Did she include the Fish cheer from the studio album, or the “Fish” cheer from the Woodstock album?
That’s a really low bar for brilliance and that’s coming from the guy who handed in the “poem”.
It was a guy, and I don’t remember any cheer. He also taught us “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” and a couple of years later when our family moved to Chicago I was relieved to learn we wouldn’t be living on the south side.
The beginning of the studio version starts with Joe yelling “Give me an ‘F’”, and the band responding “F”; “Give me an ‘I’”; “I”; etc. On the Woodstock album, it’s “Give me an ‘F’”; crowd yells “F”; “Give me a 'U”"; “U”; “Give me a ‘C’”;
“C”; “Give me a ‘K’”. It’s actuall marked on the Woodstock album as the “Fish” cheer (with quotes).
Actually, I wonder where the idea that the hero wore a white hat began. Considering the fact that Zorro one of movies most popular and earliest heroes wore A black hat.
One of Charles Manson’s top ten ‘Let’s start a race war!’ films!
According to this site about hackers,
In that case maybe Zorro is the anti trope since he premiered in 1919.
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,
from up and down and still somehow
it’s cloud illusions I recall.
I really don’t know clouds at all.
Brilliant! 
And once again, you are saying that art has no intrinsic meaning. Therefore any meaning the reader ascribes to it is both right and completely wrong at the same time.
It’s a cute idea, but basically says that art is meaningless.
Not really. Every reader decides what they find in a work, right? How they find it should be irrelevant to their enjoyment. And if you hide it, many will not get your point.
I have no problem with an author being subtle and bringing up points that could be missed on first reading. I just think it’s ludicrous that an author would hide the meaning so deeply that it takes years for anyone to notice it. Why bother doing it if no one catches on?
Your entire thesis is that the reader determines the meaning, so you can’t be objecting to my argument. And since you don’t write SF, you don’t understand the term “idiot plot,” which is well known throughout the field.
I’m having the argument with the words you are writing down. I assumed the showed what you were thinking.
Not knowing how to do what you want is a common problem of all writers.
The writers who are successful – even if they’re “bad” writers – know what they’re doing. They may not know certain elements of writing, but the story is doing what they want.
Even Alien knew what it was doing: it was out to make the audience jump. My objection is that they could only doing by showing characters who didn’t have a lick of common sense. They clearly succeeded, but the movie would have been far better if the characters reacted in a sensible manner.
Occasionally.
Perhaps it would be more useful to think of it as more “Does this story work as a metaphor for [different subject] (irrespective of original intent)?”
I think, almost by definition, that every individual reader (or viewer, whatever) is going to read a different book just based on their own cultural and personal backgrounds, fears, situation. This is especially true when a story has obvious double-meanings. You don’t have to go about arguing what the author really meant, you just have to be able to explain how a given interpretation would work. It doesn’t have to be “correct” because that’s not the point.
The Matrix works as a hero’s journey, but also as a Christ/savior metaphor, and also as a metamorphosis and transgender metaphor. There are obvious things that have double-meanings, but what the second meaning is can be whatever. If you’re going to make a claim, the job of literary criticism is to articulate that.
Once more, with feeling: meaning is a neurological phenomenon. It objectively exists, but it objectively exists only as an electrochemical process within brains. How could it exist otherwise?
Saying it exists in brains isn’t the same as saying it doesn’t exist.
No, I’m saying art had both intrinsic and extrinsic meanings, and sometimes an extrinsic meaning can be more interested than the intrinsic meaning.
Yes, there are readers who don’t enjoy symbolism. To them, a bunch of dense symbolism is going to be turn off, and more subtle symbolism is going to be ignored. And that’s okay. If a person likes a book, but misses all the symbolism the author intentionally included, he’s not “liking the book wrong,” and it’s perfectly okay for him to describe his reaction to the book without referencing any symbolism at all.
There are other people who really like symbolism, and enjoy really digging deeply into a text to find that sort of stuff. Sometimes these readers will dig up some meaning in a book that the author didn’t intend to put there. That’s also okay. They, also, are not “liking the book wrong.”
Some people - both artists and audiences - approach art as a puzzle that needs to be solved. Some people like solving hard puzzles. Some people like making hard puzzles, and watching people try to solve them.
And, of course, some people underestimate how hard they’ve actually made a puzzle, and nobody can solve it.
The term “idiot plot” is pretty well known outside of sci-fi, too. I put it in scare quotes because applying it to Alien is so obviously inappropriate. It’s also not something you learn by being a writer, it’s something you learn by reading criticism.
Beyond that, no part of “my” thesis holds that you can’t argue against someone’s interpretation, particularly if their interpretation is not supported by the plain text of the work, as in your Alien critique. Additionally, I’ve been talking about meaning, not quality - there is also no part of “my” thesis that holds one can’t comment on the quality of a text.
I’ve also not argued that a person’s opinion about a work of art is only valuable so long as they’ve personally created art in the same medium/genre, nor have I argued that a work that is popular can’t be considered “bad” because artists inherently know what they’re doing when they create art. But those are both arguments you’ve made in this thread, which make your criticism of Alien hypocritical - after all, Ridley Scott has made way more movies than you have, and Alien is an immensely popular film. By the standards you’ve articulated in this thread, you’ve got no basis for saying Alien is a bad film. You’ve never made a film, therefore, you can’t properly understand how films work, and the fact that the film was so successful proves, in and of itself, that Ridley Scott made good decisions in creating it.
No, you’re having an argument with ideas that you invented for me and then put in my mouth.
In “I’ll Be Seeing You,” the singer doesn’t mean “We’ll meet again.” She/he means “You’ll always be in my thoughts.”
Wow. I never considered people could misinterpret that. It’s basically the same sentiment as “Always Something There to Remind Me.”
I had always figured the former until I really listened to the lyrics. It becomes clear in the second half, which is:
I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way
I’ll find you
In the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you
Ozzy Osbourne’s “No More Tears” may sound like a break-up song, but it’s much more sinister. If you listen closely to the words, the reason why there’s “no more tears” is because the guy killed his gf and she can’t cry when dead. He then kisses her corpse before departing.