Kurt Vonnegut, I recall, had an alternative opinion on that, as expressed in his book Timequake. To wit (after a Google search): "She and the baby die, so he doesn't have to get a regular job and a house and life insurance and all that crap, and he has such beautiful memories."

At least Ishmael makes it! Melville probably just didn't think anyone would buy the beyond-the-grave narrator, otherwise old Ish might not have been so lucky.

Compare/Contrast with the end of Glamorama, in which Victor Ward, or whoever it is that's narrating by the end of the book, exits the world of media mediation enters a plane of real existence. Maybe.

Sweeney Todd is quite nice on the rotten ending count.

I'm from the rural Midwest; Chuck Klosterman is from the rural Midwest. I like that his writing usually reflects the feeling of outsider/insider-ness experienced by pop culture dweebs from places where that culture never is able to originate, for mostly economic reasons. He sounds like a practised version of a lot of…

I'm reading the book right now (OK, busted, I just watched the movie on Netflix, before I started to read it), and maybe "pseudo-intellectual" isn't the right term.

Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. vs. John Carpenter: meaningful it may not be, but it would be hard to get a name more ostentatious than the former or more plain than the latter.

That's one way of building suspense into the narrative.

The Executioner's Song is a surprisingly good TV movie. Tommy Lee Jones is amazing as the pseudo-intellectual jerk Gary Gilmore. I worked in a prison for a while, and he has the convict strut down pat.

I'm an atheist, posting this message via Ubuntu. WHY AREN'T YOU MORE LIKE ME?

I'm not kidding. The problem I have with the Cartel twins (as well as the other surreal touches) isn't that they involve over-the-top violence, since, as @avclub-c48f5a2d585c74f35c5abee9a8182559:disqus pointed out, that's not really so unrealistic. What is unrealistic, to the point that it pulls one away from…

This may feel like a mean joke told by a Marxist theorist of Late Capitalism, but sometimes the world is that way. Sometimes you just have to nod your head at the shadow government of Marxist theorists who pull at your marionette-strings so delicately that you barely notice those strings at all.

Only the young people I know understand how computers work, yet I know several who play Farmville. See, sadness afflicts everyone, Stingo: no one has anything left to do but die, when you think about things in a more abstract way. Avoiding thoughts like that, ironically, is probably a large reason why people might…

OK, well, things could be worse. Someone always has to mention the holocaust.

I'm tempted here to write a harangue re how this is yet another of Beyonce's attempts to define feminine empowerment entirely via how men think she's sexy, but I'll stop.

In a movie, now, there are, yes.

I know, right? Kind of depressing, in a very momentarily uplifting way.

Like, it's not related, but Jeremiah Johnson (1972) was pretty great, too.

You know, Sean's YouTube guy looks kinda dorky, but he does sound pretty good.

That's some fan fic waiting to happen.