Easter Egg Ironies

In some movies there's the ending everybody wants to believe, and there's the ending the movie makers insert like an inconspicuous Easter egg, in the tradition of computer games. I'll bet you missed the concealed ironic twists below.

The Prestige: As the Christian Bale character walks away from the scene after murdering the Hugh Jackman character, another Hugh Jackman character in the shadows is shown briefly, hiding in one of the water chambers. He had duplicated himself in expectation of being killed.

Terminator 2: The "good" terminator battles the liquid metal terminator, who immobilizes the good terminator by trapping his arm in machinery. When Sarah Connors is about to be killed by the liquid metal terminator, the good terminator appears, a stump where his arm used to be and a grenade launcher in his other arm. After he shoots the liquid metal terminator and it falls into the vat of molten metal, destroying it, the good terminator takes the cyborg hand the previous terminator in movie #1 had left behind, and lowers himself with the hand into the molten metal. However, his own arm, the one he had just torn off, is not with him. Thus the second movie ends just as the first one, with terminator technology left behind to reverse engineer and bring about the rise of the machines. Later movies in the series were not directed by James Cameron, and did not capitalize on this concealed irony.

12 Monkeys: At the conclusion, when the mad scientist finds his seat on the plane, one of the scientists from the future is already in the adjacent seat. The mad scientist asks her what her business is, and she says, "Insurance." It is made clear at that point that the Bruce Willis character, at that very moment shot dead by airport security, has been set up from the beginning to instigate the gun scene in the airport as a diversion, thus facilitating the mad scientist's dash to the plane when security was distracted. The scientists from the future were presumed to be averting the global pandemic that created their timeline, caused by the engineered virus sown by the mad scientist in the journey around the world upon which he was embarking. The ending made clear, however, that the scientists from the future were "insuring" that the mad scientist carried out his mission, thus setting into motion the events that resulted in their world.

I have never come across any references to these three covert endings. The movie critics certainly missed them entirely. A movie's structure and momentum carries it to the conclusion people prefer, and the audience forcibly fails to notice anything contradictory.

Rod Howard's commentary on the Beautiful Mind disc remarks repeatedly how test audiences resisted any reveal that the Russell Crowe character, based on John Nash, was suffering schizophrenic delusions. There were several reveals in succession, but many in the audience still held out for the possibility that he really wasn't nuts and that the government really had masterminded a coverup. The final reveal was beyond anyone's power of denial, when the character says to his wife that she can't see his friend because he is wearing an invisibility cloak. (The movie was released in 2001, the same year as the first Harry Potter book, which introduces his invisibility cloak.)

Many people with me in the audience for a showing of Shutter Island exited the theater looking dazed. In a very rare display of public post-movie discourse, they gathered in little groups trying to figure out what happened at the end. The ending isn't confusing at all as story logic, but the audience could not accept what they had witnessed and they had no alternative. Leonardo DiCaprio's character clearly decided that without his mental illness to protect him from the truth, he would rather have a lobotomy than suffer horrible memories. The audience when I saw the movie could not accept this, and thus chose to be confused rather than suffer a horrible truth. I thought Scorsese very clever to create for the audience a fate parallel to the fate of the main character.

Stage magic uses diversion to fool the eye, but movies can use clear logic and self evident visuals to inform the eye, and the audience will still insist on fooling itself. The ultimate irony is that audiences see what they want to see, not necessarily what the storyteller presents to them.