We need more movies where the bad guys win

The Vanishing

Some people love movies as pure distraction and escapism, in fact, my hunch tells me the majority of moviegoers probably do. Not me though. I like a good disturbing ending now and then, I guess because that feels more real to me. In the real world, the bad guys win. They win most of the time. They're winning right now as we speak.

This week, I revisited the classic spaghetti western The Great Silence. Spoiler alert -- it ends with a massacre perpetrated by the villain (a delightfully evil Klaus Kinski). The hero is gunned down and the feeling you're left with is unsettling -- but it's a powerful feeling.

Part of why Chinatown works so well is its devastating conclusion. Yes, there's the classic line -- "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown" -- but there's also the fact that the heroine is of the story is brutally killed and a pedophile has ridden off into the sunset with another likely victim. 

I can't remember the last time I saw a movie with an ending like that -- I guess Gone Girl. Of course, everyone remembers the ending of Seven if you've seen

it -- it's one of the best gut punches in movie history.

I'm talking about sad endings like Terms of Endearment -- although they can be cathartic too. I'm talking about finales that are brutally bleak like The Parallax View.

My favorite movie decade -- the 1970s -- was the peak of this kind of final scene. Think the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Again, these endings end up being the most memorable things about an already fantastic movie. Why? Because they did the unexpected. In the movies, we expect the hero to win or if they perish, they at least do it heroically.

This is part of why The Empire Strikes Back is widely revered as the greatest Star Wars film. As a fan,  you always remember how mind-blowing the Darth Vader reveal is. But more importantly the movie ends on an uncertain note. The rebels have escaped, but it's a hollow victory. And Vader is no less powerful than he was in the beginning.

Then there are the movies where the bad guy gets away like The Silence of the Lambs, The Usual Suspects or The French Connection. That conclusion makes those movies more haunting and they linger more in your imagination because they're relatively unresolved.

The godfather of all these kinds of movies is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, whose shocking finale still blows my mind some twenty years after I first saw it in college. I consider Vertigo the master's best film, in part because it has a more realistic ending than most of his work -- albeit after a prototypically complex plot about mistaken identity and obsession.

Had Vertigo ended with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in a loving embrace, it wouldn't be as special a movie, It would be a beautiful looking curio.

It inspired every thriller in its wake -- including the great foreign film The Vanishing, which has, arguably, the most disturbing defeat of a hero I've ever seen in a movie. I won't spoil that one for you, just see it for yourself.

I'm sure, like me, you have a lot of time on your hands.