The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: In the end, is the plot not entirely tidy?

I had the good fortune to teach a section of Andrew Sarris’s Hitchcock course at Columbia. Mr. Sarris did more than anyone to cement Hitchcock’s critical reputation in this country, and there was no better education than watching the films with him, hearing his lectures, and then facilitating a discussion with my half of the class the next day. My favorite student questions were those I never thought to ask. When we were discussing Vertigo followed by North by Northwest, I was asked an odd but interesting question. Allow me to paraphrase the student: 

• Everybody pretty much agrees that North by Northwest is a perfectly constructed film. It fits together better than any other Hitchcock movie. And, yet, you say Vertigo is considered to be “greater” by almost every critic. How can Vertigo, which is really messy, be better than North by Northwest, which is perfect? 

It was a good question. Vertigo has a very odd structure. It slows down to a crawl in places. It leaves plot threads dangling and forgets to pick them back up. The plot is untidy and so are the character arcs. We’re left wondering at the end about everybody’s motivation. We can guess, but we can’t be sure. North by Northwest, on the other hand, builds and builds and then pays off seamlessly. We understand every beat of Cary Grant’s journey, strategically and emotionally. It’s an immensely satisfying movie to watch.

But depth is found in holes. A few unanswered questions and unresolved emotions are necessary to really have a profound effect on a viewer. Right at the beginning of Vertigo, we abruptly cut from Jimmy Stewart, dangling from a building in terror, with no rescue in sight to several months later, as he talks with a friend about leaving the police force. We can figure out what happened in between, but because we never see the rescue, we’re left with the unresolved disturbance of his emotional reaction.

Similarly, I mentioned earlier that Madeleine’s disappearance from the hotel room is never explained. Again, we can hazard guesses, but the refusal to tidy up this loose end gnaws at us on a subconscious level.

These aren’t really plot holes; they’re just holes, gaps in the story, and that’s what makes Vertigo a greater film than North by Northwest. Great art shouldn’t be entirely satisfying. It has to disquiet us a little—and have a few holes for us to get stuck in. 

The Ending Doesn’t Determine the Meaning in Whiplash

The Ending Doesn’t Determine the Meaning: One problem with these sorts of movies is that it’s so hard to keep the ending from determining the meaning—If the pupil succeeds, it was all worth it, and if he fails, it wasn’t, right? Some great movies have tried to have it both ways (The Black Swan, The Color of Money, Downhill Racer and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) but this movie just may top them all. The climax of this movie mercilessly toys with our hard-wired need to determine if it’s “all worth it”, whipping our emotions back and forth several times. Ultimately, the only conclusion we can reach is that, no matter how this ends, both sides will lose, because “greatness” itself may be an unhealthy and inhumane concept.

Rulebook Casefile: The Value of the Untidy Gaps in Blue Velvet

The first cut of Blue Velvet apparently ran a full four hours, but producer Dino DiLaurentiis had given Lynch complete freedom with one condition: it had to be under two hours. Sure enough, the final cut is precisely one frame shorter than 120 minutes!

So how do you chop four hours down to two? Well, there are a lot of candidates for cutting here: odd cappers on scenes that feel creepy and unmotivated (“You know the chicken walk?”), long silences while Jeffrey watches things, the strange visit to Dean Stockwell’s house, generic montages of small town life, etc… The natural impulse would be to cut out everything but plot essentials until you have a lean, mean two-hour movie that “really moves”, as the critics say.

But Lynch could tell the difference between the baby and the bathwater. He left the idiosyncrasies in and chopped huge chunks of the plot out. The result is that we never make much sense of what’s really going on, but that’s fine. Lynch knows that untidiness can increase the meaning and power of a movie.

He could have said “Wait, if we don’t see them finding the second ear in the sink, then won’t it be confusing that Don is missing two ears when they find his body at the end?” And the answer is of course, “yes,” but it’s the right sort of gap: one we can fill in on our own if we care to (presumably the same people cut the second one off too, right?) but we don’t need to. It’s just another unexplained detail that make the world seem bigger than the movie, which is something the audience likes.

Of course, even with the plot sliced way down, there was still more to cut, so Lynch’s decision to cut out many of Jeffrey’s early scenes was even more daring. We originally met Jeffrey at college, watching from afar as a girl is almost date-raped, and only stopping it when someone else approaches the scene. This clearly sets up his longstanding problem. Then there were a lot more scenes when he first arrives in town that showed his frustration with his mom and aunt, including one where his mom tells him that they won’t be able to afford college for him anymore, causing him to worry that there will be no outlet for his darker impulses at home.

As I wrote about before, sometimes you have to write deleted scenes. Without those scenes on the page, the character would have seemed much less compelling until almost halfway in, but Lynch discovered he could cut them from the final movie because his amazing star, Kyle McLaughlin, managed to convey all of that deviance and frustration beneath the placid surface of his creepy/charming face. Just the curious way he looks at that ear basically tells us everything we need to know.

Straying from the Party Line: The Tidy Conclusion of Raising Arizona

Deviation: The movie ends with another long voiceover montage in order to wrap everything up.

The Problem: This should also be off-putting, denying the audience a chance to decide for ourselves what everything means in the end. And by tying off all of the loose plot threads, we have less to think about afterwards.

Does the Movie Get Away With It? Somewhat, but it’s more problematic than the opening montage. Let’s start with the montage of what happens to all of the other characters. On the one hand, it’s delightful to see Gale and Evelle go back to prison by climbing back into the mudhole they climbed out of, but surely there was no need to show brother-in-law Glen getting his eventual comeuppance after telling a Polish joke to a Polish cop?

Recently, the Coens’ endings have been anything but tidy. For the most part that’s good: We enjoy the frustration of not knowing what happened to the money in Fargo or No Country for Old Men, for instance. One could argue that in their most recent movies they’ve actually take this a little too far in the other direction (see the anticlimactic endings of A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis) but their recent instincts are still good: it’s better to trust the viewers rather than hold their hands at the end.

As for Hi’s summation of what happens to himself and Ed, the ending tries a little too hard to be satisfying by having it both ways:

• First we get the “real consequences” version, in which the couple, still childless, content themselves to send anonymous gifts to Nathan Arizona, Jr, every year, and live vicariously through his accomplishments.
• But then we get another vague ending tacked onto that one, implying that Hi and Ed somehow did get to raise kids and have a large family of their own someday.

This feels a little “80s” to me, like the Coens are being overgenerous to the their characters. This was still a point when indies were anxious to prove that they could be just as satisfying as Hollywood films. Don’t get me wrong, this is far preferable to modern indie movies, which too often equate “realism” with bleakness and misery, but I do wish that the Coens had trusted their bittersweet “root for Nathan, Jr. from afar” ending.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, the other guys’ relationships remain vague.
Alien	YES. Very much so.  We know very little at the end about what was really going on.  If only someone would do a prequel!
An Education	YES.  What was his plan? Bigamy? A phony marriage? Leave his wife? We never know.
The Babadook	YES. Very much so.  The ending is very tantalizing and bizarre.
Blazing Saddles	YES. everything is vague at the end.
Blue Velvet	YES.  huge questions are left unanswered.
The Bourne Identity	NO. It’s fairly tidy, but that’s fine.
Bridesmaids	YES. Somewhat. The romance certainly isn’t tied up with a bow.
Casablanca	YES. we don’t find out the fate of the other couple trying to get free, for example.
Chinatown	YES. Very much so.  If you go back and think about it, little of it makes sense, but the audience doesn’t care.
Donnie Brasco	YES.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Will Mookie comes back to Tina, etc.
The Farewell	YES. It’s very untidy.  We never find out if Billi finds a way to make it in NYC, etc.
The Fighter	YES. Very much so. The events are very messy.
Frozen	YES. We never find out the source of the powers, etc.
The Fugitive	Not really.  We even see that Cosmo is okay.  It’s a pretty tidy ending.
Get Out	YES. Lots of them.  Will he be able to explain any of this to the cops?  What about all the other victims?  (Of course, there are even more loose ends in Peele’s next movie.)
Groundhog Day	YES. Very much so. What caused this? We’ll never know.
How to Train Your Dragon	NO. Hmm… It’s pretty tidy.
In a Lonely Place	YES. we never find out how and why the murder happened.
Iron Man	YES. In the truly terrible deleted scenes, everything is explained in much more details, and as a result the story feels leaden and meaningless.
Lady Bird	YES. She still hasn’t found love.  She still hasn’t told anyone the truth about being from Sacramento.
Raising Arizona	NO. It’s fairly tidy, using lots of voiceover to explain lots of little things, like what happened to the brother-in-law, etc.
Rushmore	YES. everyone is there for the finale, but their stories don’t wrap up neatly.
Selma	YES. The tension with SNCC and with Coretta is mostly left unresolved.  It would be great to see a sequel.
The Shining	YES. We don’t understand the final shot, for instance.
Sideways	YES. It’s not clear what will happen when he shows up at her door.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Lecter remains free, and we never fully understand the mechanics of his escape.
Star Wars	YES. Vader lives, the empire continues, and Jabba’s debt is still looming over Han.
Sunset Boulevard	YES.  It’s fairly tidy, but one big question is never answered, though: Did Joe decide to leave Norma before or after he sent Betty away?

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the story’s outcome ironically contrast with the initial goal?

And so we arrive at our final irony: the ironic final outcome. Way back when we started, we discussed how the basic concept of your story should have a fundamental irony. That overriding irony should be apparent by a quarter of the way in, but it shouldn’t be confused with the final irony that isn’t clear until the end.

In chapter three, we explored why these story concepts are ironic. Now let’s jump to the ending to see their ironic final outcomes:

1. Casablanca: Rick gets Ilsa back only so he can send her away. 
2. Beloved: Sethe still thinks her daughter’s vengeful ghost was “my best thing.” 
3. Silence of the Lambs: One killer is stopped, but the worse killer gets away in the process. 
4. Groundhog Day: Phil finally figures out how to get out of the town he hates by deciding he wants to stay there forever. 
5. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: The most scared teacher turns out to be most useful to the villain, rather than the mean teacher. Then Harry and his friends win the house cup by breaking all the rules. 
6. Sideways: Miles discovers the way to get the girl is to have the courage to do nothing. He finds the book that failed to earn him the love of the world has ironically done its job after all, because it’s moved the one heart he really needed to move. 
7. Iron Man: Tony’s own business partner turns out to be the villain. 
8. An Education: At Oxford, Jenny gets the education she originally wanted, but she has to pretend she hasn’t already received a far more worldly education. 

Even stories that are already ironic can always benefit from another ironic bit at the very end. Because the Nazis are defeated by their own treasure, the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark is already quite ironic, but it has one last kicker waiting for us. After all the action, suffering, and shouts of “It belongs in a museum!” Indiana and Marion finally bring this legendary artifact (and powerful weapon) home to the United States, where it gets dumped in a vast warehouse and forgotten.

It’s ironic that Indiana’s efforts have the opposite effect of his intentions, but even more ironically, the audience realizes this forgotten bureaucratic warehouse is probably the safest place possible for this dangerous artifact. The audience has seen Indiana’s goal come to naught at the last possible second—and they love it. They actually enjoy a good ironic reversal more than a straightforward payoff.

We don’t want to live in a clockwork universe, and we don’t want clockwork stories. We don’t want to watch authors plug numbers into a machine, pull the big lever, and get the expected result. We want irony because it’s surprising, because it’s clever, and, more than anything, because it’s realistic. There are no straight lines in nature, and we don’t want any in our stories, either. We love to see our heroes get what they want in the end—as long as they don’t get it in quite the way they wanted.

Rulebook Casefile: Defying Genre Conventions and Finding an Ironic Final Outcome in The Fugitive

I’ve said before that audiences expect a genre movie to meet most of the pre-established genre expectations, but defy a few of them. The Fugitive is a classically structured, adrenaline-packed thriller that delivers almost all of the conventions that audience expects, but there’s one nearly-universal aspect of this genre that it pointedly refuses to deliver: the hero doesn’t kill either of the villains (neither hitman nor client.)

But rather than leaving audiences disappointed, this was a huge aspect of the film’s success:

• It solves the Collateral problem: “This guy framed me for a killing, so I’ll track him down and kill him, and that’ll clear my name!” Um, no, that’s not how that works (to be fair, this goes back Hitchcock, in moves like Saboteur.)
• It elevates the movie morally. The audience can’t help feel dirtied by the standard logic of “he’s a killer so let’s kill him!” There’s a reason that this is one of the only thrillers nominated for best picture: nobody’s embarrassed to say they like it.
• It ties in nicely with the movie’s ironic final outcome:

In most “law vs. justice” thrillers, the hero humiliates the pansy-lawmen once and for all by doing what they refuse to do: deliver swift-and-fatal “justice” himself. This is supposed to make the audience stand-up-and-cheer in righteous wish-fulfillment. But this movie is doing something entirely different. This is a “law vs. justice” movie, but the solution is not to sever the two permanently, but rather to bend them back towards each other. For the first two reasons above, Ford has no interest in killing the two men who killed his wife, but it also ties in nicely to his flaw-as-flip-side-strength.

As we discussed last time, it should be frustrating to us that Kimble frequently sabotages his quest, but this turns out to be exactly the right thing to do: If he’s not going to kill the villains, then what can he do with them? Make a citizen’s arrest? No, he has to win the lawmen back to his side, and ironically, he can only do so by sabotaging his cause over and over again in the name of compassion.

Every time Kimble sabotages his cause, he’s bringing about the only truly-satisfactory outcome: winning Gerard over, and reuniting law and justice. We’ll talk more about that thematic dilemma next time…

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, he finds sex but only by marrying a grandmother.
Alien	YES. they kill the object of their rescue mission, the most loyal one blows up the ship.
An Education	YES.  The education she tried to reject actually leads her back to the life of sophistication she wanted, but she has to pretend she hasn’t already had it.
The Babadook	YES. she’s the monster at the end of the book.
Blazing Saddles	YES. He saves the town instead of dooming it.  The townspeople beg him to stay instead of forcing him out.
Blue Velvet	YES. he defeats evil by absorbing it
The Bourne Identity	YES. Liman says that his model was The Wizard of Oz: he’s trying to get home, but he’s home the whole time, because Marie turns out to be his home.
Bridesmaids	YES. Helen helps Annie see that she’s the problem, rather than vice versa. Her archenemy helps her get her guy.
Casablanca	YES. Very much so: he gets her back only so that he can send her away.
Chinatown	YES, the heroes get the opposite of what they want.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  he feels worse about betraying his fake family than his real family.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Mookie just wanted to get paid, but he destroys his job instead.
The Farewell	YES. She doesn’t achieve her original goal of telling the truth and decides it was better not to.
The Fighter	YES. Very much so.  What starts out as a story about breaking free of your rotten family becomes a story about taking strength from your rotten family.
Frozen	YES. Elsa’s powers are embraced.
The Fugitive	YES. The fugitive and the marshal work together.
Get Out	YES. The in-laws love him, after all.
Groundhog Day	YES. He finally figures out how to get out of there: by wanting to stay.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Very much so. The opening dragon attack is paralleled by the final peaceful shots of dragons flying through the village.
In a Lonely Place	YES. he clears his name but loses the girl anyway.
Iron Man	YES. He earns the right to be a super-hero and then immediately breaks the first rule.
Lady Bird	YES. She seeks out the comforts of home (church and calling her mom) in New York.
Raising Arizona	YES. they are pushed apart by stealing the baby and brought back together by returning it.
Rushmore	YES. He tries to hook up Cross with Blume instead of trying to break them up.
Selma	Yes and no.  For Johnson certainly.  For King, he tells Coretta at the beginning that his whole goal is to wrap this up and settle down to life in a college town with “maybe an occassional speaking engagement,” and he certainly doesn’t achieve that.  But it could be that King was lying to Coretta about wanting to settle down, in which case, he unironically achieves exactly his initial goal.  (Of course the fact that Johnson hurts his marriage is certainly not something he planned on)
The Shining	YES. they save their family by killing the dad.
Sideways	YES. Miles finds that the way to get the girl is the have the courage to do nothing, waiting for her to re-approach instead of drunk dialing her.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. They catch one only to lose another.
Star Wars	YES. He defeats the bad guys using the technology he learned at home, not by acting like the other pilots.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. he gets his pool, she gets her return to the screen, and Max even gets to direct again, but all in the most ironic ways possible.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the ending tip toward one side of the thematic dilemma without entirely resolving it?

Your theme should take the form of an irresolvable dilemma, so you should give both sides equal weight for as long as possible until the climax. The trick is to come up with a finale that addresses the conflict and makes a concrete statement about it, without definitively declaring one side right and the other wrong. 

Each of the first three seasons of Lost has a powerful overarching theme:

• Season one: our future is dictated by our past versus our future is a blank slate 
• Season two: faith versus skepticism 
• Season three: strict, safe order (the Others) versus chaotic, unsafe freedom (the crash survivors) 

At the end of each season, the characters advocating one side of the debate are proven “right.”

• Season one: The characters find ways to move on from the past, and even sing “Redemption Song” together on a boat. 
• Season two: We find out Locke was right to have faith in the button, and Jack was wrong when he said it did nothing. 
• Season three: The chaotic makeshift community of the crash survivors proves to be more sustainable than the cultlike Others. 

But in each case, the victory is ironic and ambiguous. A statement is made about the dilemma, but it’s not permanently settled.

You have something to say, but you don’t have something definitive to say. You have a point, but your point is untidy. You’re leaving room open for uncertainty and ambiguity, because that multiplies the meaning.

Let’s return to the stories we looked at before. Each has an irreconcilable thematic dilemma, and five of them tip toward one side in the end, but not definitively:

• Casablanca: Patriotism is better than love, but it’s a painful decision. 
• Beloved: Sethe will never know whether enslavement was better than death for her daughter, but she warily accepts that self-forgiveness is better than self-accountability. 
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: Justice is better than peace, but it comes with dark consequences. (Harry not only kills Quirrell, but he condemns Dumbledore’s friend Nicholas Flamel to death by destroying the stone.) 
• Iron Man: Yes, societal responsibility is ultimately somewhat more important than individual achievement, but Tony still wants to be a badass all the time, not a do-gooder. 
• An Education: Yes, living up to one’s responsibilities is somewhat better than a life of excitement, but we sense she doesn’t really regret her dalliance and still longs to be more sophisticated than her parents. 

But the other three have interesting variations:

• In Groundhog Day, one of the contrasting values in the thematic dilemma is clearly superior to the others. Phil concludes that acceptance is almost entirely better than ambition. 
• Silence of the Lambs ends with its moral dilemma still totally unsettled. Neither Clarice nor the audience can decide at the end whether it was worth it to work with one monster to stop another. 
• Sideways pits Jack’s boundless optimism versus Miles’s clear-eyed cynicism, but each man achieves his own goal by reverting to type at the end and fails to influence the other. Jack’s outrageous, optimistic lies pay off for him, and Miles’s cynical honesty pays off for him. The conclusion looks askance at both of their philosophies but refuses to privilege either one over the other. 

So this rule isn’t universal: You can resolve the dilemma definitively, tip to one side without resolving it, or leave it totally unresolved, but the middle option is the most common and usually the best bet. You have something to say, so say it, but you don’t want to take away from the fundamental power of the irreconcilable dilemma.

Rulebook Casefile: The Irresolvable Thematic Dilemma in Rushmore

When I was trying to identify Max’s false statement of philosophy in Rushmore, I settled on this exchange: “What are you going to do?” “The only thing I can do: try to pull some strings with the administration.” For this corrected statement of philosophy later, I chose “I’m just a barber’s son.” But what about the movie’s most prominent statement of philosophy?

Max’s obsession with Miss Cross begins when he’s reading a book on diving and he finds that she has jotted down a Cousteau quote in the margins: “When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.” Is that statement proven to be false or true?

This brings us to another rule: the ending should tip towards one side of the thematic dilemma without resolving it entirely. The central thematic dilemma in this movie is ambition vs. acceptance, and ultimately it tips towards acceptance, but that’s a hard choice.

Anti-ambition movies are few and far between. America worships ambition and our movies do the same. It’s hard not to root for Max’s wild schemes. It’s painful to watch him pour so much energy and optimism into things and then admit that his work is too ambitious and ultimately not very good. We want and expect to see those qualities rewarded.

And indeed the movie only barely tips towards acceptance. He accepts public school, and gives up on Miss Cross, and admits to everyone that his dad’s a barber, but he’s still making overly ambitious plays and collecting acolytes. So is that quote false or true? Max is not as extraordinary as he thought he was, but he’s certainly unique. How will his life change for better or for worse if he learns to keep that to himself, as least some of the time?

Most movies sell us the wish fulfillment message that there’s always something more waiting for us if we’re willing to be bigger and bolder. This is one of the few that raises the possibility that we may be happier and healthier if we learn to accept a life that’s smaller. It’s a painful realization, and that pain gives this movie its emotional punch.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Respect for women and need for sex remain equally important, self-sufficiency is not as good as co-dependent love.
Alien	NO. this movie resolves its moral dilemma far more definitively than most movies: corporations are completely evil, quarantine is totally sacrosanct, self-preservation is entirely better than protecting new life-forms. Personal safety is entirely better than job loyalty. This is fine: horror movies are less ambiguous than most genres.
An Education	YES.  Responsibility is ultimately better than the glamour. (But given that everything turned out okay, you suspect that she doesn’t really have any regrets)
The Babadook	YES. Very much so.  Grief must be nurtured but controlled.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Solidarity is better than individualism, but Bart is still too discontent to be part of the community he created. Winning people over is better than standing up to them,  but both must be combined.  Anger is better than subservience, but must be controlled.
Blue Velvet	NO. Not really, we still can’t decide which is worse: naivete or cynicism. Jeffrey has decided to restore his life to a level of naive idealistic artifice, but it is merely a mask for his yawning chasm of dark cynicism, and we sense that he’s still utterly torn between these two unpleasant choices.
The Bourne Identity	NO. It tips fairly definitively: conscience is proven to be clearly better than duty. They could have attempted to make this more ambiguous by pointing to important missions that won’t get fulfilled due to Bourne’s crisis of conscience, but this is one case in which ambiguity would feel like the weaker choice: We see that the “vital CIA mission” Bourne was accomplishing was the execution of a deposed dictator and former CIA asset who was going to write a tell-all memoir. In this case, the need to show an irresolvable dilemma is trumped by the need to show the way the world works. We know that the CIA always claims that their dirty tricks are justified by their vital missions, and we also know that that always turns out to be bullshit. Indeed, the hapless reboot The Bourne Legacy does have a “but what about the vital missions?” scene, and it feels cheap and phony.
Bridesmaids	YES. It’s ultimately probably better to prioritize finding a romantic life partner over holding onto a long-distance friendship.
Casablanca	YES. it comes down strongly on the side of country, but love is clearly more appealing.
Chinatown	YES. It is better to honor the past than shoddily and unjustly build the future.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  Family loyalties are ultimately more important than work loyalties.  He chooses to go back to being a cop, a husband, and a father, but he still feels like a gangster inside and he can’t forgive himself for getting Lefty killed.
Do the Right Thing	YES. It’s still split pretty much evenly at the end, as evidenced by the conflicting quotes from Martin and Malcolm
The Farewell	YES. Happy lie is seemingly better, but we’re not sure of that.
The Fighter	YES. Family and independence must be kept in balance.
Frozen	YES. Family is better than independence, but both are important.
The Fugitive	YES. justice is better than law, but the solution is to forcibly bend the law back toward justice, rather than abandon law altogether.
Get Out	NO. it tips definitively: Vigilance is entirely great, cooperation is fatally naive.
Groundhog Day	NO. It’s pretty definitive. Phil concludes that acceptance of one’s circumstances is pretty much entirely better than personal ambition.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Justice is ultimately more important than loyalty to family, but it’s an impossible choice so the two must be reconciled. The other dilemma is split: They’re able to make peace with most, but have to kill the one who won’t make peace.
In a Lonely Place	YES. self protection is better than sacrificing for love, but it’s a painful choice.
Iron Man	YES. Societal responsibility is clearly better, but Individual achievement is still pretty cool.
Lady Bird	YES. She chooses ambition but realizes she also needs to accept that she should have been more loving towards her mom and her town.
Raising Arizona	YES. Settling for a meager legal life is better, though disappointing.
Rushmore	YES. Acceptance is better than ambition, but ambition still looks pretty great.
Selma	YES. Moderation works, this time, but we sense that DuVernay thinks other methods might have worked, too, and maybe we still have severe problems today because the movement was too moderate.
The Shining	NO. As in many horror movies, it tips overwhelmingly: Family is better than masculinity, mother is better than father, self-protection is better than loyalty to parents, moving on is better than making it work, trusting yourself is better than trusting your parents.
Sideways	YES. It looks askance at both of our heroes’ philosophies (Jack’s boundless optimism vs. Miles’s clear-eyed cynicism), but refuses to privilege either one over the other. Ironically, each man achieves his own goal by reverting to type at the end and fails to influence the other one: Jack’s outrageous positive-thinking lies pays off for him, and Miles’s cynical honesty pays off for him.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. It’s implied that it was probably worth it, (maybe it would have felt very different if we ended on Lecter killing an innocent family, for instance)
Star Wars	YES. Spirituality is better than technology, but even more dangerous in the wrong hands.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. dignity is somewhat better than success.