Monthly Archives: February 2024

Why the Best Tragedies Are Funny

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NOTE: The following is a revised version of an article originally published on Medium, where I’ve published a number of writing advice pieces.

Warning: Contains spoilers for Legends of the Fall, The Godfather Part II, Oedipus Rex, The Remains of the Day, The Illusionist, The Empire Strikes Back, and Blackadder Goes Forth.

Several years ago, I went to see Legends of the Fall. The film featured fine direction from Edward Zwick, an A-list cast that included Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, Julia Ormond, and Henry Thomas, and gorgeous, Oscar-winning cinematography courtesy of John Toll. I hoped for a sweeping, epic tear-jerker, but it turned out to be one of the most unsuccessful attempts at tragedy I have ever seen on film. The screenplay features poorly motivated, unconvincing characters, who then have tragedy upon tragedy piled upon them. The ludicrous escalation of misfortune becomes numbing, and eventually even funny.

Throughout the film, I was acutely aware of the audience’s emotional response. The first great tragedy occurs with the death of Henry Thomas’s character in World War I. Audience reaction: Sombre silence, but no-one was particularly upset, as we didn’t have a handle on who he was enough to miss him.

This was merely the first act. Another tragedy occurred shortly afterward. Then another, and another, until I heard disgruntled snorts from fellow patrons. Towards the end, when the character played by Anthony Hopkins has a debilitating stroke, the audience finally erupted with derisive laughter. Why? Because we’d been bludgeoned over the head with an unrelenting stream of big tragic events, to the point where it was absurd to expect us to be upset any longer.

Legends of the Fall contained none of the counterpoint vital to generating a satisfying tragic tale, comedic or otherwise. Before explaining how and why such counterpoint works, I am going to explore two different tragedies, and why counterpoint is essential to the success of all tragic writing. This applies whether they are based on irony, fatal character flaws, circumstantial disaster, or other traditional English literature definitions.

The Tragedy Spectrum

“I used to be partial to tragedy in my youth, until experience taught me life was tragic enough without my having to write about it.” — Amon, Clash of the Titans.

I cite the above quotation not because I agree with it (although I share the sentiment to a degree), but because it hints at the two kinds of tragedy, we invariably encounter in stories. If it is your ambition to write impactful, meaningful, convincing tragic drama, whether for stage, television, film or in prose, you must first decide what kind of tragedy you wish to write. I have devised what I term the Tragedy Spectrum.

Melodramatic Tragedy

At one end of the spectrum, we have what I loosely term “melodramatic tragedy”. This deals with the accidentally killing-one’s-father, marrying-one’s-mother, and gouging-one’s-eyes-out kind of tragedy. It is big, melodramatic, and often overheated. Not that it can’t be interesting, convincing, and moving. Sometimes a blunt instrument is the most effective tool, but it has to be well deployed. With Legends of the Fall, it was not.

However, with Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (flippantly alluded to above), it works. It also works in everything from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, to great novels including Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Many films also feature successful uses of melodramatic tragedy, including Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge.

These narratives feature large-scale tragedies that wear their hearts on their sleeves, attempting to make the biggest potential impact on the audience. Whether Hamlet’s bloody vengeance, resulting in the deaths of most of the key characters, or King Arthur’s tragic fall at the hands of his bastard son Mordred, or Michael Corleone deciding to murder his own brother, these stories exist squarely at the melodramatic end of the scale.

This kind of tragedy we are mercifully unlikely to experience. Most of us aren’t destined to unknowingly murder our fathers, sleep with our mothers, and gouge our eyes out. Nor are we likely to discover our uncle has murdered our father, undertaking procrastinating vengeance that winds up with the deaths of our entire family, whilst others around us go insane and commit suicide for good measure. Nor are we likely to become the head of a mafia organisation and commit fratricide to consolidate our power. These kinds of tragedies, when well-written, make for a gripping, dramatic story we can enjoy from a safe distance, knowing it is exceptionally unlikely we will one day find ourselves in the protagonist’s shoes.

Private Tragedy

At the other end of the spectrum, we have what I call “private tragedy”. This deals with more intimate, everyday, small-scale heartbreak and loss. As Henry David Thoreau famously put it: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation”. These tragedies rarely involve lurid sexual sins, gruesome revenge, and Grand Guignol body counts. But they are quietly devastating to those concerned. This kind of tragedy we are likelier to or inevitably will experience; the tragedy of small, mundane, seemingly insignificant events that only spell despair for the person or people directly involved.

Quiet desperation narratives include Susan Hill’s sublime collection of short stories A Bit of Singing and Dancing. Or novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, David Nicholl’s One Day, and films including Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, Yojiro Takita’s Departures, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, and Marc Foster’s Finding Neverland.

The Remains of the Day is about the tragedy of wasted lives. Butler Stevens misses his opportunity for happiness with housekeeper Miss Kenton, out of misguided loyalty to an equally misguided Nazi appeasing master. The gradual realisation of the appalling personal cost to himself unfolds throughout the narrative, which is told in flashback.

The Illusionist is interesting because it taps into tragedy all inevitably experience: Wistful nostalgia at the passing of an era. The music hall magician in that film finds himself increasingly upstaged by the rise of rock bands in the late 1950s. Along with other music hall acts, he gradually becomes obsolete. An achingly sad tale.

Counterpoint and Humour

One of the most important narrative techniques when writing any fiction is to use counterpoint. The best writing emphasises conflict, contrast, differing views, and opposing ideas. To write tragedy convincingly, there must be something tugging against it. Some optimism. A note of hope. Regardless of how relentless and miserable real life may be, it often contains moments of absurd humour. To deny humour a place in a tragedy is to deny reality, which is why a story like Legends of the Fall rings hollow.

The Illusionist works because the magician is accompanied by a naïve assistant girl who believes his magic is real. Her innocent beliefs are destined to be shattered, but her own coming-of-age, culminating in her attracting the attention of a young man, shows a happy future. This subplot provides an undercurrent of optimism amid the melancholia of the main plot.

The devastating heartbreak at the core of The Remains of the Day would be too much to bear if it weren’t for the gentle humour in the story, regarding Stevens’s hilarious fastidious, uptight character. One moment where he is instructed to convey the facts of life to his master’s godson is hilarious. Yet throughout the narrative, audience response to the absurd repression of Stevens’s character gradually moves from laughter to tears.

Hamlet has several amusing and witty subplots; for instance, the bumbling pompousness of Polonius, who seems unable to take his own advice (“Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice”). Wuthering Heights gains much tragic power because it is told through the eyes of the unreliable narrator Mr. Lockwood, whose slightly comical emotional timidity stands in stark contrast to the raging passions of the main protagonists. F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby pulls off a similar trick.

Baz Luhrmann drenches Moulin Rouge in surreal, outrageous humour, making the final tragic loss even more potent. The Godfather Part II is a sombre, brooding film, but it finds time for upbeat and comedic moments, particularly in the flashback sections to the young Vito Corleone in early 20th Century New York (the carpet theft, for instance).

The Empire Strikes Back is generally regarded as the finest Star Wars film, yet it is also one of the darkest and most downbeat. Luke Skywalker struggles not just against external evil, but the evil in himself, as revealed in the terrible secret of the Skywalker family line. Han Solo ends up frozen in carbonite, with possibilities of unfreezing parole looking increasingly unlikely as he’s spirited off to Jabba the Hutt. Our heroes don’t win. They merely survive, by the skin of their teeth, to fight another day. All of which is leavened by the hilarious, screwball comedy of the Han/Leia romance (“Would it help if I got out and pushed?”).

Even something as serious as Schindler’s List has funny moments peppered amid the horrific events. Scenes such as Schindler’s secretary montage, to his darkly comic asides with Nazi bureaucrats (“I think I can guarantee you’ll both be in Southern Russia before the end of the week”), makes the appalling tragedy even more believable and powerful. No one would be foolish enough to describe Schindler’s List as funny, but these tiny moments provide important glimmers of humanity amid one of the darkest chapters in humanity’s history.

A superb example of comedy as a counterpoint to tragedy occurs in the TV series Blackadder Goes Forth. After six hilarious episodes satirising the absurdity of the trenches of World War I, the principal characters meet their deaths in a hail of machine-gun bullets after they are ordered to advance. Their slow-motion, doomed attempt to cross no-man’s-land dissolves into a quiet field of poppies; one of the most shattering television finales I have ever seen. As a testament to the horrifying tragedy of the First World War, it leaves Legends of the Fall in the dust.

Conclusion

I expect some of you are thinking tragedy in life isn’t funny. I don’t wish to argue with anyone’s personal experience, but rendering tragedy in a satisfying narrative is a different matter. Besides, my experience is that even the most tragic real-life situations can contain moments of dark comedy. For example, at my father’s funeral, I experienced a farcical “shoe malfunction” that would have had my father in stitches. Such real-life experiences have only underlined my belief in the storytelling counterpoint principle.

Deliberately omitting humour from tragedy makes for a one-note tale that is depressing for all the wrong reasons, especially if said tale comprises little more than the repetition of endless tragedy. Such stories actually end up becoming unintentionally comic because they are so absurd, as the audience reaction I witnessed to Legends of the Fall shows. A tragic story that uses counterpoint judiciously and wisely, especially comedic counterpoint, will win over even the most tragedy-averse viewer or reader. My point boils down to this simple takeaway: If you make an audience laugh at your character, they will like them. Therefore, they will feel for them when you place them in tragic situations.

Writing Major Plot Twists

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NOTE: The following is a revised version of an article originally published on Medium, where I’ve published a number of writing advice pieces.

Warning: Contains spoilers for Planet of the Apes, One Day, Dead Poets Society, Rebecca, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 24 series 2, Death on the Nile, and The Sixth Sense.

Big story twists can be brilliant or dreadful, depending on the skill of the writer. Many a budding screenwriter or novelist would love to pull off a gasp-inducing twist of The Sixth Sense proportions, but doing so in a manner that feels organic, plausible, and above all inevitable is extremely difficult. However, it is not impossible.

Successful big twists can be intellectually thrilling and emotionally exhilarating; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Usual Suspects, and Memento are examples of the former, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, and The Empire Strikes Back the latter. Some are a combination: Snape’s true allegiance in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for instance. The big reveals at the end of Les Diaboliques, Planet of the Apes, and The Sixth Sense generate tremendous cerebral and emotional pleasure, whilst the latter even operates on a spiritual level.

Conversely, a bad plot twist feels bolted on, gratuitous, and irritating. How many times have you encountered a film or novel with a promising plot, only to be sideswiped by a random, contrived plot twist that seems to have gate-crashed from another story? Ambushing an audience with ill-conceived, implausible, shock tactic twists only serve to undermine intellectual or emotional engagement. The big twist ending cannot seem tacked-on as an afterthought. It must be an essential final component.

Twist versus Unexpected Plot Turn

To avoid confusion, it is important to define a plot twist. I do not mean an unexpected plot turn, which is slightly different. In an unexpected plot turn, the story may veer off in a new and unforeseen direction, but it does not mean earlier events are viewed in a different light. A plot twist is a reversal; a revelation that turns the entire story on its head, provoking a rush of insight and causing the audience to see the entire narrative from a completely new angle. The tragic death near the end of One Day, the suicide at the climax of act two in Dead Poets Society, or the aftermath of the sucker-punch received by Hilary Swank’s character in Million Dollar Baby are examples of unexpected plot turns rather than twists.

Most great, narrative-defining twists occur towards or at the end because that’s the natural place for them. Withholding the most essential facts from the audience for as long as possible creates the immensely satisfying thrill of delayed gratification. However, there are rare occasions when revealing the major twist earlier adds depth to the work. The Crying Game and Reservoir Dogs are both good examples.

The major bombshell central to the mystery in Hitchcock’s Vertigo occurs at one hour and fifteen minutes in. This surprised me the first time I saw it, but every subsequent viewing has underlined why screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor made this unconventional choice. Audience knowledge regarding Kim Novak’s character creates a sense of impending dread and despair, as we watch James Stewart’s character spiral into ever increasing obsession over the remaining forty-five minutes. How will he react when he finds out the truth?

Know your ending

I know this won’t appeal to “pantser” writers, but if your ambition is to craft a story with a major twist ending, simply seeing where a character takes you will almost certainly lead to far more agonised rewriting than if you work from a well-planned outline. I always prefer to start with an ending that completely blows me away, then work backwards, discovering how the characters ended up at that point. As I’ve already noted, twists of plot-defining magnitude typically occur in the latter stages, so with this kind of story, it really pays to plan.

It is also worth asking, does my story need a big twist ending? It might not. However, as an aside, every story should at least feature crisis in the climax. If the final act of a heist thriller features everything going precisely to plan during the heist, how boring would that be?

The most obvious skill in writing a major plot twist is the ability to conceal it from the audience. In some genres, such as the murder mystery, the author must summon an arsenal of misdirection weaponry, because the reader is already on the alert to expect the unexpected. Here are some examples of tactics that can be deployed in whodunit type narratives.

Red Herrings

The use of red herrings — seemingly important plot points that prove irrelevant — is an obvious genre trope, but they should be deployed sparingly. Too many will lead to frustration and confusion in the reader. However, slipping one in now and again can work wonders for plot misdirection.

Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories provide a masterclass in red herrings. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes himself turns out to be one, as he is latterly identified as the mysterious figure Watson observed on the moors. That same novel includes many other false trails, including a subplot involving an escaped convict.

In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, JK Rowling deploys multiple red herrings concerning the identity of the heir of Slytherin. Everyone from Hagrid to Draco Malfoy is suspected. At one point, Rowling even cast a suspicious eye at Percy Weasley (when he is seen reading about “Prefects that gained power”). There is also a monstrous red herring in the form of giant spider Aragog.

Incidentally, red herrings aren’t necessarily confined to detective fiction. Romantic stories can contain emotional red herrings. These take the form of misunderstandings, or secondary characters attempting to win the affections of our protagonist in their quest for true love. There are often plenty of red herring dalliances before the reveal of who the protagonist ends up with. Jane Austen’s novels, such as Pride & Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, indulge in such romantic red herrings, as do latter romantic comedies following the Austen template, like Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Multiple Suspects

When writing any story featuring a mysterious, perhaps murderous unidentified figure manipulating events behind the scenes, I incorporate at least three suspect characters into the narrative. The first is the individual to whom all evidence points, and they are suspected by characters or investigators in the story. Since the audience invariably considers themselves smarter than the protagonist, it is vital to feed them a second character, not suspected by anyone in the plot, over whom clouds of suspicions can gradually form. There can be more than one of these second suspects, as required. The final suspect is the genuine culprit or manipulator, who is considered by both reader and protagonist to be above suspicion. Yet when unmasked, the solution must appear obvious and make complete narrative sense.

Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile features a particularly clever example of this technique, with multiple suspects, all of whom have means, motive, and opportunity for the murder. Yet the two characters with cast-iron alibies, who are emphatically above suspicion, prove to be the killers. What’s more, their scheme is convincing, plausible, and fiendishly clever.

In TV series 24, agent Jack Bauer suspects young Muslim Reza of being involved in a terrorist plot. Reza protests, and we believe him. But we’re not so sure about his shifty father-in-law to be, who has secretly worked for the CIA and clearly has some dark secrets. Yet the real snake in the grass turns out to be Reza’s seemingly sweet and innocent wife-to-be, Marie. She was completely above suspicion, yet she has been brainwashed into murderous fundamentalism.

Hiding in plain sight

The final misdirection device, and one of the most effective, is the hiding-in-plain-sight technique. The Sixth Sense is a case in point. Everything you need to figure out the big twist is contained within the opening scene, which in retrospect ought to be obvious. Yet the audience doesn’t see it coming. Why? Clever screenwriting sleight of hand, from M Night Shyamalan. The subsequent scenes with Bruce Willis’s character Malcolm interacting with his estranged wife Anna, and with his young patient Cole, appear to be straightforward. Yet the final reveal points to the elephant in the room, so to speak, in every one of those sequences. It was there, the entire time, yet we failed to spot it.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is another example of hiding in plain sight. It features a phenomenally cunning twist that works best on the page rather than in onscreen adaptations, for reasons that will be clear to anyone that has read it. Whenever I encounter snobby dismissals of Agatha Christie, I point to that novel as one of the finest examples of hiding in plain sight misdirection ever written.

Daphne Du Maurier’s gothic mystery Rebecca features my all-time favorite hiding in plain sight twist. The young, nameless protagonist marries widower Maxim de Winter in a whirlwind romance, but once back at ancestral family home Manderley, finds herself endlessly and unfavorably compared to Maxim’s first wife Rebecca. She is torn apart over the belief that Maxim adored Rebecca, whose wit, intelligence, sophistication, and beauty is remarked upon by all around her. Sinister housekeeper Danvers seems particularly determined to torment the new Mrs de Winter, and she does so with devilish cruelty.

Yet eventually, a dramatic turn of events forces Maxim to confess his true feelings regarding Rebecca to his new bride: “I hated her.” Those three words reverberate in the reader’s mind, as a shocking rush of insight. Maxim’s subsequent explanation, concerning how their marriage had been a sham, forces the reader to re-evaluate everything they thought they knew about Maxim up to that point. Every time a memory of Rebecca was triggered, he wasn’t upset because he had loved her. He was upset because he had hated her. More importantly, he had been indirectly responsible for her death, and had made it look like an accident.

Inevitability

There is one other major factor in creating a twist ending that genuinely wrong-foots the audience: It must seem inevitable. If the audience instantly imagines an alternative scenario, or a better plot twist, the writer has failed. The reader or viewer needs to experience the big twist in such a way that it not only makes complete sense, but that the plot could not have unfolded any other way.

In the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film, Charlton Heston’s character Taylor is an astronaut on a mission to explore the far reaches of the universe. After years in suspended animation, his spaceship crashes on a strange world where apes seemingly evolved from men. With ape the master and mankind their mute slaves, Taylor spends the entire film trying to validate his existence as intelligent being rather than savage. In the process he upsets the religious, theocratic apes, who don’t believe in evolution, but stubbornly cling to their religious texts which warn man is dangerous and must be suppressed. They also want to suppress recent archaeological evidence of a society of intelligent men predating apes.

Taylor exposes this conspiracy, and leaves the apes feeling rather pleased with himself. But then he has to confront the appalling truth when he discovers the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, revealing the planet to have been Earth all along. Taylor pounds the sand in despair, cursing the men who pushed the button of (presumably) nuclear annihilation that turned evolution upside down. It’s an astonishingly dramatic, powerful reveal, which answers all the questions of the film in a rush of insight, through a single devastating image. Impossible to see coming, but also, in retrospect, inevitable.

Conclusion

With good planning, and by factoring in some or all of the above disciplines, in my experience it is possible to write a convincing, thrilling, unexpected twist ending. I have crafted a few in some of my own novels, which I believe fulfill the criteria of being organic, plausible, and inevitable. I hope the above advice is useful to anyone with similar ambition.

New Short Story: Trigger Warning

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My latest short story, Trigger Warning, is now being serialised in Fictions on Medium, and also on Substack, if you are subscriber. Here’s a “friend link” to the first part on Medium, so you can get past the paywall and enjoy a free sample of this four part satirical tale.

Trigger Warning concerns a future where a small but growing minority of people are being offended to death when reading contentious novels. The protagonist, a novelist who unrepentantly writes controversial material, finds their persective challenged when they become romantically involved with someone whose close relative died reading one of the author’s books.

If you enjoy what you read so far, why not subscribe to me on Substack? In addition to full access to my film review archive, you also get access to all the other articles I syndicate from Medium (film analysis, top tens, classic cinema retrospectives, etc) plus many short stories. It’s well worth the $5 per month, I think, so why not at least give it a free trial? Subsequent instalments of Trigger Warning will appear each Friday over the coming weeks.

Alternatively, for Medium subscribers, the story will also be revealed in full over the next three weeks. I hope you enjoy Trigger Warning, wherever you read it.

When to Write Ambiguous Endings

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NOTE: The following is a revised version of an article originally published on Medium, where I’ve published a number of writing advice pieces.

Warning: Contains spoilers for Time Bandits, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Doubt, The Pledge, Life of Pi, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale, Great Expectations, and Let the Right One In.

Writing ambiguity into the finale of a novel, play, or film is fiendishly tricky. The task is difficult and daunting. It has defeated many a writer, and frustrated many a reader. Yet when done well, it can add tremendous depth and audience pleasure. How should it be approached?

My wife does not care for what she terms “doubt” in stories. She coined this term after watching the 2008 film of John Patrick Shanley’s celebrated play Doubt, about a mother superior exploring whether a priest is guilty of sexual abuse. In that story, “doubt” is the entire point of the narrative, and the ambiguous resolution forces the audience to think through the moral issues raised by the drama.

However, when my wife gives offending examples of stories with “doubt”, it is often the case that the story promised one thing and delivered another. The writer set up particular genre expectations, and instead broke the “rules” to deliver an ambiguous resolution, when the narrative called for clarity. Such instances are typically found when inexperienced, posturing, pretentious authors think themselves “radical” by breaking honored conventions.

Understanding and bending genre convention

In his seminal screenwriting book Story Robert McKee states:

“You are free to break or bend convention, but for one reason only: To put something more important in its place.”

As such, it pays to understand genre expectations, before adding ambiguity that will prove frustrating to the audience. Some stories do not call for ambiguity. For example, denying readers a clear-cut resolution to a Sherlock Holmes mystery or Hercule Poirot whodunit — not revealing the guilty party, how they did it, and why — would obviously be a foolish choice.

But in some murder stories, the identity of the killer can prove irrelevant. The Pledge, a 2001 film starring Jack Nicholson, is a case in point. It opens with the murder of a young girl. Her distraught mother urges Nicholson’s character Jerry Black, a soon-to-retire cop, to “swear on his salvation” that he’ll find the killer. Black is moved, and agrees. He retires from the police, but continues to dig into the case. He works tirelessly, but makes no progress. Clues lead to dead ends. Eventually, Black becomes romantically involved with an abused woman and her child, but uses them as bait in what he hopes will be a trap for the killer. As his quest continues, the film no longer focuses on the identity of the killer, but the depths of Black’s obsession. The ironies of the finale, in which the killer dies and burns in a car crash, renders his identity moot. However, Black has now gone insane, and continues to search, still believing the killer is out there.

In the case of The Pledge, the filmmakers, adapting Friedrich Durrenmatt’s 1958 novella The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, followed McKee’s advice. They broke the genre convention of identifying the killer, and replaced it with something more important: An ambiguous finale leaving the viewer unsettled as to what lies ahead for the now unhinged Jerry Black.

Sometimes the question is better than the answer

In some stories, allowing mysterious events different interpretations can be more satisfying than giving a definite explanation. Joan Lindsey’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock was deliberately published with the final chapter missing. A variety of interpretations regarding the fate of the schoolgirls ensued, involving everything from murder to pagan deities and alien abduction. Peter Weir’s celebrated film of the novel accentuated themes of repression and sexual awakening, but wisely avoided coming to any definite conclusion. Even after the final chapter of the novel was published posthumously, the surreal events described do not fully satisfy in and of themselves, and are open to wider speculation.

Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey has one of the most famous ambiguous endings in cinema history. Using Arthur C Clarke’s short story The Sentinel as a basis, Kubrick’s classic has baffled and intrigued cinemagoers for decades. What on earth does it all mean? Some have derived meaning from explanations in Clarke’s text, but in the film, many questions are thrillingly unanswered.

For example, why does the HAL 9000 computer go mad and murder the crew of the Discovery spacecraft? The non-Kubrick film sequel 2010 posits that HAL had contradictory programming which he interpreted as best he could. An incredibly unsatisfactory answer. My own theory is that when HAL came into contact with the enigmatic, evolution triggering alien monolith orbiting Jupiter, HAL himself began to develop feelings, evolve, and turn on his human creators, believing his survival was at stake. Kubrick’s calculated ambiguity allows for my interpretation, and the story is richer for it.

Drawing different conclusions

Not all stories need to end as enigmatically as 2001, but inviting differing readings of apparently clear-cut events can delight the audience. At first glance, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four appears to end in the bleakest way imaginable. However, the coda discusses Newspeak in the past tense, and in normal English. This insinuates the oppressive regime of the novel ultimately fell.

In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the conclusion casts doubt on Pi’s version of events. Did his survival at sea adventure really involve dangerous animals in a lifeboat? Or were those animals really people who turned on one another, causing Pi to invent a different narrative to repress his traumatic experience? The novel is all the richer for opening it up to interpretation. I find it hard to imagine even the most linear minded of readers would prefer it had that final section been excised.

Terry Gilliam’s much underrated children’s fantasy film Time Bandits has, on the surface, an extraordinarily bleak and cruel conclusion. Young Kevin is drawn into a series of bizarre time-traveling burglaries, with a group of dwarfs who stole a map of time portals from the Supreme Being. Each time portal leads to an important historical figure. In the final scene, after awakening from what is assumed to be a dream, Kevin finds himself being rescued amid a house fire. The firemen discover a burnt roasting joint started the blaze, but Kevin recognizes it as a piece of leftover “evil” from the last of his adventures (when he and the dwarfs confront what is essentially Satan). He yells a warning to his parents not to touch it. His parents ignore the warning, and are instantly obliterated.

Pretty dark for a children’s film? Perhaps. However, Kevin’s parents are established as materialistic, unimaginative bores. Kevin himself essentially renounces them during one of his adventures, when he gets himself adopted by King Agamemnon. played by Sean Connery. One of the firemen, also played by Connery, winks at Kevin as everyone depart the scene, completely ignoring what just happened to Kevin’s parents. A hint that “Agamemnon” will keep an eye on Kevin as he grows up? Given that every time portal led to someone significant, what about the portal that led the dwarfs to Kevin in the first place? Could Kevin be destined for greatness?

Bearing the above in mind, would Time Bandits really be a better film if Kevin woke up, was reunited with his dull parents, and his adventures were all a dream?

What happens next?

Some classic novels end in ways that leave the reader wondering what happened next. In expert hands, with the right story, this can be a hugely effective tool to lodge the narrative in the mind of the reader. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a case in point. The reader wants to know what happens after Offred is bundled into the van, but in fact the narrative is played out. I always liked to extrapolate that Offred escaped, and Atwood’s belated sequel The Testaments proved me right. Nonetheless, I didn’t need to be proved right. The Handmaid’s Tale’s abrupt end is perfect, and as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, we are offered hope for the future in a coda.

Great Expectations is another novel with a famously ambiguous conclusion. Did Pip and Estella ever get together, or were past traumas in their relationship too great to overcome? Conversely, whilst the novel lets the reader decide, I’ve always loved David Lean’s 1946 film adaptation, which settles the matter with an unambiguous happy ending. Because Lean chose to portray Pip in a more sympathetic light, the ending in the film felt earned. The screenplay silently urged viewers to expect it. Dickens, by contrast, was a lot more critical of his protagonist; a protagonist many commentators interpret as something of a self-portrait.

Occasionally, storytelling collaborators disagree on how their tale should be interpreted. For example, what happens next after the seemingly upbeat conclusion of Swedish horror film Let the Right One In? Director Tomas Alfredson, and the novel’s author John Ajvide Lindqvist completely disagreed. Blade Runner is another famous example, with Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott differing on whether Ford’s character Deckard is a replicant. Audiences have argued about it for decades, and really that is half the fun. At any rate, what happens to the lead characters in the aftermath of both the above examples is very much a question in the minds of the audience. The stories are all the better for it.

Conclusion

Having studied which kinds of stories lend themselves to ambiguous finales, I’ve tried to apply what I’ve learned in my own writing. Some of my novels feature endings with events that can be interpreted a number of different ways. When asked the correct interpretation, I refuse to answer, because no interpretation is wrong. Although I have my own interpretation, I don’t desire to inflict it on the reader and cheapen their experience. They are the last piece of the puzzle that completes the story.