This World Can’t Tear Me Down Ending Explained: How Does the Riot End? Who Hit Ludovico?
After a long wait, the new Zerocalcare animated series This World Can’t Tear Me Down has been released on Netflix, a title that tells of the difficulty of remaining oneself amid life’s contradictions. A series that is making itself heard a lot and that has attracted many fans of the cartoonist Michele Rech to Rome for the preview of the first two episodes of the series. But how won’t this world make me bad? What is the fate of Zero, Secco, Sarah, and Cesare? Let’s find out together in this insight into the bittersweet ending of This World Can’t Tear Me Down. After the success of Tear Along the Dotted Line, the cartoonist Zerocalcare (Michele Rech) is back on Netflix with a new series: This World Can’t Tear Me Down, available in 6 episodes from 9 June produced by Movimenti Production (a company of the Banijay group) in collaboration with BAO Publishing.
In this new story, we have seen an old friend of Zerocalcare, Cesare, returning to the neighborhood after several years of absence and encountering many difficulties in settling back. Zerocalcare would like to do something for him but realizes that he is unable to help him feel at home again and make the right choice to find his place in the world. Meanwhile, a group of migrants arriving from Libya is transferred to a reception center right in the neighborhood, unleashing the wrath of intolerant and racist people who see a threat in those defenseless people marked by fear and pain, asking the institutions to send them away, but for Zerocalcare and his friends this is an injustice, and they won’t stand by and watch.
This World Can’t Tear Me Down: The Story Plot
The protagonists of this second animated adventure by the cartoonist from Rebibbia are once again Zero, Secco, and Sara. In a complicated social situation, in which the neighborhood is the scene of strong clashes (for the moment only ideological) regarding the legitimacy of a reception center near a school, Zero finds Cesare, an old friend of his who after many years in the community, returns home but struggles to find the rhythm. For his part, Zero, who in those years built a solid career making comics and distinguishing himself, despite himself, from the mass of reckless people in the neighborhood, would like to do something to help him, but he realizes that he no longer knows anything about what he once he was a close friend of hers.
Going back to animated frames with images and the unmistakable style of Zerocalcare is comforting. We are in a world that, however new and in many respects metaphorical, is familiar to us because, as in Tear Along the Dotted Line, we are faced with characters we first learned from comic strips. This World Can’t Tear Me Down is therefore a “friendly” territory for all those who love both Zerocalcare and its way of telling stories. Cesare, an old friend of Zero, returns to the neighborhood after several years of absence and struggles to recognize the world in which he grew up. Zerocalcare would like to do something for him but realizes that he is unable to help him feel at home again and make the right choice to find his place in the world. In the meantime, some migrants arrived in the neighborhood and were placed in a reception center, and this unleashed the reactions of the fascists in the area, and in turn the reaction of the other political party. The TVs ride the discontent. And Zero, who will have to be a guest on one of those television programs, feels compelled to say something.
This World Can’t Tear Me Down Ending Explained
In the last episode, the interrogation of the investigators continues at Zerocalcare, who have been in the police station for hours: they want to know who was responsible for the beating of “Lizard boy” during the clashes between those like Zero, Sarah and Secco who defend the migrants and do not want them to be moved as parcels from one reception center to another, and the Nazis, as defined by the cartoonist. “Ragazzo Lizard” turns out to be the dull little boy whom Zerocalcare has tutored for years, and who is the son of a powerful right-wing politician who insistently asks to know the name of the manager, who is presumed to be left-wing. During the clashes, the boy invoked the Duce, and Zerocalcare was shocked to realize that his teachings were useless, that he was the “failure of the pedagogue”.
Precisely because of the meeting with the ex-student, in the middle of the scuffles Zero gets distracted and gets beaten up, managing to limit the damage thanks to Armadillo’s advice: “You have to shut it down”, he tells him. An explosion, certainly one of Secco’s “bombings”, scatters the attackers and Zero is pulled at him by his friend. The clashes subside thanks to Sarah: in the previous episodes she had “betrayed” the cause and her ideals by declaring that if sending the migrants away from the neighborhood she would have averted the closure of the school where, after years of sacrifice and precariousness she had finally been called to teach, then it was right to do so, literally breaking Zerocalcare heart. But now she, with a megaphone, standing on a dumpster screams she releases the truth: “I just arrived at this school… they told me it was the reception center’s fault because it was the easiest thing to believe. Tell what happens instead, make people talk that this neighborhood lives there instead of looking for mythomaniacs and human cases to make us all look like monkeys”, he tells journalists “Hyenas” who arrived in the neighborhood only to resume the clashes.
Sarah gives the floor to the school’s historic janitor who explains that every year it empties because the heating doesn’t work, because the bathrooms are always out of service, and because a piece of the ceiling falls every two months. So, migrants are just scapegoats used by the media and politicians. This speech inspires Cesare who, on the side of the Nazis, takes the floor explaining that they don’t have it against foreigners but with “those who are at the top” who do nothing for the neighborhood, treating it like a dumping ground. However, this infuriates his companions who do not agree with Cesare’s sensible speech and to silence him they beat him heavily.
Zero’s story ends like this, but it turns out that for the whole time, he didn’t talk to any policeman but to the Armadillo to whom he attached an “Epiphone” waiting to be interrogated. One of the investigators, voiced by Silvio Orlando, makes him leave. Outside the police station, Zero meets Sarah, Secco, and “the pterodactyl friend”, and Sarah confesses that she had shot a video of the clashes in which it is seen that it was Cesare who punched the “Lizard boy” himself. The four friends decide to delete the video to defend Cesare despite the tensions between them and the choices he has made that they cannot share. He’s recently left the community and has already suffered too much in his life, and they don’t want to be responsible for the final collapse of a lost friend. This world did not make them bad.
In a flashback we see Zerocalcare after the clashes talking to one of the “contested” migrants who tells him about her ordeal, the long and difficult journey to reach Italy: “I know what it’s like when there’s no place for you. In my country, when you want to throw away something that you want nobody to find, you throw it into a lake at night, and everyone pretends not to know. We are the same: throw yourself”. This speech makes Zero think of the Mariana Trench that he studied as a child at school and compares it to the Roman suburbs in which people live like the creatures that inhabit the Trench, without light and under 12 meters of depth. “A pool of souls reeling in the dark who must learn to live together in a place where no one else can live”.
