The Death of Jimmy Gator

Rose leaves Jimmy with a piercing “You deserve to die alone for what you’ve done,” and Paul Thomas Anderson obliges.

In the movie, our last seconds with Jimmy are the beginnings of a fire. The absence of a few shots — most crucially a house ablaze or a dead body — leaves open the possibility that Jimmy survives, at least temporarily. For many years, I assumed he did.

But I was thinking about it incorrectly. Anderson wasn’t going for ambiguity. Or, rather, he wasn’t going for ambiguity as an end in itself.

Jimmy’s fate was supposed to be more certain. In the published screenplay, it’s explicit that he dies in the fire caused by his frog-assisted errant gunshot; his suicide was successful, if not in the way he intended.

“There is truly a sense of moral judgment at work with this character,” Anderson said in an interview published with the movie’s screenplay. “I can’t even let him kill himself at the end — he’s got to burn. And that’s what he deserves. I wanted it to be really clear that with this character, I’m saying ‘No.’ No to any kind of forgiveness for him.”

But that’s not exactly the path the writer/director chose for the finished movie. If Jimmy burns, we have infer it, and I don’t think smoke coming from an electrical outlet is enough information to support that conclusion.

So maybe Jimmy dies in a house fire. Maybe he dies from cancer.

It’s not important. What matters is that Jimmy dies alone, off-screen. Without Rose, but also without the movie’s audience as witness.

In the “So Now Then” section, nine major characters are shown. Phil is with Frank, who then visits Linda in the hospital. Stanley makes a demand of his father. Jim helps Donnie return what he stole, and then he visits Claudia, who has spent the night in the company of her mother. Earl is covered with a sheet and wheeled out of the house. The dog that Phil accidentally killed gets a similarly dignified exit. The dog.

Only Jimmy is absent — not just denied the hope or peace or grace granted to others, but denied any sort of closure at all. In a work that finds a place in its heart for even Frank and Earl, Jimmy doesn’t even deserve to have his story finished.

It’s the ultimate punishment an author can inflict upon a character, especially one who craves an audience the way Jimmy did.