Whatever the reason, a character's departing expression says a lot about who they were and the
stories in which they played their final roles. Whether disturbing, beautiful, or something else
altogether, these dying smiles cemented the legacies of the characters who offered them.
Inside Out famously left audiences of all ages in tears. The story centers
around a young girl named Riley, who's struggling to adjust after a big move.
She's in the midst of new and increasingly complicated feelings that come with getting older,
and inside her head, the personifications of Joy and Sadness are on a quest to restore
some semblance of order. They eventually meet Bing Bong, Riley's childhood imaginary friend.
"Excuse me?"
"Uh, I was looking for… diversion! So long sucker!"
As the trio tries to heal the emotional wounds that threaten to overwhelm Riley,
Joy and Bing Bong end up in the Memory Dump, a canyon of forgotten memories that are eventually
erased forever. Desperate, the two try to escape on Bing Bong's wagon, which propels itself with
rainbows and is fueled by song and belief. Joy and Bing Bong take care of the singing, but Riley
has lost touch with her faith and imagination, and the wagon can't make it to the top. Bing
Bong realizes that without his weight, the wagon will go the distance, and he sacrifices himself.
This means that Riley will forget about him, but as Joy flies to freedom, he smiles because
he knows Riley will grow up with the emotional health to make so many more wonderful memories.
"Take her to the moon for me, ok?"
Tim Burton's films are often dark, but they all have his trademark whimsical humor.
The combination is often surreal, and his 1989 take on Batman is no exception,
right down to the death of the Joker.
The fusion of gothic sensibilities with a certain sense of wonder feels just a little demented,
making Burton's filmmaking style a great medium through which to portray this particular villain.
Speaking of gothic, the Joker dies on the steps of a cathedral after Batman tethers him to a gargoyle
that later plummets to the ground. Before his demise, he dances happily while waiting for his
getaway helicopter. Of course, he takes the moment to gloat and laugh at Batman and Vicki Vale.
The joke's on him, however - it's his own helicopter that tugs him and the gargoyle
free from the ledge, so he truly is responsible for his own death. But even in his final moments,
he remains psychotic and smiling, like he's the only one who understands the punchline.
The Princess Bride introduced audiences to a conniving villain by the name of Vizzini , a
genius-level thug who kidnaps Princess Buttercup and draws the ire of the Dread Pirate Roberts — a
buccaneer who's secretly Buttercup's long-lost lover, Westley. When Westley catches up with
the kidnapper, the two have an odd challenge in mind to decide things once and for all.
Westley and Vizzini engage in a battle of wits, in which the latter must choose between two goblets,
knowing one is poisoned. Vizzini has a trick up his sleeve, though.
"What in the world can that be?"
"What, where? I don't see anything."
He switches the goblets when Westley's back is turned, thinking he has tricked
his enemy. In reality, Westley has prepared for this moment by poisoning himself for
so long that he's become immune to the toxin. As it turns out, he's contaminated both cups.
As smart as Vizzini thinks he is, he never would've imagined
that his enemy would poison himself. He dies laughing, reveling in his perceived triumph,
with no idea that it was the body, not the mind, that would decide this battle.
"Inconceivable!"
Titanic introduced us to the king of the world himself,
Jack Dawson. He's a working-class rogue who falls for the aristocratic Rose, and by the end of the
film, he's totally stolen her heart. However, when the titular ship crashes into that iceberg,
it sends our lovestruck heroes plummeting into the ocean, leading to a frosty finale.
As Rose floats above the water on a wooden door, Jack is half-submerged at her side.
There's apparently nothing else for him to grab onto, and Jack pleads with Rose to never give up.
"You're gonna get out of here, you're gonna go on, and you're gonna make lots of babies."
If she can just stay afloat, help will come, leading to happiness even after
he's gone. Jack then falls unconscious due to hypothermia and never wakes up,
but one of the last things he does before dying is smile at the woman he loves. Some say you see your
life flash before your eyes in your last moments, but it seems like Jack saw Rose's instead.
Smiles that precede sacrifice often come from recognizing a bigger cause than one's
own survival. Steve Trevor's final sacrifice saves the love of his life and all of humanity,
so that's a big win for him. His love is the titular hero of 2017's Wonder Woman, who tasks
herself with confronting Ares . The god of war threatens to destroy humanity with World War I,
and this includes manipulating an evil scientist who's engineered a new form of mustard gas.
In his final sacrifice, Steve flies a plane containing this poison to a safe altitude before
it's scheduled to detonate, destroying the poison and himself in the process.
He offers up his own life because he loves her, but he also demonstrates a love for all
of humanity. Steve became concrete proof of what she'd doubted — that humans have
goodness and love in them and are therefore worth saving. Steve smiled in the end,
because he knew he had given love a second chance to prevail.
"It has to be me, it has to be me. I can save today. You can save the world."
Despite giving his film the title of Kill Bill: Vol. 2, writer-director Quentin Tarantino kept
audiences guessing as to whether Beatrix "The Bride" Kiddo would take her former
lover and longtime enemy to meet his maker for the massacre he committed at her wedding.
When she finally vanquishes him, he smiles after she delivers the final blow,
and he has many reasons. He's made peace with her. He has a daughter. He's mourned Beatrix,
then tried to kill her, and is now dying at her hands. The ending is as poetic as each deserves.
Bill isn't the only one who greets his death with a degree of good humor. Beatrix does,
as well, even if it's artificial. Bill didn't want her daughter to see her in tears,
so when she mourns him the next day her tears are mixed with uncontrollable laughter. Bill knew,
or perhaps hoped, that she would need to cry because she still loved him,
and perhaps this is the ultimate reason for his dying smile.
It makes a lot of sense that The Green Mile's John Coffey — a savior figure who
shares the initials and miraculous healing abilities of Jesus Christ — would have an
uncommon take on death. His expression is strained as he waits, wrongly convicted,
in the electric chair to be executed. But it definitely looks like a smile.
The most striking aspect of John's death was that he chose to die. The dark side to his supernatural
healing abilities was the constant pain he felt as an intimate witness to the cruelty of humanity.
John spent his time on Earth lifting this burden from others,
but in choosing with his death to reveal the cruelty of the world, he shared the burden
with Paul Edgecomb . We can imagine that John smiled with relief of a weight finally lifted
and maybe even some hope that humanity might learn to share its burdens and heal itself.
People often find themselves smiling when embarking on a new adventure,
and Albus Dumbledore described death as the next great adventure. When his on-screen end
came in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, he was ready. His smile was that of a conspirator
playing everyone like fiddles. He'd accepted his death long ago, when he was irreversibly
infected by a cursed ring. He knew he had to die, and if it happened by Severus Snape's hand,
Voldemort would trust Snape, who could then protect Harry from behind enemy lines.
Dumbledore smiled because he knew Harry was still on the road to fulfilling his destiny.
Additionally, by asking Snape to do the deed, both wizards spared Draco from
the heinous act that would undoubtedly propel him past the point of no return,
leaving the misguided boy with hope for redemption. Most of all,
Dumbledore knew his death would be his greatest service to the wizarding world.
The theory behind Obi-Wan Kenobi's pre-mortem smile, the one just before Darth Vader's killing
blow in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, has developed over the course of future revelations
in the franchise. Eventually, we realize that Obi-Wan knew the true parentage of Luke and Leia,
even if the nature of the relationship was decided after the 1977 film premiered.
"Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."
"What's this?"
"What is what? He asked you a question, what is that?"
Originally, it seemed like he could have smiled because he was about to commune with
the Force or because he knew Luke would escape, along with the hope of defeating the Empire.
But considering the information acquired from subsequent films,
it could be imagined that his smile had to do with Luke and Leia being reunited.
More than just a heartwarming moment for the Skywalker family,
Luke and Leia's reunion represented the idea that neither time nor distance nor
any other seemingly indomitable force, not even THE Force, was more powerful than love.
It feels so good to finally get a joke - just ask Mr. Dawes Sr. from the original Mary Poppins.
The elder Dawes is a classic greedy boss, and just before he dies,
he chides employee George Banks for using the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
George asks him if he'd like to hear a joke, which goes, "There were these
two wonderful young people, Jane and Michael. And they meet one day on the street,
and Jane says to Michael, 'I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith.'
"And Michael says 'Really? What's the name of his other leg?'"
Dawes at first thinks that George has gone mad, not yet understanding the joke.
He repeats the punchline over and over to himself until he finally gets it,
and then he begins laughing uncontrollably before floating into the air.
He eventually dies of laughter, which George regrets upon finding out,
but the greedy old man's son assures George that he'd never seen his father happier.
The ending of Donnie Darko is notoriously confusing.
The title character in this film dies laughing,
finally finding peace and relief in a cosmic role that has eluded him throughout his life.
This role befalls him by chance. An unspecified disruption creates a tangent universe,
which is a duplicate of the primary universe in every way except for one anomaly — a jet engine,
which is duplicated twice. With no logical place in the tangent universe, the extra
copy happens to fall on Donnie's house. Donnie, likely because he happened to be at the center
of the tangent universe's genesis, is chosen to guide the anomaly out of that universe to safely
collapse the timeline. The only way to do so is to send it through a portal to the primary universe,
where it falls onto Donnie's house, as well, this time with him inside.
"Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?"
Donnie likely finds comfort in the fact that he was right about this tangent universe and
not crazy, at least not in the way that everyone told him he was. He also probably smiled shortly
before death because, by stabilizing the timelines, he saved the people he loved.
Independence Day was a huge hit with audiences in 1996, partly because of a colorful ensemble
of characters that included retired pilot Russell Casse, an alien abductee who volunteers
to confront an alien warship attacking Area 51. Eventually, Russell is the only pilot
with a missile available to compromise the warship's weapons port, but it malfunctions.
Russell recognizes that he can complete his mission by piloting his craft
directly into its target, which will kill him in the process. He tells his compatriots to
give his love to his family, then crashes into the warship with a grin and a gleeful shout.
"Hello boys. I'm baaaack!"
In the end, the most important thing for Russell was the safety of his family, as well as a little
revenge against the aliens who abducted him. His final moments were filled with the kind of purpose
that creates a legend — and enough adrenaline to follow through on that purpose with a smile.
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