Summary
O, furious about what he thinks is Desi's infidelity, asks Hugo how they are going to kill Mike. Hugo goes to a pawn shop and pawns a watch for a pistol. They hatch a plan to kill Desi, make it look like Mike did it, then kill Mike and make it look like suicide.
As part of the plan, Hugo and Mike go to the last basketball game of the year together. Meanwhile, O visits Desi, pretending to want to make amends. As Mike and Hugo drive to the game, they notice a parked car with flashing lights. Hugo says it might be someone in trouble, but it is really Roger waiting to shoot Mike. When Mike approaches the car, Roger gets out but does not shoot him. Mike wrestles the gun from Roger, but Hugo strikes Mike on the head and he falls down. Roger shoots Mike in the leg and Hugo is furious because now it will not look like Mike shot himself.
Roger and Hugo argue, and Hugo shoots and kills Roger. Back at Desi's dorm, O kisses her but then holds her down and strangles her to death. Emily and Hugo both arrive, and Emily, realizing what O did, tells him all about Hugo's lies. Hugo shoots Emily to get her to stop revealing the truth to O. The police arrive, and O asks everyone around to remember that he loved Desi. O shoots himself and dies. The police arrest Hugo and lead him to the police car.
Analysis
In this final section of the film, Hugo's otherwise "flawless" plan starts to break down. Whereas Hugo was able to successfully manipulate O into thinking Desi was cheating on him, Hugo's plan to stage a murder-suicide of Desi and Mike is precisely what leads to his own downfall. When Roger refuses to shoot and kill Mike, Hugo has to intervene. This is the first time Hugo is directly involved in his own schemes, and it is also a sign that the plan has gone awry: Roger becomes a casualty of Hugo's villainy, Hugo is unsure how the police will interpret the scene, and the responses of Brandy and Emily are interruptions Hugo did not predict. In this way, the end of the film might follow O's fall more closely, but it does, at the same time, showcase Hugo's own fall from a master manipulator to an orchestrator of his own undoing.
In the scene preceding O's suicide, he gives a dramatic speech to all the students who have gathered outside Desi's dorm. Shocked to discover the truth about Hugo, Desi, and Mike, O starts to reevaluate his character and his choices from the beginning of the film. In this final speech, O is concerned about his reputation. This moment represents another element of the film that remains true to its source material, as well as to the genre of early modern tragedy more generally. Tragic heroes often end the play by asking someone to continue to tell their true story, and O is no exception: he asks everyone within earshot to remember that he loved Desi and that his fall had nothing to do with his blackness, how he grew up, or any other race-related assumption people will likely make. Instead, O declares that he was "messed up" by Hugo, a white, wealthy, private school kid. This distinction is significant because it addresses one of the centuries-old debates about Othello: was Othello responsible for his own demise, or have white audiences been keener to interpret the play that way given Othello's "Moorish" background? In O, this final speech underscores just how significant race is to the narrative of the film and the play that preceded it, encouraging viewers to recognize the role that prejudice plays in shaping the lead character's reputation.
