Kickstarter Campaign to Remove the Rat from 'The Departed' Reaches Its Goal
It sounded crazy, but it worked.
If you believe it, it will come true! After our previous report of one gentleman's mission to digitally erase the rat out of the closing scene of Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed—it represented a metaphor that was too heavy-handed, you see—we're happy to circle back and notify you that the Kickstarter campaign has reached its goal of $4,000.
If you contributed to the campaign—or had thought about contributing to the campaign (it's still ongoing through March 21st, 2019)—you can receive your literally homemade copy of The Departed with the final shot cut out. You may push back with: what's to stop you from just buying a regular copy for $4 and shutting off the film before the final shot instead? Your guess is as good as ours.
We've all had a favorite film or two that we felt could be improved upon by removing an imperfection or two, but if this becomes the new norm, it may not be a good sign of things to come. The idea that we can take a piece of art and modify it to our liking, in effect self-improving the piece for our own benefit, is a dangerous assertion, one that diminishes the concrete choices that the artist had originally made. We do not own the material; we are admirers of it.
Nonetheless, to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign, you can click here.
