The other night, Managing Editor, Sennah Yee and I watched Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, in preparation for a screening of the film we're co-hosting at the Paradise Theatre (if you're in Toronto, there are still tickets left). I had a cold, so we watched it on Teleparty, where we had a running chat on the right and could send emojis floating across the screen: blushing faces, thumbs up, fires. But right at the end, the moment Justin Timberlake uttered his last line, the streamer queued up the next film: 1993's Puppet Master 4. And although I had technically seen the ending, I felt robbed. You need the credits, a necessary easing from the world of the film to the real world. I remember watching all 6 hour-long episodes of Scenes From a Marriage back-to-back at the TIFF Lightbox and the awkward end credits were an odd but necessary breather from the film's intensity, reflected most poignantly in Liv Ullman's face.
There's a scene early in Southland Tales where three characters discuss the plot of a screenplay in a living room while the opening scene of Kiss Me Deadly plays in the background. Robert Aldrich's 1955 noir has an ending that is so iconic it created an icon: the suitcase containing a mysterious glow. It's used in films like Pulp Fiction, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and well… Southland Tales. It's an ending that eclipses its equally powerful beginning. But that's what endings tend to do: they become the film.
Sometimes for the better: like the guttural scream at the end of Bertrand Bonello's The Beast, which brought the film's meaning into instant and horrific focus (which itself recalled Laura Palmer's scream at the end of Twin Peaks: the Return, a devastating undoing of everything that came before). And sometimes for the worse: the history-of-film montage at the end of Babylon has become the most notable scene from a film that opens with an elephant shitting on the lens.
A film can recover from a bad beginning, but it's hard to forgive a bad ending. We are wired with a recency bias and a love of closure. We love nothing more than the satisfaction of a great end-credit song. One of the worst films I've seen in recent memory, The Bride, almost won me over with a "Monster Mash" needle drop right as the once again reanimated monsters grasp hands. And then there are the endings that don't satisfy, that require us to grapple with what's missing, in ways that are both strangely pleasurable, and plainly painful. Some endings are so transcendent, we want to live them again. But you can never live it again for the first time.
With this issue we are saying goodbye to a version of In The Mood as we shift our publishing schedule from three times a year to two. We are doing this to give our team a little extra time to make some new things. And in this way, we hope to embody another rule of the ending: leave them wanting more.