"The Mist" Controversy

 

This first: I have not seen the ending to Frank Darabont's The Mist. 

Nor do I plan to. 

I do, however, know what happens, and haven't escaped being scarred by it, not completely, given some Internet stills and clips.

I have tried to avoid disturbing endings ever since Cujo (the novel).

 And I received fair warning about The Mist infamous ending in the form of an interview with Frank Darabont by Hans-Ake Lija, Swedish King scholar in his book Lija's Library. 

Though I don't recall much about King's original novella, it was open ended, and there was reportedly a slight glimmer of hope at the end, something I'll get back to later. 

Not surprisingly though, SK absolutely loved the ending Darabont gave it, reportedly expressing the opinion that he'd thought of it first (Darabont had managed to beat SK at his own game, you see), and SK is quoted as having said there should be a new law that condemns anyone "to be hung by the neck until dead" for giving away the ending. 

He's kidding (I hope), because Darabont essentially did just that during his interview with Lija! What he said was that he took some elements present in the story, and took them to their logical conclusion. Protagonist David Drayton, his young son Billy and three other people are driving through the Mist, thinking it's the end of all humanity, and David sees no way out, other than being eaten by the monsters. He also has four bullets in his gun, but there's five of them. In the end, the mist clears, and the military does arrive. But it's a terribly black and tragic ending anyway. 

Now really...how much more do you really need to fill in to see just EXACTLY what happens?

I have rented and watched The Mist more than once, always stopping right before the end. I do not own it. I do not own the novel Cujo either, nor the film of, nor the novelization of Warlock. All of these things are too disturbing to even own.

The ending of The Mist reminds of the end to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo drinks poison, thinking Juliet is dead, and if he'd only waiting a few more seconds the ending would have been totally different. I used to compare SK and Shakespeare a lot, because they both wrote tragedies, and both killed kids very frequently. 

It's a known fact that King writes to exorcise his personal demons. I'm not that sure about Darabont, though. Like King himself, he's wanting us to think about the human conditions, and the personal choices we make by identifying with the protagonist. But he also seems a bit sadistic with his audience, wanting to spring this pessimistic ending upon them, after getting them rooting for David and Billy to survive. I'd basically say that differentiates him from King, and makes him a bit more like Robert Cormier. But with this film, King basically says he wanted for audience to see this film cold, with no hint of what the ending will be! One thing I kind of which after I first read Cujo, was a warning was given for those like myself at the time, who were not yet familiar with King.

There is another thing about the film that I've initially wondered about, and others have as well, and that is that it conveys a possibility that (I'm assuming) Darabont and King never intended. Mrs. Carmody, the religious fanatic character that everyone hates, tries to sacrifice Billy to God, believing that shedding a young child's blood will put an end to the mist. Carmody dies, to relief and satisfaction of the audience. Then after Billy does die later on, the Mist parts and the military arrives. Coincidence?

Again, Darabont probably didn't want to suggest that Carmody was right all along, but it's certainly  a possibility one can draw. 

Here is a quote from Darabont during his interview, that is so opposite the general tendency for the audience to root for the protagonist, that it is virtually Addamsian:

"I think it would have been lame to tack on a conclusion that let the main character and the audience off the hook. What would even be? Suddenly the mist parts, and the National Guard is handing them coffee and donuts and putting blankets on their shoulders? How obvious and not real. It makes me cringe."

But Frank! The mist did part, didn't it? And isn't that pretty much the way it turned out for THESE people, below? I don't think it's too much of a stretch that they got coffee and donuts, do you? Is it unrealistic that it could have happened to Billy?

If you don't know what's going on above, the woman the camera is focusing on is the the one who ran off from the grocery into the mist because she was terrified for her two children, who are now with her, the three of them safe and sound. Part of my point is that it's not realism that Darabont chose to end it the way he did for David and Billy. 

But the hitch is that Darabont obviously did NOT intend the above clip to be any kind of silver lining. His purpose here is to make the tragic ending sting even more tragic. It is turpentine soaked into the whip to make the sting all the more fierce. 

And that really got me thinking hard: why should this be? 

Here we have a mother two children who have survived perhaps deadly encounters with other-dimensional horrors. She behaved in a way that often gets horror movie victims killed. Yet here she is. 

Here's the rub: Suppose instead of sticking with David, the movie had been her story. Suppose we'd followed her into the perils of the mist, saw her battling to find and save her youngsters.

The ending would no longer be bleak, not even if we acknowledged that something dreadful had befallen the Draytons. Why?

It would not have been their story. 

So why is supposed to bleak? They're not the protagonists. We haven't been led to care about them.

What Darabont is doing above is rubbing it in faces of the audience that three characters they didn't give a flying flip about survived.

So how could you give The Mist a better ending? Just don't think about David or Billy, and imagine what this woman and her kids might have gone through--a story of survival and triumph!

I've wondered about characters that I've often wanted to survive (some of them kids), and didn't, but very few other viewers or readers or cared about at all, and I've often wondered why. Once such infamous example of is Kevin Donaldson or the movie Warlock. Sure, Kev is made a bit intentionally annoying, but mostly it's because he's anything but a protagonist. He's just thrown in as a victim, and nothing else. The audience generally doesn't care, and the movie doesn't encourage them to care. And it doesn't matter in the slightest that Kevin is a young kid. So don't believe that nonsense about killing off kids being taboo, as I've explained here:

https://atheismvsfaith.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-problem-of-kevin.html

Now I'm very often as "guilty" of this noncaring attitude as anyone else. Particularly in the novel Cujo. I just really didn't care much about the Cambers. I wouldn't have liked it if Bret died, but the character I really cared about was Tad. 

I did care about Kevin, certainly, and I'd call his death almost as disturbing as Tad's, but that's because, in part, the movie seemed trying to take the side of evil over innocence, and there was the whole religious thing that Kevin was "tainted" because he wasn't a believing Christian, and all of that. 

But aside from that, in short, it's the protagonists we tend to care about. Billy and Theodore are the central children in these stories.  

And for that reason, you've just got to hand it to Darabont. It doesn't really take guts to kill off kids per se.

But this kind of ending, well, love or hate it, that takes guts. 

POSTSCRIPT: There is also the fact that this woman pleads with the others to go with her to rescue her children. No one does, not even David. This opens the possibility that David is perhaps being punished, which does add a moral layer to this, one that might be in keeping with other horror films, but that's topic for another time. 

POST POST SCRIPT: I stated above that I'd get back to the part about the SK story being open-ended. What happens is that David hears something on the radio suggesting a town called Harmon might have survivors. They aren't out of gas in the book, and they head in that direction. That's a clear sign that David has not given up at this point. It's totally different than the movie. Now, going by what SK once said regarding the move version of Cujo's ending, wouldn't the film version of the Mist be "make-believe," as well? It would be no more or less canonical than any film version that deviated from its source. The problem is that SK's original is open ended. Still, what's hinted at here is markedly different from the movie. It looks to me more like the start of an entire novel, where there will indeed be other survivors, and the closure, bleak or otherwise won't happen for a while. This is enough to either regard the movie ending is simply false, or that it exists on a separate timeline than the short story. 

Another thing: Regarding the possibility that Mrs. Carmody might have been right, it seems that there are two basic possibilities. On one hand, the mist parted a little too soon. The millitary had to have already taken care of the basic problem, sealed the dimensional doorway, or whatever, before David killed everyone but himself. The survivors in the truck had to have already been rescued before they got to him. On the other hand though, God is thought to exist outside of time. He can cause both past and present to come into being at once. So once David committed the act, the story could have opened a whole other timeline so to speak. So which one is real?