And why did he hate short people so much? Drawing a parallel between being short and being an untrustworthy liar seems specious at best. 
The reboot was even better cause they had all the MTV reality shows to shit on.
You beat me to it.I was about to post this.
One of my professor, A.R. Gurney, wrote a play based on the poem, entitled Who Killed Richard Cory? *. I saw it in an off-Broadway production.
*Wikipedia has the title wrong
Newman’s views on Political Science are also somewhat unorthodox, to say the least.
Good God – someone adapted Gurney’s play into a musical.
That must be a singularly depressing musical, or else someone else tragically misunderstood the poem
No slam on the OP, who has asked a great question. But I would posit that if everyone “misunderstands” some item of pop culture, then that misunderstanding “is” the pop culture, not the creators intentions. If everybody believes that “Every Breath You Take” is a love song, then it’s a freaking love song and what Gordon thinks is irrelevant. Franz Liebkind was wrong.
Townsend himself has stated that the line ‘We’re all wasted’ was nothing to do with being drugged or drunk, it was meant to be literal, that all the talents of the youth were being thrown away and so was being wasted instead of used.
That’s a valid observation.
On the other hand, everyone in this thread understood the intent of the OP, and responded accordingly, despite the phrasing being inaccurate.
So, by the same logic…
There’s the creator’s intentions, the meanings you can defend if you honestly argue from the text of the work and apply sound reasoning, and popular meanings someone could only get if they missed part of it and are arguing from a text which never existed outside of their head. It’s like “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, except people don’t recreate a perfect line-for-line replica in their head, they make a text divorced from the original and which is, sometimes, incorrect.
Anyway, that last bit is what the thread is about. It’s an interesting thing to think about without insisting that it’s effectively the only interpretation, especially since the “pop culture interpretation” of a lot of songs seems to be a dance beat with asemic mouth noise layered on top.
What I noticed was that when Ursula transformed Ariel we got momentary – and very tiny – nudity but when Papa transformed her, he threw in a dress.
I’m not sure what that says about me.
Just because it’s wrong to use the creator’s intentions in criticism doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Also, when Ursula transformed her, it looked painful; when dad did, it didn’t. And Ursula didn’t bother to make arrangements to get Ariel closer to the surface where she could breathe post-transformation. All of which further supports the blindingly obvious conclusion that Ursula is, in fact, a villain, not some misunderstood femimist heroine or victim of the patriarchy.
As to @gdave’s point, I don’t think it’s unserious exactly, but I sometimes think there is sort of a trend of finding a way to shit on people’s childhood favorites for…I dunno, clicks, wokeness cred, something more than just having this interpretation and wanting to share it? Not that they don’t actually believe that interpretation, though?
Well, of course it exists. The point is that the audience’s interpretation is just as (maybe even more so) valid.
I’ve never found this to be a compelling argument. This is why we get absurd situations like a college student arguing with Ray Bradbury about the meaning of Fahrenheit 451. We can say that things have special meaning to us without implying that meaning is universal. And it’s quite another thing to unwittingly miss entire elements of the story. Some interpretations are more wrong than others.
If everybody believes something, then it is universal. 
When the fight is you against the world, back the world. (Which, this being the Dope, someone will promptly and correctly point out that if everybody disagrees with me, then I am wrong, no matter what I believe or how strongly I believe it.)
But everyone doesn’t, so it isn’t. There has been much talk about the creepiness of this song since it first came out.
Captain America says you’re wrong:
That reminds me of another one - you sometimes hear that Asimov got into an argument with a college student who had a strange view of “Nightfall” and slapped the kid down righteously, but that’s not right at all. Asimov heard a lecture from a distinguished professor about “Nightfall” and Asimov acknowledged that while he hadn’t consciously had those ideas while writing the story, the professor raised some interesting points (and the two became friendly). It's Been a Good Life - Isaac Asimov - Google Books
*The story about Bradbury I heard was that a college student argued with a professor about the Martian Chronicles, and as evidence contacted Bradbury (which the professor did not appreciate).
Reality says I’m right:
