The "Gainax ending" - Brilliance or stupidity?

[Trepidation]

If you don't know what a Gainax ending is, go here
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GainaxEnding
for explanations and examples. (Pay attention if you want to avoid spoilers)

Not necessarily limited to shows produced by Studio Gainax, but they are (In)famous for it with End Of Evangelion being among the most famous. Do you think it is a brilliant way to inspire debate, or just a stupid way to end a show after the writers have stopped trying or ran out of funds?

 

[Kuu]

False dichotomy.

Clearly it is both.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

Depends on the ending.

 

[Cognisant]

"End Of Evangelion" made perfect sense to me

Why does an "ending" have to be conclusive or cathartic?
Sometimes the lack of an ending or some weird unsatisfying ending is actually the whole point of it, y'know if the protagonist doesn't die why should the story end, life isn't like that, there's loose ends, unanswered questions and shit that just didn't make sense.
From that perspective a Gainex ending merely isn't one of the set few standard ends that we've been conditioned to expect. Why must we be so limited?

Also, in some cases, a supposed Gainex ending is one in which the audience is so mentally stunted they can't understand the meaning of what's going on because it hasn't been spoon fed to them.

Then there's shows like "Lost" which really are just lazy writing.

 

[EditorOne]

Sometimes people just don't get it.

Sometimes the aim of the producers is to make people feel like it's there but they just don't get it.

Movie "Scarecrow" (1973) with Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman: I sat there wondering why I was watching this movie, about two different guys, one good and naive and the other cynical and bad, who go to prison and become comrades. The whole movie. IN the final scene, I got it: It wasn't a typical movie, it was about characters and how they change. I was delighted, I never saw it coming and when it did come, it was a huge epiphany, locking together so many other elements of what I'd been seeing on the screen that the impact was worth waiting for. But I had a friend who watched it and never got it. (Neither did most people. It was a bust, financially.)

Some producers of art want to leave you with a similar effect, but can't really pull the trigger to make the gun go off for you, due to their own ineptness. Or their references are so "inside" their own head or own group that they don't mean squat to anyone else. Or they are spoofers. We had a mean-spirited joke in my small insider group during high school and college in which a joke without a punch line was told. The insiders laughed hilariously, the game being to see which outsiders would overcome their reason and laugh with us to make it seem like they "got it." They became the joke.

The best non-ending I've seen in awhile was with the HBO series "The Sopranos." The final show is just a tension-packed subtle referencing of what the life of now-king-boss Tony Soprano will be, an endless immersion in justified paranoia in which he never knows if the man going into the restroom at the innocent restaurant he's patronizing with his family is going to come out with a gun, whether his daugher is late because she still can't parallel park or she's been made away with by his enemies, whether his most trusted lieutenant will ever come out of a coma, on and on. A lot of people wanted resolution, but the point of the ending was that for this man, in his situation, what he has finally achieved is a life where resolution is never achieved.

As usual, no conclusions, only observations.

 

[Trepidation]

Man, I love the amount of thought people put into things on this forum. Usually when referring to this type of ending I hear comments like "It made no sense, so it sucked." It's nice to see that there are people out there with open minds.