Summary
A group of Greasers gathers near a bonfire in the woods. Darry and his group approach Tim Shephard and greet him. Tim looks at Ponyboy and congratulates him and the absent Johnny on killing Bob. A line of cars approach and we hear someone in one of them yell “Hey Greasers!” It is the Socs, arriving for a fight, honking the horns in their expensive cars aggressively and getting out to fight. The Greasers look at them expectantly and seriously as it starts to thunder. The camera pans down the line of Greasers in close-up, showing them preparing to fight. As the Socs approach, Darry turns to Ponyboy and tells him to stay close by. The Socs approach them, and one of them greets Darry. Behind them, Two-Bit tells Tim that Darry and the Soc used to play football together. The Soc challenges Darry.
Just as the rumble is starting, Dallas runs up, yelling, “It ain’t a rumble without me!” Ponyboy looks back at Dallas, but when he turns back around, someone abruptly punches him in the face and knocks him to the ground. The masses charge one another, fighting aggressively. As it begins to rain, the men all punch and kick one another. The fire gets larger and larger as the fights escalate. Darry pushes his opponents face into the mud. The thunder gets louder, mirroring the intense fights they are all getting into. When the Socs leave, Darry lifts up Ponyboy and asks if he’s okay. The Greasers rejoice at their apparent victory, and Dallas lifts Ponyboy up from the ground. Ponyboy’s face is bleeding and he looks weak.
The scene shifts to Dallas driving recklessly down the street (with Ponyboy in the passenger seat) and promptly getting pulled over by a cop on a motorcycle. Dallas instructs Ponyboy to feign illness so they can pretend they are going to the hospital. The officer buys it, and tells Dallas to follow him on his motorcycle. Dallas drives behind the cop, and becomes suddenly impassioned, saying that he felt protective of Johnny and didn’t want him to run into the church. Wracked with guilt and self-hatred, Dallas contrasts Johnny’s vulnerability with his own toughness, and tells Ponyboy he wishes that all these bad things hadn’t happened to Johnny. He finally says, “You better wise up, Pony, man. Get tough like me and you don’t get hurt. Watch out for yourself, and nothing can touch you, man.” Dallas slams the steering wheel, visibly upset as he drives the car.
At the hospital, Ponyboy leans on Dallas, who leads him down the hall. They go to Johnny’s room and Dallas tells Johnny that they beat the Socs in the rumble. Johnny feebly responds, “It’s useless…Fighting ain’t no good.” While Dallas tries to comfort Johnny by mentioning that he’s in the paper, Johnny leans over and whispers, “Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.” Ponyboy weeps and Dallas tries to comfort Johnny, but Johnny begins to die. Dallas begins to weep at the sight of Johnny dying, and hits the wall in frustration that such a pure-hearted kid had to die such a gruesome death. After looking back at Johnny, Dallas storms out of the room, but Ponyboy stays with his deceased friend.
In the hall, a hospital worker apprehends Dallas, telling him that he isn’t allowed in that part of the hospital, but Dallas pulls a gun and points it at the man’s head. He says, “I’m allowed anywhere I want,” and pulls the trigger, but the gun isn’t loaded. The doctor shoos him away, and Dallas yells after him, weeping at the fact that the hospital couldn’t save Johnny. Back at the Curtis’ house, the other Greasers tend their wounds and recount the rumble. Darry sits in a chair tending a wound on his hand from where a Soc bit him. Ponyboy comes into the house, looking stricken, and when Darry asks him what’s wrong, he tells them that Johnny died. Backing down the hall, Ponyboy simply says, “He couldn’t take it, he’s gonna blow.”
Under the white light of a convenience store, Dallas looks at magazines, anxiously looking over at the clerk. The clerk finally asks if he wants to buy one, and Dallas ceremoniously tears one of the magazines in half to provoke the clerk. When the clerk tells him he has to pay for the magazines he tears apart, Dallas walks over to the desk and puts his gun to the clerks face, telling him to hand over the cash in the register. The clerk refuses, before pulling out his own gun and firing two shots at Dallas as he runs out of the convenience store. Dallas runs along the road, finally arriving at a public phone and calling the Curtis residence. He tells Darry about his run-in at the store, that the cops will be after him soon, and requests that Darry meet him in the park. As he hangs up and runs off, we see his blood on the white bags beside the public phone; he was evidently hit by a bullet from the convenience store clerk.
Dally runs down the street as a cop car rounds the corner, sirens blaring. The cops corner him, and he yells, “You’re never gonna get me alive!” holding up his unloaded gun. The cops begin to shoot at him as the Greasers run down the road, yelling that Dallas’ gun isn’t loaded. They arrive just as the cops shoot Dallas, and he falls to the ground. He manages to say “Pony” just before rolling over to his death.
Ponyboy sits in his room and reads a piece of paper, a letter from Johnny. An image of Johnny speaking the words of the letter appears next to Ponyboy on the screen, healthy and unharmed by the fire. In the letter, Johnny tells him that he thinks the lives of the kids he saved were worth more than his, that he is going to miss everyone, and that he has been thinking about the poem Ponyboy recited for him when they watched the sunrise. Johnny interprets the poem: when one is a kid, everything is new like the dawn, like the gold of the sunrises and sunsets that Ponyboy loves so much. Johnny then tells Ponyboy to ask Dally to look at a sunset once in awhile and appreciate the good in the world. Johnny concludes his letter by writing, “There’s still lots of good in the world. I don’t think he [Dallas] knows.” Johnny concludes his letter, and the camera zooms in on Johnny’s eyes as Ponyboy closes the letter, opens his composition book, and begins to write. The viewer is transported back to the initial image of the film: Ponyboy at his desk, writing the story of what happened.
Analysis
In the beginning of this final section of the film, the viewer sees the cracks in Dallas' tough guy facade. Dallas is a complicated fellow, who projects a great amount of toughness and bravado into the world. Underneath this performance, however, is an incredibly fragile vulnerability. Dallas has been a hardened and cool role model for Johnny and Ponyboy, but in the face of Johnny's injuries, and the likelihood of his death, Dallas becomes increasingly protective and projects his own problems onto the younger boys. The thought of Johnny dying, after all that, infuriates Dallas. Johnny and Ponyboy's innocent determination to save the children in the church forces Dallas to confront his own lost innocence. In these moments, he identifies with Johnny and doesn't want him to have to go through what he has had to endure. He urges Ponyboy to "toughen up" and insists that no one can hurt you if you take control of yourself.
In his final moments, Johnny becomes a kind of prophet of peace, a youthful seer and spiritual guide. Ponyboy and Dallas are excited to tell him about the Greasers' victory in the rumble, but he simply responds that fighting isn't worth it, that it doesn't actually fix anything. The boys' world has been dominated by violence up until now, and it is only by facing up to death that Johnny can realize just how useless violence is. In this moment, it is as though Johnny has lived a full life in 16 years, that he is finally seeing the ethical light after so much pain and violence. Here, his words harken back to Cherry's statements to Ponyboy, her insistence that the fighting doesn't help. Coppola superimposes Johnny's image over the image of Ponyboy reading his letter, and Johnny speaks the words in a heartfelt manner.
Johnny knows that what does matter is to hold on to what is beautiful in life, to notice the little things, and try to keep one's own sense of purity, as exemplified in his last words, "stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold." Alluding to the moment when they watched the sunrise, Johnny leaves Ponyboy with an assurance that he has to try to keep beauty alive, that he has a lot to offer the world and that he needs to "stay gold" even when the world is a tough place. Johnny's end is a tragic one, and he is covered in horrible wounds, but he leaves his best friend with a small bit of his own wisdom mirrored back at him, and in this way, he lives on. In the final moments of the film we see Johnny as he was in life, healthy and happy, before the fire.
Ponyboy is no doubt saddened by his friend's death, but he is able to handle it in an emotionally honest way. Dallas, on the other hand, responds erratically, immediately acting out and tempting fate. Dallas so palpably experiences the injustice of the young man's death, that it is as though he loses his will to live. Johnny's death signals to Dallas that the world is so unfair, that it is hardly worth playing by the rules. He goes on a chaotic tear, holding up a convenience store with an unloaded gun, and waving that gun at the group of policemen who try to get him under their control. If Johnny has to die, then Dallas doesn't mind dying either, and he would certainly prefer it to going to jail. Dallas' is an illogical and self-destructive response to death, and he comes to his own tragic end in the climax of the film.
While the film is a dark epic, and leaves the viewer with a sad conclusion, the tone is ultimately heartwarming, and the conclusion suggests a hopeful future, in spite of the shadow of violence and the tragic fate of two of the boys. Johnny insists in his letter to Ponyboy that there is still a lot of good in the world, and that if he focuses on the simple pleasures of a sunset, he can find happiness and goodness, even in spite of the sorrow. In Johnny's letter, he also suggests that Dallas doesn't know how beautiful the world was, and thus attributes his death to his inability to find a positive outlook. The viewer is left with the thought that there is always "gold" to be found, always positivity to be culled from negative experience. Ultimately, the film suggests that this search for positivity is what leads Ponyboy to put pen to paper and record what happened.
