Seeking out more than the director gives

[jrod]

Something I wrote up a little earlier today. I'd be curious to hear some of your thoughts.

Spoilers to Lost in Translation, Sopranos






Some people really need things spelled out and put in a neat little package.

Floating around youtube right now, there is a video that determines the famous "whisper" at the end of Lost in Translation. It slows it down, blocks out other sounds, and between the sounds and lip reading you can make out exactly what it is that Bill Murray says to Scarlett Johannsen.

This is one of my favorite movies, certainly one of the 3 best of this decade so far in my opinion. It is one of the best directed, written, and acted movies I have seen and the cinematography is even more impressive. It is also incredibly entertaining to me, and a lot of the feeling involved (the movie's soul) comes from the subtle and ambiguous storyline and character study.

If the video on youtube has correctly interpreted the whisper, which is debateable, I don't really get what that is supposed to prove. It was an artistic decision left out of the film by Sofia Coppola because it didn't belong. Some odd examples coming, but they both stick with me for some reason....Back to the Future III has a cold blooded murder cut from it because it doesn't fit. Terminator 2: Judgement Day had several Michael Biehn dream sequences cut from it because the love scenes were only suited for the first movie. What I'm saying is that it was left out for a reason.

I can't imagine why anyone that likes or loves the movie would want this revealed...and I can't imagine anyone that didn't like or even hated the movie to waste so much time on it.

Now that we are wrapping up 2007, all those year in review articles, shows, podcasts, etc bring up the Sopranos debate again. Is Tony alive or dead? I won't go into detail, because its really pointless. The scene leaves several red herrings that would indicate a death, which of course also work as a plot device to indicate the paranoia Tony will have to live with until the end of his life (be that in 25 seconds or 25 years).There are hints and there is no proof.

How it is not obvious to anyone that the director intentionally left an ambiguous ending is beyond me. Did people even WATCH the freaking show? Jack Bauer isn't around to wrap up every little loose end by the end of each season, and there isn't monologging suppervillians to reveal every aspect of the plot like in a Bond film. We will never know who killed Tony's horse (season 4) and we will never know what happened to the Russian in the "Pine Barrens" episode (season 3). We will never know what happened to Tony even a millisecond after the screen went black. Get used to it.

David Chase (Sopranos creator) gave an interview to GQ in which he only emphasized what was in the episode. Red herrings again in both directions. He talks about the "never saw it coming" theme that was there the whole season, which several journalists, including Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy) who is among my favorites took to mean "he's dead". CNN chose to look at a part in the interview that said there was no Da Vinci code, nothing to decode from the scene, what you see is what you get, etc. They were nice enough to post an article titled "Sopranos creator says Tony is alive and well". How stupid. The interview leaves just as much in the air as the episode.

In closing, art is what it is. It only cheapens it if people think that an "addendum" such as a youtube clip or an interview is necessary. These "conclusions" were left out for a reason. Let's leave them that way.

[svsg]

I think most of us here would agree with you jrod. But on another connected aspect, I differ from some members here. What do you think of cinema lovers attributing great meaning and depth to everything ambiguous, when one of the several possibilities include having just a plain muddled script? For example, take a David Lynch movie. His movies are pretty ambiguous in terms of reality/imagination/dream/hallucination/memory etc. It is possible that he knew exactly what to reveal to the audience and accomplished it perfectly in his movies. It is also possible that he simply had no idea what he was doing. There is no way I can tell for sure which is the case. This is another side of the "interpreting more than what the director intended" debate where I cannot come to a consensus with most people.

[Capo]

I'm in agreement with you, jrod. On The Sopranos finale, I wrote this. As for Lost in Translation, it might be my favourite film ever, and I jump with excitement at the mere thought of Sofia Coppola making Bill Murray inaudible.

As for Lynch, svsg, discard him as an author, and simply look at the text. In fact, look at all texts, ideally, by giving its author the benefit of doubt in all cases. If you find the work inviting, enter; if not, then it's not your cup of tea. Mulholland Dr. isn't a puzzle whose meaning is found by one single approach, it's a work of art (as you know) that can be approached in several different ways, none of which really invalidate any other approach.

We're an auteur-driven board, with an entire section on rating directors' entire works; but we live in a post-author world, and we need to acknowledge that. I like to contextualise films by relating them to others by directorial linkage - looking out for recurring themes and stylistic touches, etc., in order to allow myself a better chance at connecting with a work, a better chance to find a work inviting in the first place.

To get the most out of a film (a "text") - the "most" being a richer personal experience - we've got to place further responsibilities upon ourselves as viewers ("readers"). The text speaks, not the author.

This argument comes from Roland Barthes, of course, and his essay The Death of the Author. I still have difficulty grasping some of his arguments, though I'm sure if I followed criticism made since I'd find a more convincing development of justifying one's dismissal of the Author as the gatekeeper to All Meaning.

EDIT: If you haven't already, read Barthes's essay, it's very interesting: social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/whatis.htm

My approach, in essence, to all artists and their art, is a balance: I take immense pleasure in consuming works and seeing, structurally speaking, how they've been woven together (the stylistic authorial stamp, like Bacon's bright reds and oranges, Godard's single-pane tracks, Dylan's romantic lyrics). But I'll never neglect subject matter - and I've moved away in recent months from the quite stubborn stance I've been known to hold in the past that claimed "form" was "content". I think the two are never mutually exclusive, but to use the "form = content" formula unforgivably discards subject matter - story, character, theme, etc. You need a balance.

As far as subject matter goes, this is inherent in the text. Everything you need to know from a work of art is essentially inside its own fabric. I realise we're also living in a post-modern world, and so it's easy for certain intertextual references - say, the ones in I'm Not There, for instance - to go over somebody's head; but this is partly the point...

Todd Haynes doesn't have the answer to the "meaning" of I'm Not There; it's our job as viewers - and thus, by definition, critics (for as Eliot wrote, "criticism is as inevitable as breathing", and there shouldn't be any monopoly on criticism) - to invest time and effort into the work insofar that it requires it. If you don't find the film inviting enough, fine. But a) don't assume it's the director muddling intentions, and b) don't discard the "looking too much into it" notion, which many do.

(Note: trying to prove what Bob Harris whispers in Lost in Translation isn't "looking too much into it", it's "expecting too much from it". It's mixing the notion of "all meaning is that which is on show" with the notion of "meaning is that which is not within the text" - and of course, these sort of meaning-finders would argue that what Bob Harris says is within the text.)

My point, to come back to what svsg said about Lynch (and I need to wrap this up here, because I'm beginning to ramble): there is no specific way set in stone that you need to adhere to get to the core of a text. There are many different methods of approaching art, many different schools of thinking; you could read Mulholland Dr. from a structural point of view, post-structural, post-modern, feminist, deconstructivist, etc. And you don't even necessarily have to be aware of which line you're following - though the more developed your understanding of these lines of thought is, the "easier" you'll get to know what you like and what you don't like and (more importantly) on what terms you like and don't like them.

EDIT: Don't think I'm trying to put myself on a pedestal here by seeming to know all these different methods through and through. I think the more you're familiar with these methods the more chance you have of familiarising yourself with yourself and your own tastes, and the better your understanding of Art and works of art will be. But that's not to say I know any of these more than you do; I'm very much in the same boat, in the learning process, and I think they'd be very interesting and beneficial to members here.

I choose to look past Lost in Translation's possible racism, for instance, because I connect so strongly to its central romance and theme of alienation (a theme which, incidentally, allows me to oppose the "racist" arguments as necessary and naturalistic). Somebody else might find it difficult to connect to the central romance because their mind is preoccupied with the problematic portrayal of Japanese people.

I've meandered off the topic, probably, but hopefully you'll extract some sort of argument here.

A final thought which has interested me of late: All criticism should validate itself by, before anything else, announcing the cultural background from which it comes.