Like I said, you don’t understand it. That is very obvious. So forgive me if I dismiss your stories about how you were smarter than HS teachers/professors.
We’ve had many discussions about misunderstood songs and this one comes up a lot. Some, I sort of get. The lyrics to Every Breath You Take can easily be taken at face value. But ferfucksake, the words to IWALY can’t be taken as anything but a breakup song. There could almost be a parenthetical (“even though this is goodbye”) included in the title.
So you’re arguing the people in the movie aren’t acting stupidly? Explain that. I’m truly interested.
I’m sure Scott thinks it’s a great movie, but the director of Robot Monster thinks that of his work, too. Creators are often wrong about the quality of their work, though not of their intention.
Then why are your arguments about the movie so terrible?
Some of them do act stupidly.
Others don’t.
If you want a narrative where every single character acts as a pinnacle of rationality for the entire running time of the picture, then that’s a personal choice. But the limitations of your own aesthetic palette do not represent a flaw in the film.
That’s true if you listen to anything but the soaring refrain that bears the song’s title, which is what gets everybody’s attention.
They all do stupid things solely to advance the plot. It is not that they are portrayed as stupid people (other than Lambert). They continually do stupid things only because there would be no story if they didn’t. Why didn’t they evacuate the ship immediately? Why didn’t they even discuss it and discard the possibility (“we can’t all fit on the lifeboat”)? Only Ripley shows intelligence – until when she wastes time searching for the cat.
A good filmmaker deals with the issues. A great filmmaker makes sure the option doesn’t need to be brought up because it’s obvious. A poor filmmaker ignores it.
You know how, here on the SDMB, sometimes people will respond to a thread’s title rather than to what the OP says? Those are probably the same people who look at a song’s title instead of what the lyrics say.
Nah. Some people are very deliberate in their work and others have absorbed the lessons of literature so unconsciously that they just spill out a story without even feeling like they have control over the narrative. The writing process varies dramatically from writer to writer.
You’re missing the analogy, there. The purpose of having you write an essay about Robert Frost in high school was to teach you how to write essays. The purpose of taking debate classes is to learn how to debate. Neither it about getting to the “correct” conclusion, both are about learning the process.
Yes! Exactly! You’re finally getting it!
If you’re using symbolism and allegory, you’re already hiding it, by definition - now the only question, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is how deep.
Some people enjoy picking apart books looking for symbolism and allegory. Some of those people are also writers - when they write, they write the sort of books they enjoy, which are books that are loaded with subtle allegories and hidden symbolism.
That’s not my argument. You’re disagreeing with something I’ve not actually said. I do not in any way insist that everyone subscribe to my interpretation of a story - in fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite. The whole point of reader response theory is that each reader’s interpretation of a text is informed by their life experience, preferences, and biases, and that the interesting thing about art is how a static text can inspire so many radically different reactions.
I’ve read enough bad fiction to recognize that this is a fallacy.
I think this thread is getting a little het up for Cafe society. Please try to be civil to each other and interpret each other’s posts generously.
…or if you completely miss the point of the argument. There’s always that.
I’m not saying you were talking about anything other than clouds. I’m saying that other people might be, and if you insist that there’s only one correct answer, you might miss the context in which other people are discussing issues.
I will suggest that this scene tells us why.
But the point of a literary essay is to discuss the work and what is actually in the work. It’s pointless to draw conclusions that don’t exist in the work. It’s only teaching students to bullshit.
So your argument is basically that you’re not ever interpreting the work itself, but just your reaction to it. Which means any reaction to it is valid. Which also means none are.
No, you’re not necessarily hiding it at all (See Giles Goat Boy, for instance). But the real point is that if an author is including allegory and symbolism in a story, they know it. The author has the final say, not the reader otherwise you get Charles Manson’s intepretation.
OK. that’s reasonable. But it is about the reader, not the text. The point of what you’re outlining is the reader’s reactions, but not what is actually in the story.
That’s pretty condescending.
Even in published “bad” fiction has an author who knows exactly what they’re doing. It may not be high toned or literary, but the author isn’t going for that. Fifty Shades of Grey may be a terrible novel. I’ve only read the first paragraph, but I did see that James was subverting a cliched trope.
But James was writing a particular type of novel, and she knew how to do it. It’s not something you and I are interested in, but readers found it a very good book. And, by your standards, they are right.
All plots are advanced by the decisions previously made, whether those decisions are stupid or not.
That’s literally what a plot is.
But it’s simply not true that the plot is advanced purely by stupid decisions. There is a mixture. Ripley attempts to quarantine the people returning from the ship. That’s not stupid. Ash over-rides the quarantine. This decision pushes forward the plot by getting the infected crew member on board.
But that’s not stupid, either. Ash simply has different motivations from the rest of the crew, just as he has ostensibly different motivations from Ripley on the surface level when he hits the over-ride button. It’s the conflict of motivations that provides tension between the characters.
And even if Ash’s decision seems “stupid” at the time, absent the information revealed later, it’s also an incredibly human decision (ironically enough) for his ostensible rationale to disregard stuffy safety precautions in favor of short-term expediency. For regular hyu-mon viewers, which I assume includes the majority of people who watched it, it is completely understandable why people might ignore quarantine, even if we rationally consider it a bad decision. Real human beings disregard sensible quarantine precautions all the time. (This should not require a cite.) There’s an injured colleague who needs medical support. The tension between Ripley and Ash starts out with an ostensible difference in adherence to reasonable regulations, and then builds to deeper differences in motivation given the later revelations of the film. The inter-personal tension escalates as Ash’s motives become clear.
As it should, in a good movie.
On top of all this, your comments ignore deeper realities of narrative propulsion.
It is very commonly the case, even in the most highly regarded movies, that what “advances the plot” often makes no sense whatsoever.
Raiders of the Lost Ark starts with a multi-person trek through foreboding jungle. The intrepid band trudges their way through wilderness with the guidance of an old musty map.
But in the escape phase, there is an airplane waiting with exactly one extra seat, suitable for the exactly one survivor who makes it back out. What was the plan for getting the other people out?
Classic narratives have expedient short-cuts like this all time, because talented storytellers realize that almost all of the audience is going to be focused entirely on what propels the narrative forward from scene to scene, rather than noticing loose strands that hang out that don’t immediately capture our attention. It simply does not influence our evaluation of the movie to notice, afterward, that the airplane doesn’t have enough seats, or later in the movie that the main character would be in significant trouble stowing away on top of a submarine in which the command to submerge can clearly be heard.
The gears that push a classic narrative forward do not always have to mesh. To believe otherwise is to show deep lack of familiarity with narrative.
On top of all this, your comments ignore that much of what makes Alien work operates on a level far outside the logic of narrative propulsion or “jump scares”.
Much of the movie is atmosphere, just pure dread that comes from exquisite set and monster design, extremely impressive even four decades later.
Go ahead and watch the chains scene, again, where Harry Dean Stanton gets got. Not a jump. Exactly the opposite. The audience sees the creature first, before poor Stanton, and it’s moving slowly. The entire thing works based on lighting, camera angle, set design, timing, and especially sound.
And I just watched it again.
Jesus fuck almighty, it still works, even completely out of context. Ooof.
On top of all this, your comments ignore that Alien has some of the best “jump scares” ever filmed.
The one in which the actors weren’t told in advance what was about to happen is especially effective. They’re not even acting. Their reactions are legitimate, honest shock.
And that’s what makes the scene work.
It’s not the jump itself, not the bursting out of the chest itself (altho that part is totally awesome), but the legitimate, sincere, genuine emotional response. Which is to say, the genuine terror on the part of the people who had to watch that happen. Their terror is the audience’s terror. The “jump” is fantastic, but the reaction is what makes it great.
(This is another moment when the crew acts with full intelligence, not stupidity: One of them tries to kill the thing immediately.)
Great movie. Absolutely a classic for an entire host of reasons.
Also, can’t an author — lie?
Say someone writes a book that sure does seem like it’s clearly about someone in particular — but the author hastens to assure us that, oh, no, I was writing about a type of person, and not about a specific guy who can sue me. Or the other side of the coin: let’s say that a writer explains that the protagonist’s actions are semiautobiographical — which maybe lends it a touch of authenticity and sounds more interesting than just saying he, uh, made the whole thing up.
Or maybe he’s riffing on a fictional character he doesn’t have the rights to, while claiming that he’s doing nothing of the sort. Or he just wrote down a memorable detail that simply happened right in front of him, but he wants to seem creative. Or maybe he’s penning a cautionary tale about what happens if people aren’t shocked into action by something written by a great author, and he doesn’t want to spell out that he’s a great author you should listen to.
Or whatever; if we start with that sort of stuff, then how far can we go in figuring that a writer who confirms or denies this or that reading may or may not be playing fair?
That’s the point according to whom? Certainly not most teachers.
“If every reaction is valid, then no reaction is valid” is not a logically coherent position.
Symbolism and allegory are, pretty much by definition, hiding your meaning.
An author certainly has the authority to say that a black hat doesn’t have any intentional symbolic meaning, and we can treat that as objective fact for the most part. But is that the most useful way to approach the text? Is “A Good Man is Hard to Find?” a more entertaining read if you treat the hat as a symbol? If a reader’s enjoyment of the text hinges on a specific reading, and the author invalidates that reading, is the reader no longer allowed to enjoy the text?
No foolin’! You figure that might be why it’s called “reader response theory?”
More or less condescending than “I’m curious - do you write fiction?”
Hack writers know what they are doing and may put in symbolism intentionally, and may want to own a definition of the meaning of their work. That can’t be “literature” though. It implies more.
In any case, you cannot rely on the author to interpret literature for you, either honestly or mendaciously. You must use your own brain for that. Reading literary criticism can be invaluable, but also there you need to understand it, and not take it as read that the critic got it right or knew what he or she was talking about.
How many of your peers in that class and similar classes around the country were able to write essays that skillfully discussed the content of the work and possible meanings? From your description it sounds like you perfectly understood what you would be graded on and tried to subvert it for your own weird reasons. Some teachers would give that a bad grade, and some of those teachers end up having to have the students hound them because their reason was to catch the teacher out. “I did all the right things, who are you to tell me I don’t genuinely believe this?”
Maybe you would have learned something about being a smartass if you had gotten a bad grade on that essay, but the teacher obviously didn’t see that as their job, and as a teacher myself I don’t blame them, I prefer to spend my energy on the students who actually aren’t absorbing the lessons rather than the ones that do.
I suspect, more than anything, the teacher had just gone through a stack of essays that started with 'What is poetry? The dictionary defines it as…" and was just happy to read something that had a bit of wit and creativity to it. If you can parody the analytical process, you probably understand it well enough to deserve a passing grade.