How to Build a Shop
I was finally able to show Little Shop of Horrors to students yesterday. Seven students showed up for it. One girl enthusiastically liked it, two others thought it was too scary, and another girl said it was "interesting." I didn't get comments from the remaining two. We watched only an hour of the film--the after school screenings were scheduled for about an hour--and third year students (fifteen years old) are scheduled for a school trip next week and, since most of the students who showed up were third year students, I probably won't be showing the end. I'm kind of happy about that because I've decided I really don't like either of the film's endings.
So I think this is one of those rare instances where a test audience was right and the ending where Seymour and Audrey get eaten by the plant really doesn't work. The problem is that the story misunderstands itself. It thinks the audience is along for the ride for irony but they're really along for the ride because they care about Seymour and Audrey. That doesn't seem like it should be a big revelation. How couldn't it be clear from how Seymour is set up in "Skid Row (Downtown)" or how Audrey's sad dream is shared in "Somewhere That's Green"? Yet the story bets that you will be laughing at Audrey more than you'll be feeling sorry for her when she reprises "Somewhere That's Green" before she's eaten by the green monster.
Yet the happy ending also doesn't really work. Seymour electrocuting the plant and then he and Audrey walking off onto the set of Audrey's dream sequence feel insubstantial after the themes the film's set up about inescapable poverty and moral choices. The unhappy ending brings to conclusion the ongoing idea of the American dream being fundamentally wicked. Having a stroke of luck and making money must, inevitably, land you in Hell if you follow the path to the end of the line.
I can enjoy an unhappy ending, even an ending where characters I like meet untimely deaths. But not when it happens in order to serve a wobbly political ideology.
So I've been thinking this past week--what would be a good ending for Little Shop of Horrors? I think it would be one in which Seymour keeps the plant alive and manages to find more success with it without killing people. Maybe he's able to harvest a fruit from it that cures a disease or maybe he just starts feeding it cows and keeps it locked in a cage. The story's themes would be fulfilled by the acknowledging the fact that the power that comes with success can be dangerous but can be turned into something positive by the individual asserting control based on his principles. This possibility doesn't exist in the current film's underlying philosophy. There are innocent victims and there are corrupt tyrants, the film allows for no real third possibility and I think we all, instinctively, know this is a lie and we resent Audrey and Seymour being killed in service to this lie.
This is why Alan Menken and Howard Ashman were so much better off working for Disney. You could say that by taking money from the growing monster, they were living the ending they denied to audiences with Little Shop of Horrors.