🔴American Fiction Ending Explained🔴
0American Fiction Ending Explained
American Fiction, the latest film starring Jeffrey Wright, delivers a fantastic, thought-provoking ending with plenty of ambiguity and thematic depth to break down. The film is American writer Cord Jefferson's directorial debut, based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett. American Fiction delivers a nuanced, often satirical commentary on media, literature, and the perception of the work of Black artists. The film has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Jeffrey Wright, Best Supporting Actor for Sterling K. Brown, and Best Picture.
Jeffrey Wright leads the American Fiction cast as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, an intelligent author and professor who's written acclaimed novels without commercial success. After his publishers reject his latest novel for not being "Black enough," he notices the success of author Sintara Golden, whose novel We's Lives in Da Ghetto has become a phenomenon by pandering to Black stereotypes. Amidst family struggles and a budding new relationship, Monk sets out to emulate Golden's pandering by writing his own novel under the guise of an alternative persona, an escaped convict named "Stagg R. Leigh," fulfilling clichés like gang violence and drugs.
American Fiction is a complex but relatively straightforward film. That is, up until the end. At a certain point, Monk seems to be in over his head, living his real life and also embodying the Stagg persona to promote his book, which he perceives as schlock. He writes the novel out of spite, mocking authors like Sintara Golden, but ultimately profits greatly and even wins an award. As he shockingly gets up to receive his award, revealing to the crowd that Monk and Stagg are the same person, he announces that he has a confession before the screen quickly cuts to black.
Suddenly, Monk is on a movie set, working with a producer named Wiley (Adam Brody) to figure out how to end their film, which real American Fiction audiences are to understand is the movie they've been watching up until this point. Monk has just suggested the "cut to black" idea, but Wiley believes the ambiguity won't bring audiences to the theaters, suggesting they work out some straightforward alternatives. Monk suggests ending the story romantically with the fictional version of himself returning to Coraline to apologize. Wiley isn't a fan of the idea, suggesting it's too close to a romantic comedy.
Monk then suggests another idea, where his fictional self would go up on the stage to receive the award for Stagg, revealing himself to be the author. Expecting Stagg, a wanted fugitive, to show up and collect the award, police would then barge in to arrest him. The police would then misinterpret Stagg's award for having a gun in his hand and shoot him down at the ceremony. Monk is frustrated by the exploitation of the idea, but Wiley loves it and decides it's the film's proper ending.
The ending of American Fiction has dramatic consequences for the story up until this point. The film Monk and Wiley are making is a fictionalized version of events that actually happened to the former, where he was fed up with the state of Black literature and decided to write a satirical novel to get back at the industry. American Fiction already had layers of meta-commentary before its ending, but the final layer implies that Monk has grown to understand the needs of a commercial audience and has sold his story to Hollywood to secure himself financially.