I know we’ve done something similar before (I think Tolkein and the Nazis always comes up), but last night I was watching 35 Up and the disconnect was so striking I really wanted to do a thread on it. If you’re not familiar with the series, in 1964 they did a documentary film on a bunch of seven year olds, Seven Up, where they took a lot of British kids of the same age and different backgrounds and interviewed them and threw them a party and such. It was largely about socioeconomic differences and class. They’ve been going back to these people every seven years since then and interviewing them for subsequent films. 49 Up just came out recently, but I’m only at 35, so please don’t spoil me!
Now, the thing is, Michael Apted keeps making it excruciatingly obvious that he thinks the project is still about social class, opportunities, etc. It’s in the interviews and everything, it’s not like you can miss it. It just makes me shake my head, because I assure you, I wouldn’t be five documentaries into a series about how “some people have a lot of money, and when they grow up they still have a lot of money.” How incredibly tedious! No, obviously it’s a project about people, and what makes a sullen teenager into a happy housewife, and how everybody’s mom dies, yes, even yours - it’s about humanity, and how short life is, and how what you want changes as you get older, and all that stuff.
I know the Brits just luuurve to natter on for years about social class, but I promise you, that’s not what it’s about!
Any other examples of a creator totally missing the boat on his or her own work?
I’m going to offer up Pink Floyd’s album The Wall.
I think it’s fairly apparent from various interview clips and from the eponymous movie that followed that it was conceived and thought of as being about fame, alienation, perhaps war and injustice, possibly how institutions such as public schools interweave with institutions such as the military, maybe about drugs and alientation…
The movie is about being male and being out of alignment with male sex role expectations. About alienation specifically as a consequence of being a sissy with feelings and whatnot instead of a real man, in all the permutations that that takes.
That’s what it’s about. Whether Roger Waters and cohort perceive it that way or not.
I wish I had it in electronic form, but back in college I wrote a paper for film class about how *2001 *was all about sex. Cosmic procreation. Even the shape of the ship - a long white phallus with a knobby end, which spurts out a little white seed of a pod, and the sun over the moon over the planet at the credits, which looks like a giant cosmic breast and nipple. The Space Fetus, of course, is just the clincher.
I’m probably only the 9,468,345th film student to come up with that, of course.
How can the creator of any piece be told he/she is wrong about what it means? Maybe what they have produced can be interpreted in another way, but there is no way the creator of the piece can be wrong unless they are deliberately lying to the audience.
The New York Times’ review of the film compared the Discovery to a Giant Space Spermatazoa. It’s hard to resist sexual imagery.
Deems Taylor’s commentary on the original 1940 Fantasia notes that Tchaikovsky considered The Nutcracker not a very good or important work, then says “It’s amazing how wrong an artist can be about his own work.” So there’s one critic’s opinion of a case for the OP.
Meaning is “to someone”, it’s not intrinsic. Therefore it doesn’t have “a meaning” embedded in the work by the creator. Whatever it means to the creator it means that thing… “to the creator”. Not intrinsically.
To be sure, we’re being arrogant (and wrong) to post as if what these works mean to us is the intrinsic meaning which the creator of the work is misconstruing. But it’s shorthand for “This WORK may mean abc to the creator, but to myriads of other people if you look at it like this it means xyz to you (well, to many many people at any rate), and does so in a really compelling and interesting way”. Or some variation on that.
Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is, I believe, a fairly well-know example of this. (I mean the novel of course, not the movie. Please oh please, let’s leave the movie out of this.)
The central premise of the book is that in the futuristic society it describes, citizenship (meaning the right to vote and hold political office) has to be earned through voluntary public service. There is room for debate, however, about whether this necessarily means military service, or can also include other kinds of civil service.
One James Gifford wrote an extremely detailed essay on this (warning: PDF), in which he writes the following:
He then proceeds to thoroughly demolish Heinlein’s side of the argument, and also gives a plausible explanation for how the author may have come to misrepresent his own work in this way. It’s most definitely worth a read for anybody who has read the book.
We’ve all heard the director yammer on about the theory of time travel and tangent universes and Grandma Death and yadda yadda yadda. None of which appears in the movie.
In reality Donnie Darko is just another one of those “it was all a dream/hallucination/the main character is really the ghost!” movies that 1999 is known for.
I’ve read the book recently a couple of times on audio, and I really do believe that Heinlein is right that the latter answer is correct (and I’ve read several online essays on ST, and am pretty sure I read the attached one). I think that Heinlein misremembered exactly what he said in the book, because in Expanded Universe he says that there’s only a small possibility that your service will be military, and says nothing about it being odious. In ST he says nothing about the probability of the service not being military, and says that it will be hard “so that they’ll treasure it”. The implication is clear to me that the nature of the service is not at all military.
Well, to really con someone, the first person you con is yourself. An artist might not be in touch with his emotions or the source of his inspiration enough to comment on it intelligently.
It’s a cliche that if someone is angry about some little thing, they’re really angry about something else that they can’t or won’t consciously acknowledge. Someone who insists they’re angry because they didn’t get a raise at work could really be angry because their father didn’t love them enough. Someone who insists that homosexuality is disgusting may be unwilling to admit to themselves that they really think homosexuality is fascinating. The person who constantly accuses others of dishonesty is really dishonest themselves.
And so on.
Of course, artists may also be deliberately deceptive about what they think their work means, see lots of anti-fascist propaganda put out from inside the Warsaw Pact, that work perfectly as anti-communist propaganda if you just switch a few names.
Well, I don’t really have anything to add to the points Mr. Gifford makes in the PDF I linked to, so if you’ve already read that and you’re still on the non-just-military side of the argument, then we’ll just have to disagree.
The remake will fit prfectly with the theme of this thread. Presumably its creator thinks it is a worthy project. Ergo, he/she is wrong about his/her own work.
Not to derail this thread too much but there is no room for debate when you’re talking about the Heinlein original; the novel explicitly states that this is not necessarily military service. One of Rico’s classmates does scientific research, for example, as his civil service.
To use an example directly from the novel:
So unless you consider ecological surveys to be military service then military service is not required.
There are such things as alternative readings than what the creator intended that can be supported by the text, but the popular misinterpretation of Starship Troopers is not one of them.
An artist’s expression is not essentially different from that of any other person, who doesn’t consider themselves an artist. Language is just another metaphor, after all.
Clumsily expressed, but the point I’m reaching for is that an artist has the same relationship with his own subconscious motivations as the next guy. I.e., an imperfect one. And an artist is just as likely as the next guy to have issues of denial, or whatever psychological issues contribute to such an imperfect understanding of one’s one subconscious.
So an artist is often the last person to know exactly what his art means. And, as noted above, “meaning” is in the reception. You can’t broadcast meaning, you can only receive it. That is, you can try to broadcast it, but it will be imperfect: the meaning you will intend will never be exactly the same as the meaning your audience receives.
