Trilogy gave us new villain, one unlike any we’d seen in the original movies, who challenged our heroes in totally different ways than Darth Vader or Palpatine had. The Corellian Trilogy and the X-Wing: Rogue Squadron series took us into the complex world of a Galaxy in transition, with the New Republic struggling to impose its will on a the fractured post-Imperial landscape while simultaneously building a new government. Even the much-maligned Yuuzhan Vong are an attempt to do something totally new with the franchise, though I don’t think it really works. But, of course, the Expanded Universe eventually fell prey to the same problems afflicting the Disney Star Wars canon: a story that never ends is, definitionally, a story without meaning or catharsis or victory.

This perhaps explains the otherwise baffling trend of franchises bringing back beloved characters as sad, bitter old men. If the story’s not over, then the character’s journey can’t be over. For a story to work, then a character must want something, or need something, and that means that they can’t ever be satisfied.

_{I still haven’t seen this}

Of course, this isn’t a new dilemma. Arthur Conan Doyle, tired of writing detective stories, killed off Sherlock Holmes in the 1893 story “The Final Problem“, only to resurrect him 1903 in the face of popular demand. As it happens, “The Final Problem” is one of the weaker entries in the Holmes canon, and so I find myself more sympathetic to the public here than usual. But reading the Holmes stories–and Doyle kept writing them until 1927–you can begin to see the diminishing returns. In the 1960s, J.R.R. Tolkien began writing a sequel to Lord of the Rings, tentatively entitled The New Shadow, but soon abandoned the project. Writing to a friend in 1964, he explained:

I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men, it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

The key line here is, I think, not worth doing. Tolkien’s idea of what a Gondor in the Fourth Age would look like seems reasonable and accurate, but what writing the story gain us anything? Would it shed new light on the world of Middle-earth, explore new corners of the universe, expand on the themes and morals of the first three volumes? Or would it just be a “thriller”? And more importantly, as a good thriller is nothing to sneer at, would it undermine and weaken the brilliant work that already existed?

I think it is worth emphasizing something here that is too-often forgotten: all stories are artificial. No matter how realistic or well-crafted it is, or how closely you try to adhere to real events, the act of constructing a narrative is, inherently, the process of building something arbitrary and subjective. A story–whether book, movie, or TV show–is a machine, designed to convey information, morals, themes, ideas, and emotions to the audience. And the way that you end that story is a key part of it. An ending can completely reshape how a narrative works, how it makes you feel, what emotions you carry away from the theater or library. An ending doesn’t have to be happy. It can be sad or strange, ambiguous or open-ended. Adania Shibli’s 2017 novel Minor Detail is a gut-punch of subverted expectations, setting up what seems like a classic mystery story and then refusing to deliver any of the expected catharsis. It’s a story that gives you a minute-by-minute account of a horrific crime, and leaves you just as ignorant about it at the end as you were at the beginning. But that’s the purpose, the intent. Unsurprisingly, it has caused a lot of controversy.

An ending doesn’t have to leave you happy. The important thing is that it closes the loop. When you begin a work of fiction, you are suspending your disbelief, accepting unreality as the price of entertainment and/or education. The ending returns you to the real world, and lets you evaluate what you’ve just experienced–consciously or subconsciously. An ending doesn’t even have to end, technically. One of the best series finales ever is the 1994 conclusion to Star Trek: The Next Generation “All Good Things…..” (S7, E25, E26), which pulls off the very neat trick of looping back to the series pilot, building compelling and meaningful capstones to the various character and thematic arcs the show had been playing with, but still leaving you with the sense that these adventures are going to continue onward, somewhere.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the The Next Generation movies tended to be so disappointing, especially compared with those featuring the original cast. The Original Series didn’t really go in for avant-garde ideas like “plots” or “character development”, so there was still a lot of room to explore Jim Kirk. But I’m not sure we ever needed to see Captain Picard again.

Near the end of Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel The Last Unicorn, the character Prince Lír gives a speech about the nature of heroism:

“I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them, it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons share, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on witch’s door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”

The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. Schmendrik asked, “Why not? Who says so?”

“Heroes” replied Prince Lír sadly. “Heroes know about order, about happy endings–heroes know that some things are better than others. Carpenters know grains and shingles, and straight lines.”

The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle, pgs. 179-180

There is a logic to stories, an underlying narrative architecture. It can be subverted and played with, and broken with intent, but it exists for a reason. And an essential part of that structure is ending, happy or otherwise. It doesn’t take a hero to understand that a story where all the problems are resolved offscreen halfway through–or one where the protagonists decide that the Empire isn’t that bad, honestly, and retire back to Tatooine–is going to be deeply unsatisfying. Likewise, a story where the characters keep getting trotted out for one more round, where no victory is final, and no choice ever seems to matter, where character arcs and themes and morals all get blended down into a slurry of pure content–well, you can see the problem.

Everything in life ends. That’s one of the essential facts of existence. And because stories are, at their core, a tool we use to try and explain life to ourselves, they need endings too, if they’re going to matter.

The Last Unicorn ends with another story beginning, because that too, is part of life. One book closes, another opens. The theater lights turn on, and you go home a different person because of what you’ve seen. You get on the bus back home to California, and start high school. Morning comes, and King Shahryār spares the life of Scheherazade for one more night, enraptured by her tales. The woman you love turns back into a unicorn, but you’re now both a king and a hero, a very different man than the one you used to be. And the USS Enterprise sails off into the night, boldly going where no one–not even the audience–can go with them. But for these new stories to begin, you have to be willing to let go of the old ones. You have to be willing to go forward. Because a story without an ending isn’t a story.

It’s just noise.

Five card stud, nothing wild…..and the sky’s the limit.