Shiny, Happy People
The concluding scene of The Last Laugh depicts the incredible gluttony and generosity of the unnamed, demoted doorman after he miraculously inherits a fortune from a dying American millionaire. He feasts on mounds of food, eating caviar as if it were candy and drinking champagne as if it were water. A tracking shot of the "spread" emphasizes the opulence and indulgence of our hero. What is the point of this ending? Is is a happy ending or a parody of a happy ending? Is this supposed to be objective reality or a fantasy? Is this a cynical commercial ploy or is there deeper significance to the ending?
The point of the ending of The Last Laugh is to satirize and show the ridiculousness of typical happy endings. Throughout the whole movie, the situation for the protagonist gets increasingly worse. He loses the job that he likes, is moved to a degrading position, and his family disowns him. In a typical story, something would happen to improve our protagonist's situation. Through some combination of luck and work, he would show just how strong he really is, prove that he deserves his job back, and make up with his family. This, however, is not what actually happens. Instead, our protagonist's situation goes from horribly bad, to comically good by a matter of pure chance. The reason that this is done is to point out how ridiculous happy endings are. Instead of blending luck with work, as most turnarounds in stories do, The Last Laugh makes it all luck. Not only is it all luck, it's luck so ridiculous there is no way it could ever happen in real life. I don't know a lot of millionaires who leave their wealth to random strangers. As stated earlier, this is done in an attempt to make fun of classic story endings, showing how that is very rarely, if ever, how life works. Along with the unbelievable luck in the ending, The Last Laugh also makes the jump in status ridiculous as well. The protagonist goes from laughed at by his community and disowned by his family to so wealthy he can feast on delicacies all day with no concern. The absurdity here is meant also to make fun of classic story endings. It shows just how silly it is to expect one chance happening to fix all of your problems. The ending as a whole serves to point out the flaws in classic story endings, as well as satirize them.
ReplyDeleteThe sudden happy ending in The Last Laugh is the director’s way of making fun of the traditional happy ending in films after he was forced into adding the ending on to his original film. The director’s original film fit the bill of German expressionism quite well, valuing self-expression and deep emotions over pleasing the audience. Being forced to please the audience; however, prompted the director to laugh at the traditional idea of a happy ending by making it all too lucky and too rich. The protagonist went from having just lost everything meaningful to him, his job as a doorman and his family, to luckily earning a man’s fortune after he died in his arms. The protagonist proceeds to spend the great fortune on a great feast at which people suddenly regain their respect for him. Too many things go right in a row for the protagonist that it almost seems set up like the comedy actualités and the gags in The General. Although the ending for the protagonist was not set up in the way those gags were, to me, the pure coincidence in everything that happened for the protagonist made the ending too unrealistic to enjoy watching. I did spend most of the time cringing at the consistent flow of food in for the protagonist, especially when he scooped out a plate full of caviar, the stereotypical expensive food that is meant to be enjoyed in small quantities. The cringe from the caviar capped off a successful ending of making fun of the traditional happy ending. As an extremely talented director as proven in the first part of the film, the director must have been incapable of ending the film with such an unwatchable ending unless if he truly meant for that ending.
ReplyDeleteThe alternative "happy" ending in The Last Laugh is meant to be a satirical take on the traditional happy ending. In most cases, the story resolves itself quite nicely. The antagonists are defeated, the heroes end up happier than ever, and the audience is left feeling satisfied with the story’s conclusion. The Last Laugh however, takes this in an entirely new direction. After the first ending where the doorman presumably wastes away in the hotel bathroom, the director makes the deliberate choice to create an ending where the doorman has zero health, money, mental, familial, or job problems. All the doorman does for the entirety of the ending is stuff his face with fancy foods, wasting caviar, meat, and nearly an entire cake while bossing around countless waiters. The point of this ending is to effectively give the audience what they wanted (since the first ending did not fare so well) while making it so disjointed from the original ending that it would be pushed aside and discounted. It is obvious that the director did not want to make this ending, as demonstrated by the ridiculous nature of it. Although it may be a happy ending by definition (the hero wound up filthy rich, happy, and healthy), I do not see it as such. The sheer amount of food being consumed and wasted, the waiters forced to see to the doorman’s every wish, and the quantity of money being thrown around almost follows with the grotesque themes found earlier in the film. It’s disgusting to watch his lack of self-control and uncaring attitude toward the employees, and despite this mimicking their heartless attitude toward him when he was in dire straits, this ending feels uncomfortable; as if it were thrown together in an hour with little thought besides putting a twist on the usual “happy ending.” The point of this ending, while satirical, is practically poking fun at the audience, as if to say, “You want a happy ending? Okay, we can do that. But that does not necessarily mean that YOU'LL be happy about it.”
ReplyDeleteThe point of this ending is simply to show the absurdity of the “always happy ending.” At the time of the film, there was no such thing as a “sad ending.” No movie dared to have a sad ending because writers thought that it would discourage viewers from returning to the theater for their next show. When this writer’s original ending idea was rejected, they were forced to come up with a new idea and create scenes that they did not necessarily want to create. This led to the writer forcing an absurd ending just to get it done. The author created the new ending which simply fixed every problem that the protagonist faced throughout the course of the film in ten minutes just to satisfy the viewers. There was nothing great that the protagonist did or goal that he achieved to get the money. He was simply handed everything he wanted on a silver platter and all of his problems just seemed to magically disappear. The ending although occasionally comedic also did not even have any substance to it and was bordering on unrelated to the rest of the film. It was just a montage of clips showing how luxurious the protagonist’s life was and did not advance the story line in any way. It did not even cover how the protagonist came out of his depression. The writer most likely intended ending of The Last Laugh to be a fantasy that would never actually have realistically happened. It is definitely a cynical commercial ploy just to get the “happy ending” that people wanted.
ReplyDeleteThe new ending of The Last Laugh is a stark contrast with desolate beginning, meant to be a satire of a typical happy ending. In the beginning of the movie, we can see that the protagonist is leading a happy life. However, after he had lost his job, his life became an avalanche, losing his family and becoming a janitor in a bathroom. With the plot being that the once proud doorman loses almost everything in a blink of an eye, it is extremely comical that we see his life turn just around just as fast, winning the lottery of an immense wealth from someone's will by pure chance. In The Last Laugh's original ending, the once proud doorman becoming an outcast was supposed to portray a more realist life situation where nothing could be taken for granted, since often-times, tragedy strikes. Rather than leaving us at a cliffhanger wondering if he would ever work hard and try to make the best of his situation, we are hit by a complete left field where a desolated old man pretty much gains a fortune out of thin air. Rather than being canon, I could see the ending acting as one of the former doorman's dreams when he falls asleep on his bathroom duty. Just like in extreme comedy, the doorman's life turned 180 when he loses his job, and then 360 when he all of a sudden is able to afford a feast with caviar. It seems the director is just poking fun from "how can I make this man's life a living hell" into "what if I turned his hopeless situation into him being the richest man alive?". In contrast to typical happy endings, where the protagonist would work hard, find another job, and re-establish his relations with his family, we get two extremes clashing at each other, our protagonist went from saddest man alive into happiest man alive in a blink of an eye. This ludicrous (and almost idiotic) turn of events that differ from a normal comeback story proves that The Last Laugh was meant to be a satire on a typical happy ending.
ReplyDeleteI think that overall, this ending is a slap in the face to the studio, and to the viewer. By introducing an ending that has almost not relevant to anything that was shown to the viewer during the movie, it is as if the director is introducing this ending out of spite. FOr starters, the ending as a whole just doesn't feel right. The scenes of the doorman being cheerful and happy with his wealth, just a short time after his despair, feels extremely forced. In fact, it feels like a scene from a different movie entirely. My best guess is that the director made this choice intentional out of spite in response to the movie studio and several clues point to that being true. His wealth is portrayed in an almost comic sense while he is eating, perticulary when he his being brought absurd amounts of food, (most of which he doesn't have time to eat) which would make sense if the movie was a comedy. However, the movie was not a comedy and the portrayal of the doorman’s wealth in this way makes me think that the director knew exactly what he was doing when he created this terrible ending. However, if you were to consider the fact that this ending is intentional in it’s terrible nature, then I think the director does wonderfully to create and ironic and mocking ending, that takes the idea of a happy ending, and makes in undesirable to the viewer. This ending, if intentional, is a perfect slap in the fact to the movie studio for their desire to force a happy ending on the viewer, however, if that was not the goal the ending mocks the intelligence of the viewer.
ReplyDeleteThe new ending in The Last Laugh, is the director’s way of making a parody of an original happy ending. While the film was supposed to stop at the first ending, there is a whole other ending that completely derails from the films main point. Throughout the entire film, the old, ragged doorman was virtually in an end of life crisis. He got fired from his job, was made fun of by all of his friends, and started to hallucinate. The director is giving an “I don’t care” to his bosses when creating this ending. The issue with this ending is that it gives very little context and reason for why this is happening to the doorman. In the Last Laugh, they are essentially giving the film an ending that it does not need. This ending does not depict reality nor does it depict anything that makes common sense. When is anyone going to see a man transform from extreme depression to being rich in a couple of days. At the start of this scene, we see the now rich doorman, eating extremely expensive food and throwing away money like it is trash. Clearly, the doorman has never experienced having money before because normal people do not just throw it away like that. The doorman is proving to all of the people in his neighborhood that he is not just a nobody. This ending demonstrates that anything can happen in a movie. The doorman has found his new life and is happy once again.
ReplyDeleteThe Last Laugh's additional ending serves as an artistic mockery of the idea of a happy ending. The original ending of the Last Laugh did not include this ending, and was added only when the producers of the film told the director that he needed to add such an ending. We can see throughout the film that it is not supposed to be a 'happy' movie, and it focuses on the struggle of an ageing bellhop losing his job, being re-assigned, and the social struggles that associate with it. When the director was told to add a happy ending to the film, he added an outlandish idea that does not associate with the films ideas or themes in any way, and it was a spur of the moment kind of ending. This could likely be because the director tried to convey that it does not fit with the rest of the film, and almost seems forced. This could lead those who have seen the film to become suspicious of the ending, and realize that either it was not supposed to be there or that it was not the directors original vision; in other words, it allows the director to salvage his original ideas in the final cut of the film meanwhile those watching can pick up the change, and receive the intended message of the film. The mockery aspect of the ending goes to show that not all films have a happy ending, and often times those without happy endings can even be better.
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