Thursday, February 7, 2013
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?
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The happy, epilogue ending, turns a movie translated as The Last Man into The Last Laugh as the doorman becomes happy and rich after losing his job and becoming a shell of a man. The purpose of this added ending was to turn a depressing film into a happier one, though it is through unrealistic circumstances. The director was forced to add a happier ending, so he parodies the idea and gave the doorman a fantasy beyond his wildest dreams. However, this parody ending illustrates the severe divide between the rich and the working class in Germany at that time.
ReplyDeleteBy the realistic ending of the movie, the doorman was in decline and his demotion had hit hard. He was not the proud, confident doorman, but an aging, depressed bathroom attendant. In fact, until the epilogue played, I assumed the doorman was going to die in his new post, because of his declining state. However, once the ending played, it shows the stark contrast between his life as a rich man compared to his job as a poor doorman. The interactions between guests at the Atlantic and the doorman are short and forced. Once he is demoted, the doorman had awkward encounters with the guests, who didn’t want to interact with him more than they had to. As a rich man, the doorman almost did a full 180 because he didn’t interact with the staff much. However, he understood his roots and invited the night doorman to join him in a lavish meal. A rich fantasy for the doorman would involve such lavish accommodations while eating at the restaurant in the hotel that demoted him, earning him the so-called last laugh.
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ReplyDelete: To me, the added ending of The Last Laugh, appears at first glance to contrast the tone of the rest of the movie and ‘inverts’ the trajectory of the increasingly depressing plot. However, upon further reflection, I believe that the ending very much adds to the same message that the rest of the film aims at conveying in a highly ironic manner. On the one hand this movie seems to highlight the unfairness of the working class society at the time as a cause of the old man's downfall, but on the other hand his stress is equally--if not to a greater extent--produced both by exaggerated perceptions of old age, and also the pressure of his family and village. The epilogue takes this idea to the extreme, portraying the old man in a sort of “victorious” manner, even though in my opinion, he really lost the battle for happiness and instead gained a surface-level feeling of contentment according to the social code of the time.
ReplyDeleteAt the first signs of aging, the old man is pulled into the manager’s office and demoted to the job usually reserved for the eldest and most sickly of the hotel staff. The demotion is only one scene in the entire movie, though, and we do not really see the manager again. So the management, as a source of stress leading to the old man’s downfall cannot be the only cause. The fault additionally lies with the old man’s village.
In order to understand the origins of the old man’s stress from the community, it is important to keep “Schadenfreude”—pleasure derived from seeing another person’s misfortune—in mind. After all, if the local hero gets demoted, everyone is suddenly on the same level.
This leads us to the epilogue where the hotel dining room and the old man are portrayed with similar cinematic techniques as the beginning of the film. We first see the doorman with a traveling camera shot sweeping us through the bright and bustling hotel lobby. The ending is a recapitulation of this tone with the smiling rich man eating a feast fit for kings and briefly pitying his fellow night watchman. The epilogue also shows the old man suddenly in good physical and emotional health (He looks years younger). This idea—that age is a function of your mind and that happiness is dependent on social class—shows the old man in almost a pathetic light. If the old man were to truly have the last laugh, he would—in my opinion—overcome the pressure of both society at large and his own community by finding contentment as a bathroom attendant (no job too small!).
I would certainly argue that the director was the one with the last laugh in this situation.
The last scene of the Last Laugh is not truly the last scene at all, the director had intended to end it on a previous, utterly sad, scene but the studio wouldn’t let him. They wanted him to put in a happy ending that, apparently, they felt would uplift the audience and not leave them so gloomy and dissatisfied. However, to even a casual viewing, the ending really ruins the effect of the movie; which can ultimately be seen as a critique of the seemingly heartless mechanization of working class jobs. The happy ending thus is a situation where the director has the last laugh on the argument with the studio. As if to say: ‘You really want a happy ending? Fine, is This what you wanted?’ Had the director been truly serious about making a happy ending, there are a myriad of other, believable, ways in which he could have believably done so. For instance, when all hope and happiness has faded, his family might return and accept him again. While this would have been an uncharacteristic turn of events, it is well within the realm of possibility. Instead, he sarcastically creates an ending so miraculous, so impossibly happy that it is easily recognized for what it is and that things are just as gloomy as they were. This ending really is too good to be true; perhaps it is but the highest possible fantasy conceivable by a man in the lowest possible psychological state. The impossibly happy ending also provides a social critique of classes of the time. On the one hand is a depressed, poor man whose job it is to clean the hands of people in a hotel restroom, while on the other is a happy, wealthy man who is able to engorge himself and wantonly spend money on luxuries.
ReplyDeleteThe additional ending is the stereotypical happy ending. The main character miraculously becomes happy and has no more worries or stresses. In The Last Laugh, the doorman gets a large sum of money from an American millionaire and can suddenly afford to eat and drink as he pleases; constantly smiling and worrying about nothing. Whereas previously, he had been demoted at work from doorman to bathroom attendant, which had greatly demoralized and debilitated him. The original ending had fit better with the tone of the whole of the film because it summed up the overall depressed feel of the doorman. Although as a class we agreed the first ending needed improvements, like more closure for example, but by having him sulk in the bathroom is something realistic for a man in his situation and for a man feeling the way he did.
ReplyDeleteI think the new ending is more like a parody of a happy ending because of how unrealistic it is. It is not believable that a man who was so depressed could all of a sudden become so happy. It brings up the question of what was actually important to the doorman, money or his job, which could also signify his dignity. The original ending fits with his sadness and loss and continues with the same general tone. One gets the sense that the doorman really was upset due to his demotion.
I am not sure what the political, or cultural views of the filmmakers were, but from my perspective, the ending of the Last Laugh seemed more like a parody of a happy ending than an authentic one. At first it seemed feasible that this could be a happy ending, when the doorman triumphantly re-entered the hotel with a ton of money, and sat down to a five-star meal. But when you step back and look at the situation, it seems that the ending is more of a mockery of false happy endings, as well as a criticism of materialism as false happiness. When the man was sitting down to the nice dinner I was thinking "This is nice, but wouldn't he be much happier if he was enjoying this meal with his family, and his newly wed daughter?' In my opinion, the ending is more of a parody because a man is depicted as completely happy because he got a fortune of money, even though his family and his self-respect are gone. I think that this could be said about the entire film. The old man loses his job and is demoted. This is understandably a blow to his pride and self-respect as a man. He no longer sees himself as the respected door man he once was. However this problem, which is significant, dwarfs the fact that his whole family walked out on him afterward. It seemed like this was a fact just mentioned in passing, then the film returned to the narrative about his job. By perhaps overemphasizing the significance of his job, and barely covering his family life, the film seems to be offering a narrative on materialism. This is just emphasized even more with the over-the-top ending.
ReplyDeleteI feel the point of this ending was solely to give the audience the happy ending. I think that audiences may have had a negative reaction to a film where all that happens is the main character loses more and more throughout the film, compared to this drastic change of events that occurs. Unfortunately, this new ending seemed to take away from the film because it was originally a look into the life of an everyday person who had to suffer great hardship and I feel that in itself was a spectacular movie because the viewer felt the emotions and was drawn into the movie more by having those emotions with the main character. The new ending takes all of that emotion away and also takes away the realistic qualities of the film and transforms the film into a fantasy; sure, some rich guy could die in the bathroom and leave him with all of his money, but it isn’t really realistic. I had initially thought that it was a dream sequence, which speaks to how the new ending seemed like a fantasy. In addition to changing how the viewers’ emotions changed, it also changed the genre of the film in my opinion. Until this new ending the film did not seem to be a comedy to me, and felt more like a film of the everyday man. Considering that the movie didn’t become a true comedy until the final scene really takes away from the film because almost all of the difficulties faced by the main character earlier in film are forgotten about because the viewer is now pulled into this fantasy where the bathroom steward becomes an incredibly wealthy man, and is simply sitting around eating a ridiculous amount of food. During the new ending I was almost waiting for something tragic to happen so that the ending would actually fit the film. I believe that this new ending should have been left out of the film.
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ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, I think that the ending of the The Last Laugh depicts a parody of a happy ending. It seems to me that the director was making fun of the stereotypical happy endings usually shown in film. The original end to the movie, where the devastated doorman has lost everything, is more realistic opposed to the fantasy of the doorman sporadically acquiring money from a stranger who just happened to die in his arms. I feel that the director added the new ending because of the poor reviews received based on the tragic, final scene, of the movie, and because of this he made the ending cynical towards the difference between social classes. While the last added scene depicts a jolly, easygoing and most importantly wealthy doorman, adored by most of the population, the underlying message is not that. While the scene depicts the doorman feasting on continuous plates of food, and sipping wine and champagne from the bottle, I noticed a difference on the way he was treated by the people around him from each ending. In the first tragic ending, the doorman is treated as scum and not given the time of day. No one seemed to care about his troubles while he wasted away in the downstairs bathroom. In the second and more upbeat ending, he is treated beautifully because of his limitless money and generosity in distributing his money to anyone passing by. This emphasizes the class differences with the underlying message that the more money you have the better you are going to be treated in that day and age.
At the end of The Last Laugh, I was definitely laughing and appreciating this additional ending. Many will contradict my opinion but I believe that this ending was a happy ending. If we look back at the movie and the way it was supposed to end, when the man hunches his way back to his stool in the bathroom under the hotel where everything amazing is happening and nothing is happening for him, we are saddened and feel grief for this man. Even though he isn't sitting on the streets begging for money, we are almost given that sense, that everything wrong has happened and there is no way of getting out of this hole, literally. People may say it is a parody of a happy ending because it mocks a true happy ending but I see it as making fun of the character, a tall heavy set man who is shown to eat 4 tables worth of food. This is an important part of the end of the movie and can be seen as a mockery because he is blowing away the fortune he made on food that he never imagined dining too. I think there is a deeper meaning to this ending, especially since he works as a bathroom attendant, I see this as a message to people. No matter if you're working in the bathroom with nothing, there is still always hope and reason to be happy. Without hope, miracles like that wouldn't have happened and the way he was eating, maybe the next time he uses the bathroom he'll end up in the same position, having a heart attack and passing a long his fortune to someone else who thought they couldn't have it any worse. Another important thing that is overlooked by all the food and drinks the man is devouring is the end when he goes to the bathroom and is mingling with the bathroom attendant. He sneaks him a cigar (which any man would enjoy) and without saying anything because of the whole silent film thing toasts a cigar to miracles and never giving up hope. I think there is definitely a deeper message within the alternate extended ending of the film that gives off more than just a mockery of a normal happy ending.
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