The Subtle, Layered Brilliance of ‘American Fiction’s Ending

Take a bow, Cord Jefferson; American Fiction is solid gold.

One would be forgiven several times over if they forgot that Jefferson—co-writer, director, and producer of the Jeffrey Wright-led satirical dramedy—was making his feature debut with this particular Best Picture nominee and Best Adapted Screenplay winner. The ingeniously written humor, soaring tenderness, and a cast at the absolute top of their game throughout suggest a seasoned master pulling the strings, and we already can’t wait for Jefferson’s next venture.

So, what exactly was up with that ambiguous ending-within-an-ending?

How does American Fiction end?

Spoilers ahead, obviously!

When Monk’s book is inevitably named as the winner of the Literary Award, the supremely disgruntled protagonist marches unceremoniously up to the podium, takes the award (much to the confusion of the patrons, who still aren’t aware that Monk was behind the piece thanks to his pen name Stagg R. Leigh), and says “I have a confession to make … ” Fade to black.

That’s the first ending to a script that Monk pitches to film producer Wiley, (Adam Brody) who bought the movie rights to Monk’s book, as an alternative to the movie based on Monk’s book. Wiley dislikes the ending because of its ambiguity (go figure) and asks Monk to dream up another one, eventually leading to Monk landing on an ending where he runs away from the awards ceremony to go apologize to his ex-girlfriend Coraline. Wiley, deeming it too rom-com-y, asks him to try again.

Monk does try again, and, with what was no doubt the same jaded adrenaline he’s been channeling throughout the film, pitches an ending where police officers storm the awards ceremony and shoot Monk dead. This one, of course, gets the thumbs up from Wiley. Monk then leaves the set, gets into a car with his brother Cliff, looks over at a young Black actor who’s set to portray a slave in Wiley’s current movie, nods to him while being nodded to back, and drives off.

What does American Fiction‘s ending mean?

It would take forever to unpack the nuances that American Fiction has to offer, so let’s keep it short: The fact that Monk pitched two fantastic endings that got rejected, only for the most patronizing, exploitative one to get crowned as the proverbial winner, brilliantly aligns with American Fiction‘s literal ambiguous (and also fantastic) ending, and works as a perfect final note for the film’s cerebral identity and goals on a number of levels.

And that acknowledgment between Monk and the unnamed Black actor, in all its gorgeous subtlety, underlines the essence of Monk’s personal journey, arc, and struggles while offering up a smattering of hope to go with it. Here we have a man so consumed by the nature of an exhaustingly glib yet ultimately intangible market, that the resulting pessimism and superiority complex has brought him to a point where he struggles to meaningfully connect with people—specifically other Black people.

In stepping outside and looking at real people enduring similar struggles rather than—albeit perhaps rightly—smirking at the literary industry’s reflection of the world, Monk comes across a complete stranger that, in some wordless way, sees Monk and his duress, and Monk sees the same thing in that stranger. All of a sudden, this weight that Monk used to drive himself up the wall is instead channeled into something much more human and much more conducive to his own emotional health.

As Jefferson himself put it in an interview with USA Today, Monk has spent the film “on his high horse and just like, ‘You guys are doing it wrong.’” That changes at the end, with Jefferson saying, “And in that moment, Monk is coming out of this meeting in which he’s had to sell his soul a little bit in order to get this movie made and tell his story. He finally understands that like, ‘Oh, being mad at these people on the ground with me is ridiculous.’ In fact, these people are operating within a system at an institution that has existed far before any of us.”

And while we’ll never ultimately know if Monk overcomes himself in the end, American Fiction will probably leave most viewers thinking about their own lives for so long that they may never feel the need to get concrete answers about Monk’s future anyway.

(featured image: Orion Pictures)