Director’s Statement

Other species may have brought about their own extinction, but I can’t imagine they saw it coming. They never discussed it, fretted over it, planned in detail how it might be avoided—and then did nothing. Imagine how foolish we would appear to them. We see the abyss ahead of us, we know we are racing toward it, yet we do not change course. We tell ourselves the cataclysm will never arrive; the day of reckoning will be postponed. Like in an action film, every time we cut back to the approaching disaster, it’s a little farther away than it should be, giving our hero just enough time to save himself.

Some, of limitless means, believe they can afford to give up on collective solutions and decide, instead, to save themselves. They think it is too late for the human ship to correct its course, but having enjoyed such power and privilege, why should they go down with everyone else? They will survive the apocalypse alone with their families, cut off from the broader human family. They tell themselves they can live on, in complete isolation, and still remain human. Their humanity is self-contained. And why not? Our economy is based on this same idea – that the isolated and self-interested individual is the fundamental unit of being.

The End explores the logical conclusion of this self-deception: a family holed up in a bunker years after everyone else has perished, enjoying every comfort, a last flicker of human consciousness surrounded by the artifacts of a vanished species, desperately telling themselves that they are happy and good, and thus all is well.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

I want my films to be mirrors. I try to invite, cajole, sometimes even force viewers to acknowledge their most urgent truths. This inevitably requires confronting our self-deceptions, exploring their sometimes terrible consequences. Our ability to lie to ourselves is probably the tragic flaw that makes us human. And it will surely be the one that destroys our species—unless we stop and find the courage to recognize our lies for what they are.

Milan Kundera wrote, “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

The second tear is the beginning of sentimentality, and it usually is escapist. Consider the feeling of crying a second tear for something painful. Does it not allow us to flee from the concrete moral demand placed on us by the suffering of others, and escape into the “fellowship of humankind”? And does that not let us feel good about ourselves for joining “all humanity” in caring, while not recognizing that we have escaped from an all-too-real moral obligation into a fiction that lets us off the hook?

In my work, I try to bring the viewer to a place where we cry a third tear—where we understand the tragic consequences of the second tear and mourn the terrible costs of sentimentality itself. I want the

viewer to feel the devastating effects of escapist fantasy, of lying to ourselves, of not confronting our most important problems. But we never cry the third tear without also feeling the first and second. (We must first empathize with the fear fueling the characters’ delusions. We are never moved to the third tear when we are satirizing, confident in our own superiority, certain that we are immune to the self-deception on which the characters depend.)

Which brings me to musicals. Melodies are introduced early on. When characters burst into song, the orchestra plays along, and the audience already knows the tune. In this way, characters’ private emotions are collectivized. And if there is a chorus, what began as an intimate moment between, say, two lovers magically transforms into an occasion shared by dozens of dancing girls (and the audience). We all feel the emotions together. “How nice to be moved, together with all mankind…” The second tear is built into the structure of the musical, making it the only form of cinema truly honest about its own sentimentality.

This honesty—the fact that the escapism of the second tear is built into the genre—makes
musicals an ideal form for provoking the third tear, for getting viewers to feel the tragic
consequences of the musical’s own escapist sentimentality. This is particularly so if the characters survive by lying to themselves. In The End, the family faces doom with desperate, misbegotten optimism. The classic Hollywood musicals of Vincente Minnelli, Gene Kelly, and Busby Berkeley form, collectively, cinema’s most optimistic genre. Nowhere else do we see such naive certainty in the world’s ultimate harmony (created, it should be noted, right when humanity developed the ability to destroy itself, and the planet, at the push of a button).

I love these films. I laugh like a delighted toddler every time a character opens her mouth to sing. Yet at the same time I shudder at the price we will pay for this cotton-candy cheerfulness, for the perpetually sunny forecast in the midst of a hurricane. That is, I feel my eyes welling with a third tear. That musicals provoke in me these contradictory feelings tells me that it is the right genre for the bunker’s desperate form of optimism.

It is an optimism born of fear. Afraid to face their own guilt, the characters in The End fear change, for to change would require acknowledging their mistakes and accepting their pasts. Until they can do that, they are condemned to lie to themselves, even in their private thoughts. Expressed in song, we hum along to their delusions, identifying with them while at the same time witnessing —and grieving for—their tragic consequences. That is, we cry a third tear.

If the characters’ hearts open to us when they sing, yet even in song they deceive themselves, a frightening question lies at the film’s heart: what remains of us when we lie to ourselves in our dreams and unconscious yearnings? But isn’t this question universal? Afraid of death and the moral reckoning it promises, don’t we strive for eternity through recognition, legacy, and influence? Aren’t we hungry for more because then we might just amount to something? And our rich but fleeting inner lives become echo chambers for these delusions.

The bunker in The End is a manifestation of such delusions. Therefore, there is no sharp contrast between “reality” and “fantasy,” between the dialogue scenes and musical numbers. The songs embody the family’s fantasies, but since these fantasies gave birth to the bunker, and before that to the civilization of which the bunker is at once culmination and nadir, this gilded tomb is suffused with music.

—Joshua Oppenheimer