Open endings (examples: “In Bruges”, “As you are”, “Young Royals”)

This is a little postscript, a short addendum to last week’s post, if you will, that I hesitated to include last time because said post had already got quite long. 

But I feel that this is an important topic that a lot of people struggle with when it comes to understanding how narratives (be it in a book or a film) work, and since my last post included a lengthy review of the movie ‘As you are’, which happens to have an open ending, I think we should use this opportunity to briefly discuss what to do when you encounter an open ending in the wild, how these kinds of open-ended narratives work and how to understand them. (And obviously, we can address the ending of ‘Young Royals’ season 3 once more, as well, and examine how that one is constructed quite a bit differently from a classic open ending, but how it still has a few ‘open-ish’ features to it.)

So…how to understand open endings. Here we go:

The most important thing to understand about open endings is that they’re not secret endings.

They aren’t endings that exist just for the initiated few disciples of the author, the truly dedicated fans who really understand what’s going on and can be trusted with the secret knowledge about the definitive, closed ending that the author actually had in mind but didn’t want the general public to see and thus hid in a drawer somewhere.

That’s not what open endings are!

Allow me to elucidate:

Let’s assume you’ve read a book or watched a film or TV show that, to your utmost consternation (and frustration), features an open ending, and you’re presented with two possible outcomes: Either the main protagonist is dying at the end of the story and will soon be dead (outcome A) or the main protagonist has actually survived and is alive and well (outcome B).

Now, a lot of readers (or viewers, depending on the medium we’re talking about) will instantly, right upon closing the book or switching off the TV, go online and start to argue about the issue, “I think the main protagonist is definitely dead. Here are the reasons why…” or “No, no, no, the main protagonist is gonna make it; he’s definitely alive. There’s proof for that hidden in the following clues…” And some hardcore fans of the book or film in question will be so desperate to find a definitive answer that they will scream into the void, “Please, for the love of God, I need to know what happened? Is he alive? Is he dead? What happened? What will happen to him? Can somebody point me to the hidden clues about what’s going on?”

Well, I say: Forget about all of this!

The most important thing to keep in mind in this context is the following eternal truth:

Fiction is not reality!

I know this sounds trivial, and perhaps you’ve just rolled your eyes right now, dear reader, and gone, “Duh! Of course, it isn’t. I know that.”

But think about it; really, really think about it.

Because actually, that insight has far-reaching implications:

Fiction is not reality. And thus none of the characters in that work of fiction you’ve just read or watched are real people. The story is made up. It ends at the exact moment the curtain comes down. The main protagonist in our hypothetical example above cannot be alive by definition – just like he cannot be dead. He doesn’t exist. He’s not real.

The story you’ve just watched or read (and potentially loved) isn’t reality. The characters aren’t flesh-and-blood people that you could ever meet in real life. They’re not real. They exist only on a piece of paper or on a strip of celluloid – and in the author’s (and your) imagination.

None of it is real.

So, the question, “Please, what happened? Will he die? Is he alive? Will he make it?” doesn’t actually make any sense.

Have you ever had a kid ask you, “So…what existed before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang?”

And then you stumbled for a response and thought, ‘How do I explain that, not only can’t I say what happened before the Big Bang, but the question in and of itself doesn’t even make any sense. There was no before. There was no time! Time only came into existence with the Big Bang. ‘Before’ didn’t…couldn’t exist yet – without time. So asking about a ‘before’ is absurd by definition.’

It’s a bit like that, okay?

You cannot ask, “What happened after that open ending? Did the main protagonist die? Or is he still alive?” because those questions don’t make any sense. They are absurd by definition. This hypothetical main protagonist from our example above is fictional. He never existed. He cannot be alive, and he cannot be dead. There is no reality to this story outside of that fictional universe; it doesn’t exist in our (real) universe outside of the book or the film you’ve just immersed yourself in.

Immersion is also probably the reason why people ask these questions, by the way: As human beings, we are hardwired to love stories. We adore stories. Stories have a profound emotional impact on us. They give our life meaning. They impart important messages to us. They provide us with moral and ethical wisdom (or conundra that we like to ponder). We connect to stories on an almost visceral level, and this connection can be so strong that we really do love or hate the characters in them as though they were real people.

And because of this sense of immersion and these strong emotions, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that what we’re reading, what we’re watching, isn’t real and that everything about it is created, constructed, ‘built’ from the ground up. As you know, this applies to subtext, symbolism, metaphors, etc. But it applies to endings, too!

There simply is no answer to the question, “Is this fictional character going to make it? Or is he going to die? What is really going to happen now?” Because this question in and of itself is absurd. None of it is real. The story is fictional and thus doesn’t exist outside of our imagination.

This means that the only actual, meaningful question you can ask about outcome A and outcome B in our hypothetical example is the following one: “What did the author imply about these two outcomes? What was the author’s intention when presenting us with an open ending showing us these two alternative outcomes?”

Oh, but this, as you can see, is an entirely different question.

We’re not asking about objective reality here anymore (because the characters aren’t real, anyway). We’re asking about authorial intent now! And that is a completely different can of worms.

Now, there’s, of course, an entire school of thought according to which authorial intent can be simply dismissed and doesn’t matter one bit once the author has handed their work of art over to the public (‘the death of the author’ and all that).

Personally, I find ‘the death of the author’ a bit of an overused concept as a literary analysis approach – not that it doesn’t have its merits, but people tend to use it to justify whatever wild thing they want to read into a text without even the slightest bit of evidence, and that’s probably not what Roland Barthes had in mind when he formulated the idea. You could also argue that any author’s intentions are not just unknown, but ultimately unknowable and inaccessible to us.

All of which is nice and well…but, let’s face it, that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Thing is…I’m guessing that, if you, as a reader or viewer, are still up at 2am in the morning, arguing with other people on the internet (or perhaps with your real-life friends over a glass of wine) whether that hypothetical main protagonist died or is still alive, whether outcome A or outcome B is ‘what really happened’, in short, if that thrice-cursed open ending of your favourite book, film or show is keeping you up at night…well, then perhaps, at that moment, you’re not really all that much into the whole ‘death of the author’ thing anyway, am I right?

If you keep pondering that open ending, then you do actually think that authorial intent matters, don’t you?

Otherwise you wouldn’t keep trying to work out what the author meant by that ending. I think it’s fair to say that, at least in this case, where we’re trying to work out the true meaning behind an open-ended conclusion to some work of fiction, we can do away with the whole ‘death of the author’ approach.

So, what are we left with in this case?

We are agreed that the characters aren’t real and the story is fictional and that we therefore cannot ask ‘what did really happen’ because there is no ‘really’ here and that question would be absurd on its face because fiction isn’t objective reality. And we are also agreed that the only question that’s not absurd in this context is the following one: “What did the author mean by this ending? What was their intent?”

Which is where I’d like to refer you to the beginning of this post:

The most important thing to understand about open endings is that they’re not secret endings.

The author isn’t being secretive or sneaky when they aren’t giving us a definitive, closed ending but an open ending instead. They’re not being mean either. They’re not playing games with us. They’re not trying to make us suffer.

It’s not that this author has actually written out a definitive ending (with either outcome A or outcome B meticulously typed out) that he or she is keeping hidden from us somewhere in order to torture us with this open ending. And it’s not that we, the audience, are supposed to work like a detective in some mystery novel to try and deduce what the intended, definitive ending is by picking up on hidden clues the author has left like breadcrumbs for us to find.

That’s not how open endings usually work. 

(I mean, I’m not going to exclude the possibility that there might be some authors out there who do that sort of thing, but that’s definitely not what open endings are usually all about.)

Usually, open endings aren’t about the author being sneaky or mean. Usually, they don’t mean the author has a closed, unambiguous ending typed out and hidden away somewhere.

If the author had a preference for either outcome A or outcome B, then most likely he or she would have considered and then laid out that precise ending in their book or screenplay. If they had a preference, well, then that’s the ending we would have got.

But we didn’t get a closed ending because the author thinks both outcomes have some merit, so they left the ending intentionally open.

If they had had one ending in mind, we’d know that. The author would have made that abundantly clear, and that would have been the ending we would have got for the story.

Since there are, however, two competing endings, we should assume that that’s exactly what the author had in mind: Both endings are equally meaningful and most importantly equally valid. Both of them make sense, according to the author.

There is no hidden gospel to be found here that only the true fans, the real disciples of the author, the initiated few followers will uncover by digging through the evidence. (And arguing about whether A or B is ‘really’ going to happen is meaningless in the context of a fictional story, anyway, as we agreed above.)

The author is telling us that those two endings would both make sense for their story. And in fiction (!), two things can, indeed, be true at the same time. In fiction, two endings can both happen. In fiction, two facts can contradict each other and both be canon. In fiction, a character can, indeed, be both dead and alive at the same time. Because none of is real, anyway.

The author is giving us two endings because that’s what their story needs!

In hindsight, one ending most likely lets the story appear in a certain light, and the other ending lets the same story appear in a completely different light. When you apply what you know about both endings to the story retrospectively, the two different endings highlight different aspects about the story and are thus both deeply meaningful and therefore both valuable and valid.

Just imagine you were given two differently coloured lenses labelled A and B by the author. And most importantly: You were only given these two lenses at the very end of the story.

So, now you can pick up these two lenses and look back on the story you’ve just read or watched through them. Depending on which lens you choose, you will get a completely different picture of the story. You will see things differently in retrospect once you hold up lens A (outcome A) or lens B (outcome B) to the narrative. Different things will jump out at you. Different narratives will emerge where you thought there was just one.

That’s why the author is doing this.

That’s why he or she is giving you two different possible outcomes and is leaving the ending open.

Not to be mean. Not to play games with you, the reader or viewer. Not to torture you. But because those two alternative endings, those two competing outcomes, highlight different aspects about their story that the author wants to draw attention to.

The author isn’t sitting in a corner, rubbing their hands together and cackling maniacally Hollywood-villain-style because they’ve given us an unsolvable puzzle. The author isn’t cruelly withholding information from us. They most likely haven’t picked one of the two endings (outcome A or outcome B) as a definitive ending themselves. They really think that both endings are equally valid.

And that’s why we get both outcomes. That’s why we get…an open ending.

As mentioned above, in fiction, two contradictory things can be true at the same time, and a story can really have two endings; a character can be both dead and alive at the end of the story. And unlike in the case of Schrödinger’s cat, the author is never going to open that black box to check whether the cat is, in fact, dead or alive because the author him- or herself doesn’t regard their story as a black box that needs to be opened. For the author, this story simply has two equally valid endings. That’s it.

Let’s take a look at a few examples to see how that works…