Endings

As always, getting out of things is a trickier business than getting in.

There are rituals for getting into a work of art, but a lot of these happen outside the work. For every art 'event', there is the lead-up - getting dressed-up, entering the theatre, shuffling in the seats, waiting expectantly. The lights dim. The preparations can seem at times to be as elaborate as those for a shuttle launch, and I think this is right, because a certain transportation is meant to take place. When I read a book, itself having no built-in rituals, I sometimes create my own: I inspect the cover, turn it around in my hands, glance at each of the mostly blank pages that precede Page 1, the dedication, the publisher; then I read the first line very slowly.

But, having gotten in, it is the work's responsibility to get us out. This is a tremendous burden, and the consequences of its failure are too horrible to speak aloud. I get this feeling of dread all the time when I sit in student recitals, and a note slips - the kid looks worried - and I know he is thinking the same thing as me and everyone else in the audience, which is shit, shit, what would happen if I just stopped? What would happen? Would it be something worse than death? No - but I had to think about that for a second.

As I wrote in the introduction earlier, an ending is a place where a movie becomes movie, a novel becomes novel, where the art becomes about itself and shows us its artifice. Or, if you think of the content or story as artificial - its truth. Either way, having got us in, the work has to carefully extricate us from the world it has created, absorbed us into. There is no better example of this than the ubiquitous zoom-out from a city at the end of the movie. We literally leave the world the characters inhabit, and where their faces once filled the screen, they now disappear, tiny, tinier, until we can't possibly care about them any more as real people and can step gingerly out of our seats and into our lives.

There are two ways to read this. We feel genuinely, emotionally connected to art; the art world becomes our world. To return us, art has to show us its bag of tricks and say "Ha!" - we were duped. We forget that we are watching a movie, but now, at the end, we must remember it is only a movie; artifice, then, is a severing tool. The other way to read it - and this is both nobler and more desperate - is that art creates fragile worlds, ones that are easily burst. Art cannot stand up to the pitiless force of reality; it has tremendous power, but only in its own domain. Against actual lives, actual problems, its basic contradiction of reality and unreality would cause it to implode, not because it is less, but because its subject is completely different. Artifice, in this reading, is a buffer or a bridge; it protects art from the contaminating presence of reality by allowing us to leave the work behind, safely, and whole.

My favourite example of an ending is the one used in American Beauty, which is nearly preposterous in its artificiality but necessary to counterbalance the harrowing emotional impact of the movie's climax. Here we have the classic zoom-out from an American suburb, overlaid with the equally classic voice-over of the protagonist (the return to narrator being a borrowed marker of artifice from literature) - except Kevin Spacey was killed not five minutes before, and so is now apparently narrating after his death. But it works. As the camera zooms out, you slowly become aware of the edges of the TV (or movie screen), the room you are in, the people with you, the time of day, the light in the window. Half an hour before, you could have been in that suburb. But you already have your own suburb, and at the end of the day there can only be one.

Another example: musicologists Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker think they have smelled something shifty in Mozart; they say that the ending of Act II to The Marriage of Figaro reveals a discontinuity between music and action. Here, things are as confusing in the plot as they are likely to become - everyone is running around on stage, no one knows what the hell is going on. And yet the music is coming to a crash-bang dominant-tonic close - the epitome of musical certainty. A&P say, maybe music and action don't always have to correspond to one another. But I think that correspondence is still happening in the Act II finale, though it is not a correspondence of plot and music. It is a correspondence of music and the audience's relation with a work of art. We see that things are getting hairy on stage, but there is also an intermission coming, and we need to be ready. If the music ended on a note that reflected the stage, what would happen? It would end unexpectedly, we would be confused, and we would certainly not be ready to re-enter the work in the third Act. There is in fact a specific moment, as there is near the end of nearly every finale, when you know the work will be over within a minute or two. I can point to it exactly in Figaro: I always get caught up in the excitement of the Act II finale, and then there is a moment when the music suddenly jumps into a faster tempo, and I think Ah yes, it's almost time for the bathroom.

Are these codes learned, from watching lots of movies with zoom-outs and lots of operas that end with a crash-bang dominant-tonic? Probably, but that doesn't make them less real, and we need them besides. Think of these as tropes or devices used by artists to control a reader's position in relation to the work: close, middle, far? At the endings of things, I think most artists would say that they don't want the reader too close, where things are too specific and too much like life, or too far, where the work is held at arm's length and loses its relevance.

Instead: from a point of immersion, where the reader is in the world of the work, you pull back, up, and as you rise out of the work the universality of art stretches its relevance across the skin of the earth, encompassing everything. Everyone who has experienced this will know what I mean, and will not need me to describe it; it is an emergence, a moment that feels like rebirth or renewal. For a few delirious seconds after the work is finished, you are suspended halfway between the your world and the world of art, and touch both. Sometimes, I feel like art exists only for these moments.