The Giant Explanation of The End of Oak Street

Are you just here about the two Jeannettes at the end of The End of Oak Street?

If you just want to know about the two Jeannettes at the end of the movie, here’s what’s going on. 

Jeannette Prime ran back down the hill to save her parents and her past self. She then convinced them all to leave the house, the street, the neighborhood, before the flash happened. She just didn’t immediately make it back to Platt Primes and Greg Two. I imagine Jeannette Prime ends up living with them and is still dating Aubrey. So when the Platts have that BBQ, Jeannette Prime, Jeannette Two, and their parents all show up.  

I’m sure there will be people who read into this quite deeply, but, honestly, I think it’s more David Robert Mitchell having fun and working through the time travel mechanics, even winking at the idea that ‘80s trope from Back to the Future that the future self and past self shouldn’t interact. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a twist. It doesn’t change the thematic reading of the movie. Or even the plot. 

The biggest thing it confirms is that Denise could have saved her entire past family but opted only to save Greg. The implication of that being she sacrificed those other versions of herself and her kids for her own happiness. Which is kind of crazy. But actually kind of fits with the theme. Let me explain. 

The regular intro

Alright, let’s dive into the theme of The End of Oak Street. And, yes, it has one. I know the film plays out like your standard survival movie that’s meant for fun and not thought. But David Robert Mitchell snuck some meaning into the film nonetheless. And everyone who loves Under the Silver Lake can appreciate hiding a message in plain sight. If you don’t get that reference, go watch Mitchell’s last film, Under the Silver Lake. 

This is a pretty standard thematic setup, where the opening scene establishes the main idea and the ending confirms that idea through contrast. And we have the title as the supporting evidence. So let’s dive in.

The End of Oak Street is about America

End of Oak Street opens with an establishing shot of the suburban town of Flowervale. Then cuts to the sign for Oak Street. Then to the Platt family, happily preparing for a sack race. After the race, we cut back to a wider shot of the block that reveals the party and all the neighbors having a great time. Mitchell steeps the scene in this idyllic romanticizing of 1980s America. 

The film positions the Platts as part of this romanticizing. They aren’t special or oppositional. They’re representative. They appear just like everyone else. And there’s that dialogue early on where the neighbor says to Greg, “You got a great family. You’re a lucky man.” It all seems lovely, doesn’t it? 

To the friends and neighbors, the Platts seem perfect. Except very quickly it emerges that things aren’t great. Greg and Denise have been fighting and are on the brink of divorce. Denise uses writing a novel as a form of escapism where she can imagine leaving her family and starting a new life. While the couple think they’re hiding the strain, the kids are very much aware of how bad things are, openly speculating about whether the relationship will survive. 

Remember how the movie started by zooming in from the neighborhood to the street to the Platts? While that’s a basic maneuver to bring the audience into the world, it also establishes the movement from broad to narrow. And thus allows us to reverse that movement from narrow to broad.

So if the Platts represent the seemingly perfect family of the 1980s, we can zoom out and say they represent “oak street” and the “neighborhood”. Even America itself. In the 1980s, a lot of people, including Americans, still romanticized the American Way of Life. That picture-perfect, white-picket-fence existence. To this day, some people feel that way about the country. 

But just like with the Platt family, appearances are just appearances. What’s going on behind closed doors is often not idyllic. 

The meaning of the dinosaurs

The big difference between movies and novels isn’t that novels are written and movies are filmed, it’s that novels have interiority and movies don’t. Novels often directly tell us what a character is feeling, thinking, remembering, etc. So we’re not only told what they’re doing but we get to experience why they’re doing it. 

Look at the opening of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. 

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. 

A movie would either have to resort to voiceover, which is often a lackluster choice, or have to rely on the actor conveying the appropriate amount of joy and hope that he’ll get to go to the lighthouse. They may even need to add dialogue to get the point across. 

Because film lacks this interiority, what often happens is that the events of the plot become an externalization of whatever the character is dealing with internally. This is most obvious in horror films when the monster is an externalization of the character’s grief or depression or loneliness. The process of engaging with the monster represents engaging with the real emotion. And conquering the monster often coincides with emotional breakthrough or catharsis. 

Even realistic movies can use this technique. In Good Will Hunting, Will keeps sabotaging himself because of trauma. He acts confident but is actually terrified that people will leave him, hurt him. The film uses his relationship with Skylar as an externalization by which we can measure his progress. When he blows up the relationship, it’s a byproduct of his inner conflict. When the movie ends with him finally leaving Boston to be with her in California, it reflects he’s no longer operating out of a place of fear and is finally embracing vulnerability. Fight Club is the same character journey but told less realistically.

So, in End of Oak Street Denise and Greg have these marital issues. And even though it seems they’re all friendly with their entire neighborhood, we see the bad relationship they have with their next-door neighbor, Mel. Things aren’t idyllic, are they? And if that’s true for the Platts, it’s probably true for everyone else, right? 

Oak Street could explore this revelation, of the ugliness underneath the perfect appearance, in a realistic way, like Mad Men does with Don Draper, or Revolutionary Road with Frank and April, or, you know, American Beauty. Or it could defamiliarize like The Stepford Wives. In that film the men in a seemingly perfect neighborhood actually replace their wives with obedient androids. Some people might think Stepford Wives is just a fun thriller about androids. But it’s actually commentary on the female experience in a patriarchal society that holds appearance to such a high standard. 

The dinosaurs become a metaphor for all the shit that people try to hide in order to keep up appearances. You can’t keep it hidden. Denise tried to hide her novel from Greg but he finds it and is crushed. Greg tried to hide that he lost his job and the dishonesty was ruining his marriage. If he had been honest, maybe it would have actually made their marriage stronger. Greg has to hide his pizza delivery roof-topper because it embarrasses Denise for the neighbors to see it. The result: dinosaurs. 

In a grounded movie, the dinosaurs would be Greg and Denise having a huge fight and separating. Their appearance as a perfect family crumbles. At the same time, scandal rocks the neighborhood as these other dramas reveal themselves. A year would pass and the Annual Oak Street BBQ doesn’t happen. People pass each other on the sidewalk and don’t wave or make small talk. The neighborhood is far more guarded, closed off. The pleasant Oak Street from the movie’s opening is gone. 

That’s what’s happening in End of Oak Street, except by way of dinosaurs. That idyllic 1980s living is over, and actually never existed in the first place. The truth is finally out there. 

The end of The End of Oak Street

At the end of Oak Street, we’re two years in the future. And we don’t end with another block party where everyone is neighborly and happy. It’s a BBQ at the Platt house. Just their family and Jeannette and a second Jeannette and her parents. Maybe others will show up. 

Let’s take inventory real fast and establish what’s different at the end. 

Denise no longer has to hide her novel writing. Greg’s barbecuing, which may seem minor, but, remember, at the start of the film he tells Denise he can’t grill because he has to run some deliveries. That causes the first fight we see between the couple. So him grilling in this closing scene brings closure to that. Audrey’s with Jeannette, at a time when many LGBTQ+ people had to hide their sexuality. 

What we see are multiple characters no longer having to hide or appear a certain way. That fakeness is over. So if the movie starts by emphasizing people hiding things from one another and ends with them being open…that’s an inroad. 

The Platt household, in the final shot, is quite progressive. It’s reflective of a modern America that isn’t all white, all straight, and all Christian. I wonder if Mitchell was making a point by having the movie conclude at the Platt home and not with another Oak Street block party? It strikes me as commentary about the end of a homogenous America. And how that’s not a bad thing. If each family is living their truth in their own home and not causing problems for others, isn’t that fine? 

I mean, look at the title. The End of Oak Street. Oak Street was the setting for the false romanticism that opened the film. And if the dinosaurs are a metaphor for the ugly truth that destroys that romanticism…then you can say that the end of End of Oak Street tells us that the movie is actually about people embracing honesty and truth in order to progress. Not only in their own lives, but in the world around them. 

If I were to sum up the theme, I’d say it’s something like, “Stop idealizing the past and move on.” Like…dinosaurs are quite literally Earth’s past. So the “past” is the film’s antagonist. Which seems like an evolution of ideas Mitchell explored in Under the Silver Lake, where his main character struggled to escape the influences of the past. 

I’ll finish this section with a quote Mitchell gave to Mubi, about Silver Lake.

• Mubi: Tonally, there’s an air of decadence, or even naive innocence. Right now, it feels like culture’s being closely examined through the lens of Trump, and we’ve been thrown into some very sincere, horrified conversations. 2011 [the setting of the movie] is arguably before that hit…
• Mitchell: I wrote this in 2012 and kind of set it aside. But I had felt it was something we should put out as soon as possible. In the sense that there was a feeling, as I was writing it, of a shadow rising. That’s a feeling within the film. We’re at a point now where it’s no longer rising, these shadows are covering us all. They’re dancing. And it’s nightmarish. But yes, it’s that feeling that these elements are there, in the corners. Whereas now, certainly in the U.S., they’re out in the open. 

You were going to explain Denise not saving her past self and kids?

Remember, movies are representative. So you shouldn’t think about it literally as Denise not saving her past self and past kids. Think about it metaphorically. Denise and her kids have grown through this experience. Who they were before the dinosaurs isn’t who they are after the dinosaurs. So the past versions of them are already “gone”. They were part of the Oak Street way of life. And we’re past that now. 

And Denise didn’t appreciate Greg before the dinosaurs. So her reunion with Past Greg, embracing him, proclaiming her love for him, is her acceptance of who he was, especially his pizza delivery driving. 

Absolute cinema?

One last thought. 

By taking on the iconography and tropes of Spielberg and Amblin movies that defined pop culture in the 80s and 90s, I’d argue that Oak Street extends its commentary beyond America to cinema itself. Just like the country has had to reckon with “dinosaurs” so too has the film industry. That innocence that people had about movies and Hollywood is gone. Heroes aren’t in the vein of Indiana Jones. They’re John Wick.  

Today, we all know Hollywood is a business focused on money, money, money. Through this lens, Denise comes to represent a kind of filmmaker who writes their story, tells their truth, and isn’t concerned with pleasing Oak Street.  

Common questions about The End of Oak Street

Did Greg really die? 

I mean, yeah, you saw a T-Rex eat him. That wasn’t fake. And in this world, the wormhole is real. It wasn’t a dream. The Greg at the end isn’t Greg Prime who we spend most of the movie with. It’s essentially Greg Two. If Denise hadn’t called him, he would have gone back in time with the rest of the family and a T-Rex would have devoured him. But she called him and thus created an entirely different timeline. 

What happens to the other Denise, Audrey, and Brian?

They probably didn’t make it. We saw how futile bunkering down was for the family. At some point, some dinosaur or giant snake or alligator was going to enter the home. At some point, they would run out of supplies and have to forage or hunt. The chances of survival are pretty much nil. And since it’s been two years, it’s unlikely that any of the other three found the mini-wormhole and returned. 

But, like I said in the thematic analysis, if you go down this rabbit hole, you’re reading the movie too literally. The Denise, Audrey, and Brian who survive the dinosaurs escaped Oak Street and their past selves represent the versions of them who were part of Oak Street. So it’s an expression of the movie’s themes rather than some moral failing on Denise’s part. 

Is Denise a bad person because she only saves a few people?

If you take the movie literally, then Denise not saving her entire family, only Greg, was a really selfish act. And I get why people would be mad at that. But the ending has a happy tone that doesn’t reflect any judgment on Denise. Because her not saving the other versions of herself and her kids is representative instead of literal. 

And then it’s the 1980s and Denise only had like 23 minutes or something before the wormhole opened. How many people could she realistically convince to leave? But the film uses her saving Mel as an example of Denise being a good person. He was her nemesis. There was no reason for her to call him. But she did so anyway. And he listened to her, despite their differences. 

So I think the film really wants you to feel positively about Denise at the end. 

What sent the Platts back into the past?

The movie made it really simple: a wormhole. They reference Carl Sagan and the lights being portals that were smoothing things between different points in time. The plant in Mrs. Huddleston’s yard and the pile of poop in Mel’s backyard were like the foreshocks that precede an earthquake or volcanic eruption. 

Is End of Oak Street a Cloverfield movie?

According to J.J. Abrams, no. “The only connection to our Cloverfield movies is that Ewan’s partner is Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who was the star of 10 Cloverfield Lane, who we were very lucky to get to work with and who I adore. So there was that, but other than that, people are just making connections that they happen to see.” 

Does End of Oak Street set up a sequel? 

Even if it did, that doesn’t guarantee a sequel. And vice-versa. They could have made it as a standalone film and if the studio decides they want another one, they’ll find a way to make another one. 

But, no. End of Oak Street tried to tie up as many loose ends as it needed to. And doesn’t hint at any further story.

Does End of Oak Street connect to David Robert Mitchell’s other films?

I see The End of Oak Street, It Follows, and Under the Silver Lake as spiritually connected. It Follows introduces this idea of something haunting you and confronting it is awful and getting away from it is awful. Then Under the Silver Lake also explores something haunting but less directly and more existentially. Its protagonist has more agency and more catharsis. But Silver Lake is a pretty bitter film where the character struggles to reconcile the past’s influence on the present. And then End of Oak Street is kind of freeing in that Mitchell has the characters confront the past, defeat it, then move on into a more promising future. It’s a simpler film than Under the Silver Lake, but also less bogged down in Mitchell’s own fretting. It feels like he’s turned some kind of corner which allows Oak Street to be, in some ways, more profound than something as ambitious as Silver Lake.