The "collapsing Ending" as a Turning Point in Contemporary Cinematic Narrative

More and more salient in recent cinematic productions have been the related phenomena of the "anti-ending", the "zero ending", and the "multiple ending". The ending, in other words, appears to have forfeited the authority it once had to terminate a history and the power it once enjoyed to move people's hearts. Today, more and more, stories cease abruptly, with no sign to warn of, or mark, their end. The "collapsing ending", however, should not be seen as a simple change occurring at one particular locus in the stories told in cinema today but rather as a symptom of an important turning point in contemporary cinema's very notion of narrative. That the traditional ending is collapsing indicates: firstly, that the interest of stories in contributing to knowledge-production is decreasing and that narrative is shifting, in its very nature, from being a type of demonstrative, to being a type of descriptive discourse; secondly, that audiences have begun to experience, vis-à-vis the various versions of "structured time", a certain aesthetic fatigue, so that the demands typically made on narrative are just now in the process of shifting out of the cognitive realm, and into the realm of "gaming"and the pleasure of "gaming"; and thirdly, that the narrative authority of the creator/filmmaker is just now entering into an anxiety-driven state of self-undermining and that the power and predominance over discursive mechanisms which had once been the prerogative of the narrator is just now shifting into the hands of the narrative's audience.