Controversial endings, from ‘Lost’ to ‘Saltburn’: When is a surprise twist too much?

Thousands of fans are anxiously waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish writing The Winds of Winter, the sixth and penultimate installment of his novel series A Song of Ice and Fire. Every chance they get, the readers (and the viewers of Game of Thrones, which is based on his books) rush the author, who on more than one occasion has apologized for not being faster. All the expectation revolves around the fact that the last two installments of his saga will offer what screenwriting masters like Robert McKee refer to in their manuals as the climax and the subsequent resolution of all the plots that started in the previous novels. In other words, everybody is asking Martin to finish underpinning his narrative structure with a satisfactory ending in his last two books.

Although Martin is an expert in transgressing the norms of contemporary fiction, such as the one that says that the hero has to win every single time (he has killed some of his most charismatic characters), everything indicates that, whatever the outcome, if it is taking so long it is because he is making meticulous calculations. It is a heavy responsibility: if he does not want to disappoint millions of fans, every detail must perfectly fall into place in the last pages of his books, just as the canons of fantasy literature dictate.

Unlike real life, which is random and subject to uncertainty, everything that happens in fiction follows (or rejects) certain rules, and some of the most rigid are those that apply to endings, perhaps because a bad ending can cause all the virtues of a work to be immediately forgotten. The question not only affects aspiring writers or screenwriters; it matters to all the readers or viewers who will be concerned about the fate — that force in which we no longer believe for ourselves — of the characters they have been accompanying for some time.

Examples abound. Perhaps the most paradigmatic is the ending of Lost, which to this day, more than thirteen years after the last episode was aired, continues to be analyzed, defended and criticized. Much more recently, Saltburn offered an ending that annoyed many viewers who considered it way too obvious for their taste.

The death of tragedy and the life of spoilers

The American writer Flannery O’Connor recounted that her aunt used to get angry whenever she finished reading one of her stories and no one in it had died or gotten married. Poetic justice, a wedding or the apotheosis (picture everyone dancing at the end of Shrek 2) are the three most common types of happy ending, the most frequent kind and the one that — to please those who think like O’Connor’s aunt — is often imposed by entertainment industry executives.

As noted by the critic George Steiner, Greek or Shakespearean tragedies, which end with the death of the hero and present a fatalistic vision of humanity, subject to arbitrary gods that impose unjust punishments, do not resonate well with modern sensibilities. Not even contemporary dystopias — full of apocalyptic elements — could be considered true tragedies, because they always contain some glimmer of hope. But, in addition to the positive, negative or even tragic emotional charge, when an ending is proposed, it must be decided whether it will be open or closed, and whether or not it will include a surprise or a final effect. This resource is used by films like The Others or Planet of the Apes, in which a final discovery gives new meaning to everything that came before. The alternative, however, is simpler and less effective: to leave the plot unresolved, or cut in the middle of the climax.

The final effect is also a common technique of the short story. Borges defended that a story must have two plots: one false, vaguely shown, and the real one, which will remain concealed until the end. He, like Hitchcock, was able to combine ambiguity and surprise, closing almost all of his works with that unexpected twist. It is precisely this balance between necessity and surprise what playwright Juan Mayorga defends when one of his characters gives the following advice to a teenager that is beginning to write: “Do you know what the two qualities of a good ending are? The ending must be such that readers say to themselves: I didn’t expect it, and yet, it couldn’t have ended any other way. That’s the good ending. Necessary and unpredictable. Inevitable and surprising. You have to find it, an ending that either comforts the reader, or hurts them.”

But in addition to being practically unachievable, Mayorga’s advice (just like the examples of Borges and Hitchcock) belongs to a cultural universe that did not have to deal with spoilers. As the American writer and critic Emily St. James pointed out in an article published in Vox, current narratives — especially series — are based on continuous plot twists and endless surprises. These shocks drive compulsive consumption, for fear that someone will reveal them to us ahead of time. We refer to the famous binges that the platforms seek at all costs, even resorting to very careful leaks of the plot. We are forced to beat the spoilers, St. James complains, as the industry, terrified of losing money, tells us the same story over and over again, while we pretend it is new.

Open works against the reactionary spectator

Many children always ask for the same story when they go to bed, the one whose details and outcome they know very well. That repetition helps them fall asleep peacefully. Vladimir Propp was a Russian anthropologist born in 1895 who, amazed by how different traditional stories caused very similar effects in the children who heard them, studied the morphology of these stories and found certain common structures. Propp determined 31 narrative functions, ranging from “interdiction” to “punishment” and “arrival.” Although not all of them are always present, numerous studies have found these functions extracted from the Russian oral tradition in the great hits of American commercial fiction, from The Matrix to Star Wars.

Thus, all fictions share certain mechanisms, although, as the writer Agustín Fernández Mallo points out, they must go unnoticed by the reader or viewer. “Showing the seams of a narrative never works. It is a sign of lack of experience. Unless it is done intentionally, to create a specific rhetorical effect. There are fictions that work very well by explicitly showing the seams, but they tend to be works that reflect on the very fact of narrating.”

As for the endings, Mallo does not consider them to be so relevant. “What matters is that the work in general is open, that it breathes throughout, from the first page, as an organic entity, that it has life from beginning to end, regardless of whether it is open or closed.” Elena López Riera, filmmaker and doctor in audiovisual communication, agrees, and adds that she is concerned about the growing conservatism of the industry: “More than the matter of endings, what I’m interested in is how commercial cinema is increasingly reactionary,” says the director and screenwriter of El agua (The water). “Even in the so-called auteur cinema there is some fear, very reactionary stories are being created. Very diverse sources remain untapped, such as oral literature or poetry. There are also other narrative models that I like to explore and that have to do with repetition, with dispersion, with forgetting, with the reinvention of motifs, with certain imperfections...”

Another thing that both Mallo and Riera agree on (along with most contemporary authors) is that, regardless of the type of ending, their creative processes do not start with a meticulous project like the one Poe recommended or the ones that, taking different metrics into account and with the intervention of a commercial department, production companies develop. To enjoy their work, those who write with their sights set beyond the bottom line also seek to surprise themselves with their own texts.

“I always shoot three or four possible endings, because I don’t plan before shooting,” explains Riera, “perhaps because I come from the world of documentaries. I know that I will not find the end, or the beginning, until I get to the editing room. I believe that the film itself will reveal its ending to me. I try to leave those openings. I like to approach work with a dimension of surprise for myself, because knowing what is going to happen in life and at work seems boring to me. It has less to do with the final object that people will see and more to do with how I approach the process.”

So most creators do not attach as much importance to the outcomes as those readers and viewers who are obsessed with spoilers and surprises. Riera says that, as a reader, she appreciates everything from Henry James’ closed endings to those in which all kinds of interpretations are possible, but insists that what is concerning is that “the final twist becomes a banal excuse for doing nothing. Or that it becomes a norm and that the industry and the viewers begin to see variations as a sign of danger.”

“In the so-called real life we look for magical things, things that seem like fiction, we look every day for things that surprise us and take us out of the mechanical routine,” Mallo reflects. “And in fiction, the opposite actually happens: for them to be credible, for them to seem plausible, we want them to resemble real life as much as possible.” A difficult balance that has been speculated about for approximately 2,300 years. This debate has no end yet — and if it does, it is an open one.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition