# Your unpopular interpretations of creative works \[Spoilers\] **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [August 3, 2009, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194 "2009-08-03T18:34:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/161 "2009-08-12T20:17:00Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > I still don’t think he was much of a hero. Wasn’t like he started some sort of underground railroad, ‘transferring’ his Jewish employees to factories in non-Nazi-occupied countries so that he could continue to hire more and thus, increase the number of people he saved. Nope. He just had the one factory and that was all. He still saved the lives of over 1,200 people. He put his life in danger, and ruined himself financially, to do it. If that doesn’t make him “much of a hero,” I have to wonder what your standards for heroism are. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/162 "2009-08-12T20:18:23Z")
What I’m saying is that Remy didin’t care about whether he was above people, below people or among people. He didn’t care whether society accepted him or whether his father loved him. All he wanted was to make wonderful food and to find people to eat it. ---
**Author:** ![Dogzilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@Dogzilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dogzilla)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/163 "2009-08-12T20:27:59Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > He still saved the lives of over 1,200 people. He put his life in danger, and ruined himself financially, to do it. If that doesn’t make him “much of a hero,” I have to wonder what your standards for heroism are. Altruistic intent, apparently. Told you it wouldn’t be popular. I don’t mean to debate this, I’m simply responding to the OP, which asked for my unpopular interpretations. I interpret **Schindler’s List** unpopularly: I thought the dude was a self-serving war profiteer. I didn’t expect anyone to agree with me. In fact, that’s what I thought “unpopular” meant. Does that word not mean what I think it means? ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/164 "2009-08-12T20:55:30Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > I don’t mean to debate this, I’m simply responding to the OP, which asked for my unpopular interpretations. I interpret **Schindler’s List** unpopularly I won’t much debate your response, but I’d like to know how you interpret the following lines: _Schindler: You don’t see a difference? I see a difference. Stern: You’ll lose a lot of money, that’s the difference._ ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/165 "2009-08-12T21:01:16Z")
> [@Dogzilla](#): > > Altruistic intent, apparently. > > Told you it wouldn’t be popular. I don’t mean to debate this, I’m simply responding to the OP, which asked for my unpopular interpretations. I interpret **Schindler’s List** unpopularly: I thought the dude was a self-serving war profiteer. > > I didn’t expect anyone to agree with me. In fact, that’s what I thought “unpopular” meant. Does that word not mean what I think it means? Well, there’s unpopular, and there’s unsupportable. I mean, if you’re going to call someone a war profiteer, shouldn’t it be someone who made a profit during the war? Oscar Schindler (at least, the one portrayed in the movie) deliberately bankrupted himself to save as many Jews as he could. That strikes me as pretty far removed from a war profiteer, and a lot closer to altruistic intent. ---
**Author:** ![Dogzilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@Dogzilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dogzilla)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/166 "2009-08-12T21:04:02Z")
Wait, now we have to have reasonable, logical, supportable arguments for our unpopular interpretations? :: throws hands up :: I’m out. I saw the movie once 100 years ago, that was my interpretation, which is clearly unpopular, and I haven’t been interested enough in the movie to watch it again to see if my mind is changed by evaluating the evidently numerous plot points I obviously missed the first time around. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/167 "2009-08-12T21:16:00Z")
> [@Love\_Rhombus](#): > > The idea of a Superman does devalue human achievement. No, it doesn’t. THIS concept devalues human achievement - ‘if I can’t be #1, what’s the point?’ It’s Luthor and Syndrome who are devaluing humanity. Not that they’re actually being honest about their motivations - they don’t give a shit about the normal people. If they did, they’d be raising everyone up, they wouldn’t be wasting their time, resources, and genius, trying to bring Superman and Mr Incredible down. Ironically, if it was true, Luthor and Syndrome, with their superhuman genius, would be as great a disincentive to human achievement as any nominal super - normal people couldn’t even do what they do with a lifetime of training. What’s the point of studying engineering when Lex Luthor can come up with, in his sleep, from scratch, any device I could build with most of a decade of education and building on existing achievements - and _better_? ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/168 "2009-08-12T22:05:06Z")
> [@RikWriter](#): > > I don’t know that I agree that this is the reason, but I do know his refusal to kill is a selfish one that allows innocents to suffer so he can remain “moral.” Hear, hear. I wrote a story along those lines, once… Oh! Another one… "Joe Quesada thinks he’s freakin’ Spider-Man. " I didn’t say it wasn’t a _widespread_ idea, just that it’s an “unpopular” one. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/169 "2009-08-12T22:21:29Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > The “aliens” in the movie “Signs” aren’t really aliens. They are boogie-men. That’s why their actions don’t make any logical sense, and they can be killed by things that don’t make any sense. Every Boogie-man has a weakness. Maybe its heart is hidden in a box. Maybe it is afraid of mice. Maybe water causes it to melt. Or maybe a baseball bat to the face will do the trick. > > The boogie-men may (or may not) come from outer space, but they are still boogie-men whose only goals are to scare children. Everything else is just speculation by the characters in the movie. This explains why the boogie-man won’t open a door, because it’s scarier if he doesn’t. > > Note that M. Night Shamalayan might not believe that the creatures are boogie-men. He might believe that he made a movie with aliens. All I can tell you is that if it walks like a boogie-man and quacks like a boogie-man, it’s a boogie-man. My unpopular take on _Signs_: the aliens aren’t trying to conquer the Earth. They’re just trying to grab humans for use as slaves, or experimental test subjects, or something nefarious but relatively small scale. And the aliens we actually see are not the aliens running the show. They’re another slave race, maybe genetically designed for the purpose. They’re pretty dumb - some animal cunning, but nothing in the way of tool use, which is why they had so much trouble getting into the basement. And their weakness against water is very much deliberate. They use them on Earth precisely because the climate is so dangerous to them. They don’t want any of them escaping, so they deploy them on worlds where the very environment is fatally toxic to them. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/170 "2009-08-12T22:25:33Z")
I don’t think we were supposed to conceive of Schindler as some big altruistic hero. He was a flawed human being. He was a drunk and a party-boy. He saved the jews who worked at his factory almost by accident. He started using Jews as workers because they were essentially slave labor and were cheap. There was nothing altruistic about it. But then he found that he couldn’t let them all go to their deaths, and acted to help them. He took some risks to help them, but as he said at the end of the movie, he could have done so much more. Does that make him a huge hero? Not really, just an ordinary decent person. But it turns out that many ordinary human beings in Schindler’s position in wartime Germany didn’t lift a finger to help people who were sent to the camps. Ordinary unremarkable human decency turned out to be pretty uncommon. Still a thousand people who would have ended up in the camps didn’t, because Oskar Schindler helped them. Why did he help them, when so many other people wouldn’t? And when the war was over, Schindler was ruined financially. He was a drunk, and a poor businessman, he only was successful during the war because he was a back-slapper and had some friendly contacts in the Nazi party. After the war he was a failure. He had to be supported financially by the Jews he saved because he couldn’t handle money. I think the movie itself doesn’t know why Schindler did what he did. And all he did was not let himself become a monster when everyone around him was eager to become a monster. That doesn’t make him a hero, but if he wasn’t, why were his unheroic actions so rare? ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/171 "2009-08-12T22:28:47Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > My unpopular take on _Signs_: the aliens aren’t trying to conquer the Earth. They’re just trying to grab humans for use as slaves, or experimental test subjects, or something nefarious but relatively small scale. And the aliens we actually see are not the aliens running the show. They’re another slave race, maybe genetically designed for the purpose. They’re pretty dumb - some animal cunning, but nothing in the way of tool use, which is why they had so much trouble getting into the basement. And their weakness against water is very much deliberate. They use them on Earth precisely because the climate is so dangerous to them. They don’t want any of them escaping, so they deploy them on worlds where the very environment is fatally toxic to them. So even though we manage to kill the aliens who are attacking us, the master race could just send a different kind of alien? Or come down themselves and grab us at their leisure? ---
**Author:** ![mr.jp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/48db29/32.png) [@mr.jp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mr.jp)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/172 "2009-08-12T22:31:23Z")
> [@Ranchoth](#): > > Batman, in many of his incarnations, doesn’t choose not to kill because of moral qualms. It’s because he, at least subconsciously, wants to _prolong_ his fight against villainy. It’s what he’s based his identity on, and channeled his entire reason for being (and his own pain and rage) into. If he _won_, he’d have to _stop fighting_. I like this one. ---
**Author:** ![mr.jp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/48db29/32.png) [@mr.jp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mr.jp)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/173 "2009-08-12T22:34:26Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > But Remy, the rat, isn’t “as good” as everyone else - he’s much, much better. His natural culinary talent is essentially a superpower shared by few others, if any. And against him stand the forces of mediocrity: his father, who wants him to be just another rat; the chef, who wants to market knocked-off versions of another’s genius to the masses; and the critic, who sees it as his goal to stifle any expression of greatness. > > No, Brad Bird has an obssession with genius - as well he should. I’m a big fan of those movies. However, I was confused by the end of Ratatouille. Why did it go on that odd diatribe against critics? ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/174 "2009-08-12T22:44:23Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > …but as he said at the end of the movie, he could have done so much more. What he says at the end of the movie – when he drops to his knees and starts weeping – is that he could have saved maybe twelve more people, or maybe just eleven. You can allege that he could’ve done bigger-scale stuff, but don’t paraphrase him to do it; he’s just beating himself up over not saving eleven more Jews on top of the eleven hundred. _“There will be generations because of what you did.” “I didn’t do enough.” “You did so much.” “This car. Goeth would’ve bought this car. Why did I keep the car? Ten people, right there. Ten people, ten more people. This pin, two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would’ve given me two for it. At least one. He would’ve given me one, one more, one more person. A person, Stern. For this. I could’ve gotten one more person and I didn’t…”_ ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/175 "2009-08-12T22:52:17Z")
> [@Freudian\_Slit](#): > > So even though we manage to kill the aliens who are attacking us, the master race could just send a different kind of alien? Or come down themselves and grab us at their leisure? Probably, yeah, although my guess is that the events of the movie played out just like they expected, and they got exactly what they wanted from us. When they showed up, they were determined to capture X number of humans. I suspect they did that, then just let their servants run loose collecting extras until we figured out how to fight them off, then they scrammed with their new cargo. As to them coming back, I figure there’s a reason they didn’t show up to conquer. Possibly what they’re doing is considered illegal by some larger extra-terrestrial governing agency. The water soluble aliens we saw might tie into that - a couple of good rainstorms after the “invasion,” and all the evidence tying them to the Earth is washed away. ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/176 "2009-08-12T22:54:47Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Probably, yeah, although my guess is that the events of the movie played out just like they expected, and they got exactly what they wanted from us. When they showed up, they were determined to capture X number of humans. I suspect they did that, then just let their servants run loose collecting extras until we figured out how to fight them off, then they scrammed with their new cargo. As to them coming back, I figure there’s a reason they didn’t show up to conquer. Possibly what they’re doing is considered illegal by some larger extra-terrestrial governing agency. The water soluble aliens we saw might tie into that - a couple of good rainstorms after the “invasion,” and all the evidence tying them to the Earth is washed away. Oops, I forgot that they got a few people before Mel sprang into action and defended his castle. Heh. I like the idea of the aliens doing something illegal to them. ---
**Author:** ![Idlewild](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/8491ac/32.png) [@Idlewild](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Idlewild)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/177 "2009-08-12T23:41:58Z")
I recently watched _Bell, Book and Candle_ for the first time, and decided that it was either a darkly satirical jeremiad against marriage, specifically the perils of an independent woman being trapped in the social role expected of a married woman in mid-20th Century America, or I was deeply depressed by the ending. I choose to stay happy and go with my interpretation. Subvert the dominant paradigm! (Plus, with all the dark village jazz club stuff and the lengths to which Our Plucky Heroine would go to prevent her brother from ‘outing’ himself and the family, I couldn’t help but wonder if witchcraft was just another word for the love that dare not speak its name.) I’m semi-serious in wondering if there weren’t at least some people involved with the production of the film who were undermining the treacly romantic message on purpose. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2009, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/178 "2009-08-12T23:53:12Z")
An interesting thing about SCHINDLER’S LIST is that at one time Martin Scorcese either owned or was interested in the rights. (This is per Robert Deniro in an interview sometime back.) He wanted to set the film _after_ the war with a washed up and penniless Schindler mooching off the Schindlerjuden (who financially supported him for most of the rest of his life). This would probably have been a very different impression of the man. Count me among the majority where he’s concerned though; I see him as a hero. (The fact that the Jews he saved considered him a “Righteous Gentile” is enough of a reference for me.) > [@Idlewild](#): > > I recently watched _Bell, Book and Candle_ for the first time, and decided that it was either a darkly satirical jeremiad against marriage, specifically the perils of an independent woman being trapped in the social role expected of a married woman in mid-20th Century America, or I was deeply depressed by the ending. A good friend of mine was the first to point out that _Bewitched_, one of my favorite sitcoms, was one of the most infuriatingly chauvinistic shows of all time. Darrin couldn’t deal with the fact that Samantha was so much more powerful and thus subjugated her. It’d be about like marrying a billionaire and making her live in a trailer park. _I Dream of Jeannie_ was similar but at least in that one Jeannie wasn’t really there by Major Nelson’s insistence and at least in the early episodes he’d have been more than happy for her to go back to her own kind, plus unlike Samantha she wasn’t particularly upset by (or bound by) hsi request she not do magic. ---
**Author:** ![FlyingRamenMonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@FlyingRamenMonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyingRamenMonster)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2009, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/179 "2009-08-13T04:46:37Z")
> [@RikWriter](#): > > Bob Parr yes…but you seemed to be saying that Syndrome was speaking for Byrd. No, no, I didn’t say that. I meant Bob Parr. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2009, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194/180 "2009-08-13T05:15:16Z")
> [@FlyingRamenMonster](#): > > No, no, I didn’t say that. I meant Bob Parr. I think **Rik** ’s point was that the views you were attributing earlier to Brad Bird were expressed in the film by Syndrome. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194.md?page=8) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-unpopular-interpretations-of-creative-works-spoilers/505194.md?page=10)