The Undoing — Why did we Hate the Ending of Nicole Kidman’s latest Thriller?
By: Jessie London
Tags: Nicole Kidman, Feminism, Violence Against Women, HBO, TV Shows

The Undoing — Why did we Hate the Ending of Nicole Kidman’s latest Thriller?

Spoiler Alert — ‘Bravo to The Undoing for the most obvious finale that wasn’t obvious at all. What a ride.’

Facebook — Nicole Kidman

The Undoing is a 37 year old novel by the Jean Hanff Korelitz, turned HBO hit starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant among other A-Listers including Donald Sutherland. Novel and Show differ quite significantly on many points, but not on the whodunnit or howdunnit — for now, let’s talk just about the show. From the first episode, it commanded thousands upon thousands of viewers world wide, me among them; I watched the show a few weeks behind everyone else from my home in a small and sleepy town in rural England. As the episodes came and went, my family and I debated over who the killer would turn out to be (none of us having read the novel at that point). Something struck me immediately; no one in my family thought that Hugh-dunnit. Second biggest shock? No one thought that the Husband dunnit either.

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Intriguing. We turned to that ever so scientific method of data gathering. Social media. Again, the same results. Very few people in our collective friendship groups pointed to Hugh as the killer. WHAT?! This was actually beginning to scare me. Here we have a crime scene with only two sets of DNA — Doc and Hubby. We have two highly motivated killers. Men known to the victim (as most murderers are). We have the Doc’s footprints. A missing murder weapon later found by the Doc’s son. We have a serial cheater who’s clearly duplicitous and whose own Mother labels him a sociopath. For the husband, we have confessions of heated arguments between him and his wife and clear opportunity for him to kill her too. Still came the arguments that Hugh was ‘too obvious’ and so was the Husband. Surely there’d be a twist. Hugh is a Doctor; he’s no way dumb enough to kill her and leave bloody footprints and DNA — he’d have been more meticulous. The reasoning around it not being the husband was more divided; he wouldn’t let his son find her or he wouldn’t leave the children alone or he’d insure her first. Again. WHAT?!

Want to know who the most popular choice for the killer was among viewers in the UK?

Nicole Kidman’s 15 year old — never been in trouble at school — I just want a puppy -son.

A CHILD.

Photo by Ekaterina Bolovtsova from Pexels

After the show concluded here in the UK, the ending made the national news — turns out we weren’t the only family thinking it wasn’t Hugh. Disappointing shouted the headlines. One paper even ran an article about how Hugh himself argued for the finale to be changed to leave it ‘open ended.’ Another article in a national paper analysed viewers’ reactions on social media — this one summing it up perfectly —

“F***ing bravo to #TheUndoing for the most obvious finale that wasn’t obvious at all. What a ride.”

The one thing that seemed unanimously agreed upon was this: if this was real-life, there’d be no way that it wasn’t Hugh.

Photo by Elijah O’Donnell from Pexels

So why were people disappointed? Why do we seem to crave fiction that is believable but isn’t? More concerningly, we seem to be receiving what we want more often than not because let’s face it — ‘success’ of movies, shows, books is determined by the number of people who consume and the reaction of those consumers. The fact that our ‘consumer demand’ for believable but quintessentially unrealistic stories is being met, begs the biggest and most worrying question of all:

Is fiction getting it wrong at women’s expense?

What does the reaction to the Undoing teach us about our modern expectations of fiction and is fiction contributing to inequality? Just as the stories of Charles Dickens reinforced a ‘woman’s place’ as the ‘angel of the house,’ are modern tales failing to show society just how much of a global issue gender violence is?

Rebecca Solnit summed it up in her 2016 social critique:

“We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

So why do viewers of the Undoing, my nearest and dearest included, find it disappointing when presented with fiction that is true to life? Do we, as a society, not want to look in the mirror? Are we happiest ignoring one of the biggest, most brutal facts of our time — that being — violence has a gender. Men kill women. A lot. The Undoing just told the story of one of those women.

How was Hugh presented and what do we learn from that? A sociopath. A narcissist. A psycho. These labels somehow give comfort because those things are rare, right? Wrong. Nope. The reality of Jonathan Fraser (Hugh) is actually really, really common.

Globally in 2019, 60,000 women were killed by people they knew. That’s nearly as many people as Coronavirus killed in the UK. So where is the lockdown? In the USA alone, one rape is reported every 6 minutes. Are people talking about this? Not really. Not universally.

In fact, we are disappointed with the obviousness of the killer in the Undoing — why?

What is this failure doing to men? There are so many more good guys out there than bad. Of that, we can be certain. Not tackling the issue of gender violence is having a profound impact on men too both in fiction and reality. Look again at the Undoing. So many male characters suffer because of this; most notably the two boys — Miguel and Henry. Donald Sutherland who ‘never liked’ Hugh, has to watch his only daughter suffer public shaming, pain and loss — and he pays $2.5 million for the privilege. Let’s not even dwell on Mr Alvarez. In the real world, male suicide rates continue to soar. More men than ever before are self harming, being treated for depression and in therapy. Something is really wrong here.

Was it simply that the ending of the Undoing is altogether too ‘real’ for us to be an enjoyable piece of fiction? I’m not talking real in terms of the stunning coats, private helicopters and second homes on the lake. I’m talking real in that it holds up a mirror to one of the biggest issues we face today.

A mirror that no one wants to look in.

Sources:

The Undoing © 2020 Home Box Office, Inc.

Solnit, R. (2014). Men Explain Things to Me. [Place of publication not identified]: Haymarket Books.