The Netflix adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 runaway hit apocalyptic novel, Leave the World Behind, concludes relatably. The movie—directed by Sam Esmail and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali—sees tween girl Rose desperate to find out what happens in the finale of Friends as the world literally burns around her. Even though there’s a major telecommunications breakdown, Teslas are going haywire, and wildlife is gathering as if in anticipation of Armageddon, Rose must find out what becomes of Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey. Do Rachel and Ross finally get back together? (Yes, even though Ross is a gaslighting softboy.) Do Chandler and Monica have a baby? (They have two, in fact.) What becomes of the iconic purple-walled loft? (Monica and Chandler give it up and move to the suburbs, thus signaling their descent into middle-aged uniformity.) More than just a reference to Gen Z’s pandemic-era obsession with bingeing a show that started 30 years ago this year, it’s indicative of our growing obsession with certainty in a world that’s anything but.
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Depending on your algorithm, a cursory glance around YouTube will likely engender an assortment of ending explainers, or videos by pop culture commentators and influencers unpacking the endings of all manner of movies and TV shows. They range from necessary explainers—Mulholland Drive, anything by M. Night Shyamalan—to rote ones. (I don’t think we need ending explainers to understand Hit Man’s basic happily ever after or that Hooper and Brody kill the big bad great white in Jaws, but they exist.) Don’t just take my word for it: According to Google Trends, searches for “ending explained” have doubled in the past five years. And it’s not just visual mediums: Many culture sites have sections dedicated to analyzing outcomes, and it seems like that’s all some publish. Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves, and do we need all possible meanings—however simple or abstract—tied up in a neat little bow? Are our attention spans so shot that we can’t spend a few hours not checking our phones in a movie theater? Or do we need a third party to interpret art for us when everything else about modern society is so fraught?
“Our brains are hardwired to seek patterns and relish that gratifying ‘aha’ moment when all the pieces finally click into coherence,” clinical psychologist Daniel Glazer tells The Ringer. Suddenly, Rose’s yearning to finish the final episode of Friends before, you know, the final episode of humanity makes a lot more sense.
Digital natives like those in Rose’s generation get a bad rap for possessing the attention spans of goldfish, but her dedication to finishing an 86.5-hour sitcom instead of YouTubing an ending explainer is indicative of anything but. For evidence that internet denizens still have attention spans, look to the case of Late Night With the Devil, the breakout horror hit from this year that inspired its share of ending-explained videos and articles. “People have made the effort. People have seen this more than once. They’ve done their research,” Colin Cairnes, who directed Late Night With the Devil alongside his brother, Cameron, says about ending-explained YouTubers. When content creators are creating 30-minute-plus videos that get over a million views, like this The Menu ending explainer by FoundFlix that has 2 million, it’s clear that viewers aren’t just seeking them out because their attention spans were too short to finish the movie!
When it came to Leave the World Behind’s ending, Esmail—who is well aware of the negative feedback related to it—deliberately set it up to stretch viewers’ minds and get people talking. “I wanted you to go to a coffee shop and have a two-hour debate about what it meant and how it felt and how it all connected or didn’t connect at the end,” he says. “Those are the kinds of conversations I lived for as a moviegoer, and that really only happened when movies didn’t tie everything up in a bow.”
Esmail is no stranger to ambiguity, as perhaps his best-known project, Mr. Robot, ended with its audience questioning everything they thought they knew about the show. He says those are his favorite kinds of stories—ones that worm their way into your brain and keep you thinking days, weeks, sometimes years afterward. Remember when you immediately needed to go back and rewatch The Sixth Sense after (25-year-old spoiler incoming) finding out that Bruce Willis’s character was a ghost himself? Or the shellshock you got when Emerald Fennell Psycho-ed her main character during the climactic confrontation of Promising Young Woman? Or Psycho, for that matter?
“Those movies where everything was answered, it was very straightforward, and everything was explained, you leave the theater, and even if it was a good movie and you enjoyed yourself, I found that I stopped thinking about it pretty quickly after,” Esmail says. What’s even the point?
Speaking to The Ringer from his home in Melbourne, Colin says there’s a fine line between crafting a conclusion that will keep the conversation going and honoring the fictional world of the movie, especially for the vast majority of films that don’t have the support of media conglomerates behind them.
“If you’re operating within that low-budget indie world like Late Night With the Devil is, the onus is on us as filmmakers to do something different and try to surprise and take risks with the way we set up the story, the way we resolve it, the way we end these movies,” he says.
And anyway, Late Night With the Devil’s outcome is pretty definite: It’s revealed that late night talk show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) literally sold his soul to the devil in exchange for career success, and he kills an apparently possessed girl on live TV. Though Colin does jest that, because of an earlier hypnotism scene, it could have all been a hallucination.
YouTuber Daniel Whidden, who writes, narrates, and produces his own channel, Think Story, where he has more than 700,000 subscribers, believes the acceleration of these videos speaks to the way we consume media now. In contrast to the proverbial watercooler conversation in eras past, because of the plethora of streaming options we have now, everyone’s watching something different.
“Now with dozens of platforms, [like] Netflix, Disney, Amazon, etc., and the ‘binge’ model of consuming media, it makes it difficult to discuss these shows. Suzie from accounting could be on Episode 2 of Squid Game, while Tom in marketing could have binged the whole thing in a day—or he might not even have Netflix at all!” Whidden tells The Ringer. “Thus, they have no one to talk to about their favorite shows and seek out alternate communities and channels.”
It speaks to Esmail’s contention that he wants filmgoers to continue to wax lyrical about what they’ve just seen, a notion that Colin echoes. “As filmmakers we’ve got to wear it as a badge of honor that people have deemed it worthy as a topic of debate,” he says. “That’s what we’re in it for, to elicit a response, hopefully a positive one, but if it leads to division over what it all means, that’s kinda cool too.” It’s just that now, because of the rise of streaming, Netflix-only releases like Leave the World Behind, and the prevalence of VOD, those conversations are happening online.
“You can have that experience [of talking about a movie while] walking out of the film … and then it jumps online for people who haven’t seen it in a theater and have seen it on Shudder or Netflix or whatever it might be,” says Colin. “We set out to make a film that would spark conversation, so whether that happens in a cinema lobby or on YouTube or Reddit, that’s all good.”
In that way, ending explainers are a way to extend community.
“In previous eras, the ability to convene and collaboratively revel in [a] narrative climax was largely constrained by immediate social circles and physical proximity,” offers Glazer, pointing to the aforementioned watercooler theory and the decline of appointment viewing. Sure, the majority of your office or friend group probably watched Baby Reindeer, but you might have binged all seven roughly 30-minute episodes the day it came out, your bestie could be saving it until the weekend, and your work spouse might be waiting to watch it with their actual spouse. On Reddit or the YouTube comment section, you can immediately revel in your IDTA (Is Donny the asshole?) conspiracy theories. “Suddenly, the diverse insights, theories, and analyses surrounding a pop culture plot point radiate from a global array of voices and life experiences,” Glazer continues.
And there are diverse subcultures within those communities, says Whidden, who also posts ending explainers for shows like Bridgerton, which, as you can imagine, draws a very different crowd than “an over-the-top gore movie. This is because of the wide array of content I create. Instead of fostering one giant community, I have a series of smaller communities.”
One subgroup that has felt seen not only by one of this year’s most buzzed-about films, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, but also by the explainers created about it is the trans community. The ’90s-set genre film follows two teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), as they bond over their favorite TV show, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer–coded The Pink Opaque. Owen is berated by his father for liking a “girl’s show,” and his identification with one of the female stars of The Pink Opaque can be read as a trans allegory by those who care to see it. For those who don’t, Schoenbrun isn’t interested in their interpretation.
“As a trans filmmaker, I’m not really that interested in the legibility of the work to a non-trans audience because I think a lot of other people are going to think about that for me,” Schoenbrun tells The Ringer. And they have, in copious ending-explained clips on YouTube and TikTok. Even publications like Time, USA Today, and Vanity Fair have weighed in on the deliberately (pink) opaque subtext of I Saw the TV Glow, raising questions about the state of culture criticism when writers are asked to rehash conclusions rather than tackling what leads up to them. (Schoenbrun, for their part, doesn’t see much distinction between the two forms.)
“When I end a movie, I’m looking for something that can continue to linger and poke at and ask the questions that the movie is trying to ask,” says Schoenbrun, who also directed the 2018 documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination and 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the latter of which shares thematic similarities with I Saw the TV Glow. “I prefer, in my own art, making things that are ambiguous. Not just for the sake of ambiguity, but because the work is talking about complicated things that I’m trying to reckon with.”
Like Esmail and the Cairnes brothers, Schoenbrun ultimately sees ending explainers as a good thing, enjoying the ones made about their own work.
“If somebody really is racked emotionally by my movie and reads an ending explainer post, to me that’s a nice thing,” they say. “I don’t think that’s the be-all, end-all of how we process art right now. It’s part of how we process art right now. Hopefully they’re at the beginning of that process. That sort of long-term engagement with art as we and as times changed is something that no one internet post could ever stop.”
The term “be-all, end-all” also comes up in my conversation with Esmail, who is the most tentative of all the people I spoke to about ending explainers. He admits he’s of “two minds” about them: If he’d come of age during the internet and online fan culture, he says he might have been creating that content as an extension of his own interest in filmmaking. However, “the part of the ending explainer culture, or I should say online fandom culture, that I don’t appreciate,” he says, is the part that doesn’t allow for dissent.
People with different opinions will get piled on or troll just for the hell of it. And as we’ve seen in the case of the newer Star Wars movies and diverse Marvel casts, minority creatives—and, one can assume, the minority content creators who cover these movies—in many cases experience harassment and are forced offline. (For his money, Whidden, who is a white man, hasn’t observed much of this in the comments of his videos. “I try to be courteous and respectful and tend to ignore the odd toxic comment,” he says.)
Esmail also believes that there’s less willingness to sit with the questions—and the uneasiness—that cryptic endings provoke than there was, say, 50 years ago. “If you go back to the ’70s, a lot of movies ended in an abstract, abrupt way, and I just happened to be a fan of that—it haunts you and lingers months and years after you’ve seen it.
“There’s something in the culture now where films need to be a little more self-contained,” he continues. “That saddens me because there is a joy to not being told all the answers and having to sit with your thoughts and feelings about it. And even getting frustrated with it!” As viewers certainly did with the abrupt ending of Leave the World Behind.
“We as a culture need easy answers now because the world has gotten incredibly complicated. We don’t want to turn to movies that just offer us more questions and ambiguity. Especially a movie like mine, where I’m directly commenting on the world we’re living in now,” he says.
“I think because of what’s going on in the world, it’s important to do and provoke those kinds of questions.”
From a psychological point of view, Glazer sees ending explainers as tempering that anxiety. “For those of us conditioned to having a world’s worth of information constantly at our fingertips, simply sitting suspended in ambiguity for an extended stretch can start to feel uniquely unsettling,” he says. “I’m certainly not suggesting we necessarily want the easy way out every time. But our collective patience for persisting in uncertainty has undoubtedly been whittled away by our era’s blistering pace. Comprehensive explanations and answers provide ballast—hanging in interminable limbo just doesn’t feel emotionally stabilizing.”
While Rose might not be able to watch an ending explainer about the series finale of Friends, she does ultimately get her wish. The much-maligned climax of Leave the World Behind sees Rose stumbling on an apocalypse bunker stocked full of canned goods, bottled water, and a physical home media library with—you guessed it—the box set of Friends. Instead of looking for her family to alert them of this safe haven, Rose immediately pulls the last season from the shelf and slots in the disc on which “The Last One” exists in perpetuity, however long that might be. Leave the World Behind’s parting shot is Rose’s wide grin filling the screen as she is lulled into contentment by the signature dulcet guitar strains of the Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You.” In that ending, Rose is anything but inquisitive, but Esmail’s intention was to leave us questioning—or at least seeking comfort in the communities that continue this discourse, wherever that might be—at the watercooler, the theater lobby, the coffee shop, the bar, or the comments section.
Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can read her previously published work on her website and through her Substack, The Scarlett Woman. Follow her on X at @ScarlettEHarris.
