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Sunday
Oct152006

Alternate ending for The Departed (not a spoiler)

Colin Sullivan runs into the woman's apartment, hoping he's gotten there before the bad guys. He's too late, but she's still alive, gagged and tied to a chair! They spared her life, but took her (horrors!) right hand and wrist! As soon as he removes the gag from her mouth she gasps, "the sink! the sink!" He runs to the sink where her fingers are just barely visible in the maw of the garbage disposal... which is on! In perhaps vain hope of reattachment, he scrambles to find the off switch, and simultaneously to remove the severed hand from the drain. But (again!) he's too late; he grasps at the fingertips; he can't get a grip on them, but the motion of the disposal on the tendons opens the fingers, releasing... what? A travel-size game of Clue, the classic Milton-Bradley board game! The camera zooms in on the pristine label of the game, and the sink and the desperate man and the brutalized woman are replaced with an advertisement for a new, The-Departed-branded special edition of Clue, based in not a crumbling mansion but a map of the Massachusetts State House, with butlers and professors replaced by, ahem, cops and lawyers. With the characters fate implied but unknown, the bad guys probably drinking Guinness in a bar in Southie, and the marketing deals solidly in place (the Clue special edition includes a DVD with the theatrical trailer for the movie! and a real replica "T" token!), the credits roll, and we (the self-forgotten audience) are sitting in the theatre dumbfounded, all of our passion and excitement and dread created by the ever-onrushing story replaced with a none-too-subtle feeling that our lives would be this exciting, too, if we were much worse people, but given our straightforward allegiances and Judaeo-Christian values, we can at least spend a sunday afternoon (the concluding anti-climax product placement tells us) pretending we are as vital as William Caustigan, Jr, as ethical as Captain Queenan, as powerful as Frank Costello, and as vicious as Mr. French. And yet... we are simply the bourgeoisie, resembling these brazen, sultry, consumed characters only in that we, too, are doomed to die.
FIN.

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