Art where the creator is wrong about their own work

Cafe Society
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[QUOTE=Mangetout]
George Lucas. At some point, either now, or else nearer the beginning, he’s been wrong about what Star Wars is supposed to be.
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I think he’s also completely wrong about what people liked about the original movies.

[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
John Lennon and the Beatles always stated they didn’t realize that Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds spelled out LSD and the song was about an acid trip.
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John also made some dismissive remarks about his own work that I don’t agree with. I think he was incorrect, and I think he was speaking mostly from bitterness that came from the breakup of the Beatles.

No I’m not. I think of art as a collaboration between the creators and the audience. I don’t think the writer knows everything, and while readers and viewers sometimes come up with interpretations that either aren’t in the work or are flatly contradicted by the work, the writer doesn’t have veto power.

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The true ‘art’ is the expierence between the viewer and the art.

If a painting hangs on a wall and nobody looks at it, is it art?

Nope.

Not until someone, other than the artist, comes in and looks at it is there any sort of ‘art’.

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AHunter3, while I will agree that this a large aspect to the film, whether or not the writers intended it, it is far from exclusive. The anti-war theme is so prevalent as to be unavoidable. The fame and resulting separation from reality is obvious too. To come to your opinion exclusively, requires that you ignore what is obviously there.

[QUOTE=Marley 23]
I think of art as a collaboration between the creators and the audience.
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This is precisely how I see it. An artist may subconsciously place meaning in a work that he/she did not know was there when they created it. That to me is a sign of a good artist. For an artist to be wrong about their work, they would have to have its underlying facts wrong, and even then, it can make a work of art valuable because it becomes a “sign of the times” piece that demonstrates common thought processes of the era.

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[QUOTE=Zsofia]
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?
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I won’t spoil any details on anyone’s lives in the film, but after watching 28, 35 and 42, you are struck by the stability of their appearance over this span, and then by 49 you will be shocked by their deterioration.

Also, in 49, the kids you see scampering around have all grown up, so it’s very family oriented.

[QUOTE=Walton Firm]
…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. …
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I would actually say Heinlein is correct, that federal service could mean anything. However, the society he paints is one where brutality is valued (I vividly recall the passage where it explains that children are beaten, sometimes publicly, because that’s how we train dogs, and children are that much more valuable to us). So yes, federal service in the universe of the book could mean anything, but because the society values brutality, in practice it means military service. Heinlein was right, IMO.

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[QUOTE=Just Some Guy]
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.
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Military scientific research. Like, weapons and stuff. On a military research station, which is destroyed by the enemy during the events of the novel.

Not all federal service employees are soldiers; there are also military researchers, military spaceship pilots, intelligence agents, etc. However, there is no evidence anywhere in the book that federal service can include a desk job at a city government, or working in a general hospital, or anything else which is not inherently controlled by the military.

If you apply for the service and you are completely incapable of doing real military work, they will find something for you – preferably something nasty and dangerous, like testing new spacesuits, but if a paraplegic wanted to join, they’d give him some silly make-work like counting the fuzz on a caterpillar’s back.

However, there is no middle ground between those extremes: as the recruiter in the story clearly states, “it’s either real military service, rough and dangerous even in peacetime, or a most unreasonable facsimile thereof”. You can’t earn the franchise by sweeping streets or taking care of old people. Not according to the plain text of the book, whatever its author may have claimed elsewhere.

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[QUOTE=Christopher]
AHunter3, while I will agree that this a large aspect to the film, whether or not the writers intended it, it is far from exclusive. The anti-war theme is so prevalent as to be unavoidable. The fame and resulting separation from reality is obvious too. To come to your opinion exclusively, requires that you ignore what is obviously there.
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That’s a reasonable assertion. I don’t agree with it, but I find it reasonable.

I think it all comes down to whether the foreground of a work (book, album, movie, etc) is of central importance (Goldfinger is a spy story; it’s not an allegory for anything else), of at least co-equal importance (The Shining is a tale of a family trapped in a haunted hotel, not to the exclusion of being a tale of how under some circumstances a guy who loves his family can end up trying to murder them, perhaps, but it wouldn’t be at all the same book if you xxxed out the Overlook Hotel) or of arguably peripheral importance (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not the story of a man and his boy taking a trip on a motorbike).

To assert that the foreground is sufficiently unimportant that it’s “not what the work is about” is always controversial. To what extent is Gone With the Wind an exploration of female strength in different forms and not a historical tale of a person in Civil War time? How about A Fish Named Wanda, could the essence of that movie have been made around something other than a bank robbery?

The Wall is about a married British rocker with a dead father who is quite successful but alienated from any sense of pleasure or connection to his performances & audience. But most of that is relatively unimportant foregrounding. The war angle is important but not really separable from the maleness thing, the harshness and condemnation of soft feelings and the violence being done. It could be recast without much difficulty as an Australian stage actor with many of the same alienation themes. It would relocate easily enough to post-WW1 instead of post-WW2 generation.

Meanwhile, behind the foreground of dissociated punk rocker is this powerfully-written theme about maleness and masculinity. THAT, and not war or mean schoolteachers or drugs or punk rock, is what the actual WALL, the one that gets torn down at the end of the tale, is all about.

http://www.pinkfloydonline.com/lyrics/thewall.html

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[QUOTE=Baldwin]
That sounds ludicrous to me. Why in the world should I value your interpretation over what the creators of the piece have specifically stated? (Their statements make way more sense than your interpretation, for one thing.)
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Say that you read a book, and you really like it. You think it’s saying something that’s very interesting and relevant to you. Then you hear the author talk about the book, and he says that the book is about something entirely different, something you find trivial and kind of dumb.

Do you still like the book? Or does the creator’s stated intent overwrite whatever value you perceived in it?

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This is, I think, the crux of the matter. Those who stand firm that the author’s intention is all that matters, I put to you the example of a movie with a supposedly serious moment, but the audience laughs at it because the writing is trite (say) or dated. When you evaluate that work, is the artist’s intention going to override audience reaction? Nope, sorry.

Don’t trust the artist, trust the art itself.

Alfred Hitchcock never seemed to be aware of the deeper meanings in his films. John Ford told me he made “potboilers.”

When an artist DOES become aware and self-conscious, IMHO, the art usually suffers. Kurt Vonnegut was at his creative best in his earliest years, before he became self-consciously “arty.”

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[QUOTE=Miller]
Do you still like the book? Or does the creator’s stated intent overwrite whatever value you perceived in it?
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To me, the book would still be good. Especially in the case of a book, one storyline or philosophy may cause another to be incidental. A good writer may write that portion of the book without realizing it because he/she is doing a good job of creating the imprssion of the way life works. Often times situations are unintentionally analogous because life itself is full of patterns. The fact that an artist can pick up on these patterns without realizing it is a testament to the artists perception and comunication.

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[QUOTE=C K Dexter Haven]
This is, I think, the crux of the matter. Those who stand firm that the author’s intention is all that matters, I put to you the example of a movie with a supposedly serious moment, but the audience laughs at it because the writing is trite (say) or dated. When you evaluate that work, is the artist’s intention going to override audience reaction? Nope, sorry.

Don’t trust the artist, trust the art itself.

Alfred Hitchcock never seemed to be aware of the deeper meanings in his films. John Ford told me he made “potboilers.”

When an artist DOES become aware and self-conscious, IMHO, the art usually suffers. Kurt Vonnegut was at his creative best in his earliest years, before he became self-consciously “arty.”
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John Ford is an excellent example. He made some of the most profound art of the twentieth century while, apparently, focusing entirely–consciously, that is–on surface story. The emotional truth of his instincts shine through, despite his denials to the contrary.