Famously, the ending of Whiplash has been described as tragic, or at least ambiguous. The look of horror on the father’s face, the ambush by Fletcher to humiliate and completely destroy Andrew. The latter almost works, except for Andrew taking control of the stage and delivering a tour de force on the song ‘Caravan’.
The film itself foreshadows an unhappy ending for Andrew, with talk of overdoses, and the suicide of another of Fletcher’s students/victims, and this has been confirmed by the director himself in interviews.
What all of these takes miss is the factor of agency. It’s not up to us to decide what constitutes a happy ending for Andrew; it’s not up to his father, nor his surrogate father Fletcher. Andrew alone decides what he values, and what he values is music, and becoming ‘one of the greats’. We see this clearly in his listlessness after leaving school. Those scenes are brief, but evocative. We see him completely lost, his apartment empty, his life devoid of purpose.
This is somewhat reflected by his father. In an early conversation with Fletcher, he’s asked what his parents do.
Andrew: My dad’s a writer.
Fletcher: Oh yeah? What’s he written?
Andrew: Uh, I guess he’s more of a teacher, really.
Writing was his father’s music. We don’t know why or under what circumstances he gave it up for a stable career, but we do know he’s come to peace with it and found happiness in his work (he’s said to be ‘teacher of the year’ in the dinner scene), and with his family. Presumably there’s a universe where Andrew himself comes to peace with losing his dream, maybe finding love and starting a family of his own. But then he meets Fletcher again and everything changes.
The dinner scene also gives us the clearest distillation of Andrew’s values, his goals, and the lengths he’ll go to achieve them:
”I’d rather die drunk, broke at 34, and have people at a dinner table talk about me, then live to be rich and sober at 90 and nobody remember who I was.”
This is doubled down on in the break-up scene, which is borderline sociopathic in the brutality of the logic Andrew lays out to Nicole. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’, she says, and fair enough. What’s wrong with Andrew is that he values his pursuit of musical excellence above all else, and we see that single-minded dedication bear fruit in the final virtuoso performance.
It may not be your cup of tea, those may not be your values, but they are his, and if we are to grant this character his agency, we must accept that: it’s a happy ending. In those final closeups on Fletcher’s eyes, we see the validation and pride; in the final closeups on Andrew’s eyes we see vindication, and triumph. He has succeeded in his goal, all his practice and sacrifice has paid off. And the movie ends with his smile.
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