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Funny, I was thinking of this film recently: The first time I saw Brazil, it was this version, the second and third time it was the other ending… but it didn’t really matter, that movie is so unnerving and depressing no matter how it ends. What I really can’t understand is why I saw it 3 times. I guess when you’re young, you engage with sad/depressing stuff, because your life is relatively great. As you get older, you realize that life too short, sad & depressing to add to it.
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Many don’t care enough to bother. Others don’t know how to. Sure there’s a lot of piracy in China, but then again there’s a lot of people in China, many of whom don’t generally access forbidden media.
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This sort of thing is old hat to comic book readers in the late Golden and early Silver Age, when the Comics Code Authority was formed to remove “objectionable” material from the comics:
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I feel the same about this as I did about the US radio version of RTM’s Killing In The Name Of, in which there is no resolve to “F–k You! I Won’t Do What You Tell Me!”… rather, a continuous repetition of the phrase “and now you do what they told ya.”
Like, the observation has been replaced by a command.
Thank you! This was driving me mad during this conversation. They could have totally just taken the book’s ending and been entirely within their space. It’s especially weird that they had to say “Welp, the government fixed it all” rather than “maybe the terrorist wasn’t as competent as he thought”
“I sold you and you sold me…”
Anthony Burgess released an extended version of the book where Alex is now one of the normal people he used to terrorize.
Whats funny is that Chuck Palahniuk mentioned that this ending honestly is more like his book.
There definitely is in the book, Fight Club 2, and Fight Club 3 aswell.
In the book, though, we see that Project Mayhem is still going on in the shadows.
- You don’t ask questions.
- You don’t ask questions.
- No excuses.
- No lies.
- You have to trust Tyler.
— Fight Club , pages 119, 122, 125
That is an anti-anarchist manifesto right there. Compare with this:
I dream of a society where I would be guillotined as a conservative.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
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From the vice article
and this isn’t the first film to be given a happy ending. (from Lord of War)
Probably easily verifiable with a tencent subscription.
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Hitchcock did this sort of thing better.
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which films did you have in mind? In a sense, he was able to have the last word. No such flexibility was extended towards Fincher.
TV, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Hitch’s outros frequently told how the guilty were eventually punished.
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I absolutely hated the end of the 2000 movie Rules of Engagement where, after Samuel L Jackson’s character was found not guilty for (the quite inexcusable) mass murder of protesters at an embassy in Yemen, the epilogue states that two other characters were found guilty of destroying exculpatory evidence.
Jackson’s character was presented as the hero of the blatantly anti-Arab movie. Really bad stuff, and the text of the epilogue wasn’t it’s biggest sin, but it felt tacked-on and just added insult to injury.
The epilogue text at the end of 2000’s Unbreakable movie describing how Samuel L Jackson’s character was caught by police and locked up in an asylum was pretty bad too. What was the deal with putting epilogue text at the end of movies starring that guy at that time?
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When we watched through most of the series that really stood out. It was the 50s, can’t have anybody getting away with anything! Wonder how much that sort of nonsense contributed to the general sense of the “just world” worldview.
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On the other hand, one could consider that Hitch’s conclusions let the show get away with things. Technically, the guilty were said to be punished, but this didn’t exactly happen in the world of the story.
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so, I haven’t yet bought this book
but the excerpt I’ve read notes that in the early days of the Hays Code, the dictum that “no crime should go unpunished” prompted some directors to plan for big shootouts to end their gangster films. Unfortunately, that loophole was closed early on.
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