I was wondering about something. Have you ever seen a film with an unhappy ending?

Now... By that I don't really mean 'unhappy'. There are loads of films where the hero dies at the end or everyone ends-up in floods of tears or whatever - but in just about every case I can think of the film ends on a note of moral positiveness or hope.

The whole cast may be killed-off or whatever but you generally find that there's a sense of catharsis or denoument or a prevailing sense of hope for the future, or a moral lesson to be learnt.

Even films like 'American Beauty' which documents the gradual crumbling of the facade of domestic happiness tend to finish with a sense of hope... Our hero may be dead but we realise they did all love each other, there was a chance of reconcilliation with morality or 'god' or whatever.

It occurred to me that I've never seen a film with an entirely negative view, given the number of manic depressives and 'look aren't I woeful' arty types in the world, you would have thought someone might have managed to create something that purposefully set-out to communicate a sense of hopelessness to its audience?

You could argue that such a film would be - by means of example - a great advertisment for hopefullness, but I think an intelligent audience should be able to decide exactly how a piece of art or film affects them. An example - look at Fight Club, one its major themes was the exploration of destructiveness and self-destruction.

The concept of casting-off things like hope and growth - of embracing the fact that once you've sunk to a certain point there's nothing left in the world that can harm you. I was just starting to get interested when we discovered the whole thing was the result of an 'aberration', a schizophrenic mindfuck.

And, once again, it's the good side (Edward Norton) that wins-out in the end.

So is Hollywood too scared to actually give us a movie that is prepared to give us movies that are confident enough to leave the film on an unhappy and downbeat ending?

I for one would appreciate it if they treated us with enough respect to do so.

Si Spurious