Robert Deniro's looking up at the end...

He hears a buzzing sound.

He was probably wondering why the hell he was doing this movie.

Wouldn't surprise me if it was a nod to the last shot of Taxi Driver.

The end of the film goes like this:

Stone is walking down the road. We hear his voice as Gerald calls into their Christian radio station and tells the listeners about learning spiritual truths through sound, and if you let the sound go through you it puts you in tune with God and Truth.

The next scene is Mrs. Mabry looking kind of downward, eyes kind of foggy from booze I guess, maybe from crying, but she hears the buzzing of the bee. The sound of the bee gets louder and the camera zooms into an ECU of her eyes. I'm not sure if this shot is meant to relate to the eye scene in the prison killing, or if it is meant to symbolize her "seeing" the truth, or if simply that the eyes have nothing to do with it and it is all about the sound - if we the audience are tricked by the visuals in this shot even though the sound of that bee is very obvious.

The next scene is Jack Mabry, kneeling over the boxes in his office for the last time. Kneeling perhaps like in church? The Prison his church, his truth his life? I don't know but there is no sound in this shot. He just looks up. Cut to black.

I think the point is not the last shot but the sequence of shots. Gerald has found the path, his wife has just discovered or just accepted the truth, Jack is lost.

I totally had a very different reaction to the end - and I thought it was extremely clear, actually.

I read it as his moment of dark enlightenment.

If you think of it in terms of mysticism it sort of makes sense.

The idea of most kinds of mysticism is that if you are in tune enough with the universe, you see a sort of sublime beauty in everything. Throughout the shots leading up to that one, there is the buzzing noise. Remember that the buzzing noise symbolizes the sort of base-level, ambient noise of daily life, the "static" that prevents us from hearing "God" or from being in tune with the universe - unless you can really listen to it very intensely. Remember there were two scenes where Stone reached his sort of "enlightenment" and went into a mystical trance. The first was when he burned his grandparents' bodies - recall that he just knew he had to do it, and that he experienced a sort of indescribable joy from it (mystical trance). The second time was when he was in jail and watched the other man being murdered - and it's very important that that scene did not have any sound at all (I don't remember any).

It was a very liberating moment of clarity for Stone, because he was again one with everything (or a tuning fork or whatever). He had transcended normal human concerns (which isn't necessarily a GOOD thing) and was just taken by how much he liked watching it all. In a sense, he BECAME God (again, usually the goal of mysticism) - the disinterested maker/observer who can see how all the parts of the watch work together.

Now, in the last scene, there are what seem to be several minutes of buzzing, and finally, it all goes quiet and the camera zooms in on Jack, and suddenly, he looks up - after a whole movie of not getting it, he's finally experienced it himself. He's now seen the world the way Stone came to, and you can see it's changed him. Stone had done that and burned his grandparents; his wife had done it and burned their house down. The question the film leaves you with is "now that he's come to this dark realization, what is Jack going to do?"