The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made? • Hacker News Board

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#21

Post by dang » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

nimih wrote: post #10

Causality1 wrote: post #3

arguing that we should embrace ambiguity. This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something. "You decide how it ended" "You decide if she lived or died" "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" "It means whatever you want it to mean" It's an excuse for lazy writing and for being too cowardly to make decisions.

Ah yes, the famously lazy and cowardly filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch.

Please don't post snarky comments or shallow dismissals. If you know more than other people, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. That's more in the intended spirit of this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

(Btw - re Lynch - I watched Blue Velvet after many years and was surprised at how satisfyingly the plot did line up. I'm not saying that's true of his other work. But I had had the impression that BV was in the fashionably-ambiguous style and when I saw it again I realized I got that wrong.)

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#22

Post by chowells » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

Causality1 wrote: post #3

arguing that we should embrace ambiguity. This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something. "You decide how it ended" "You decide if she lived or died" "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" "It means whatever you want it to mean" It's an excuse for lazy writing and for being too cowardly to make decisions.

Exactly none of those are what ambiguity means. Ambiguity means that there are multiple resolutions that fit the existing evidence equally well.

That doesn't mean you get to decide. Ambiguity isn't choose your own adventure. You aren't having agency assigned to you in order to be the ultimate arbiter.

Ambiguity is the opposite. You are having agency withheld and being told by the author that you don't get to know.

It's an exercise in accepting that some things are unknowable and a challenge to you to find enjoyment in the story despite that.

Maybe you fail at that challenge. That's ok. Some people demand their art be unlike life, in that everything is always fully explained. But some people enjoy the construction, the ride, and the occasional recollection and reconsideration as time goes on. Ambiguous art is for for them.

But it's not a choose your own adventure story for anyone.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#23

Post by soneca » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

seph-reed wrote: post #18

pjmorris wrote: post #9

I was amazed and astonished when I first saw 'The Big Sleep', early in my college career. I'd never seen a movie I had a hard time following before, and I was captivated. There's an old Steve Yegge post where he described presenting for Jeff Bezos. I'm paraphrasing, but Yegge said something like after writing the presentation (no slides), delete every fifth paragraph to keep Bezos intrigued enough to pay attention. I…

This was a really nice read. I've made a habit lately of "checking out" on having any opinion about anything I can't truly analyze. And this is a great example of why. I'm surrounded in content telling me why Bezos is a monster, and they make a good argument. But for all that hatred, I've never once heard a single mention of him being smart, let alone intimidatingly smart, let alone "a first class genius" or "better…

I remember reading about him being very smart multiple times. Just not on articles commenting Amazon workplace environment and such, as it should not be indeed.

On articles about the beginnings of Amazon, the writing culture, or anything that is in part a biography on Bezos, I always see it mentioned how smart he is.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#24

Post by ghaff » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

chowells wrote: post #22

Causality1 wrote: post #3

arguing that we should embrace ambiguity. This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something. "You decide how it ended" "You decide if she lived or died" "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" "It means whatever you want it to mean" It's an excuse for lazy writing and for being too cowardly to make decisions.

Exactly none of those are what ambiguity means. Ambiguity means that there are multiple resolutions that fit the existing evidence equally well. That doesn't mean you get to decide. Ambiguity isn't choose your own adventure. You aren't having agency assigned to you in order to be the ultimate arbiter. Ambiguity is the opposite. You are having agency withheld and being told by the author that you don't get to know. It…

It depends on the film. Without getting into a long rambling film analysis, there are certainly films (Inception is probably one), for example, in which the ending really is ambiguous and those assert otherwise are probably looking a little too deeply into discerning patterns in the tea leaves. There are others (probably including Total Recall) where there is a logical argument to be made as to why the film actually ended in a particular way.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#25

Post by monkeyfacebag » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #2

Was it really that baffling? As a genre, film noir tends to have a twisting storyline and this was a particularly good one. But compared to, say, a Christopher Nolan or Charlie Kaufman film, this was a walk in the park.

Do Christopher Nolan films have a reputation for being baffling? I've never had that experience with them.

On the other hand, we just saw The Green Knight and that one will throw you.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#26

Post by technothrasher » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #12

leephillips wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ambiguity, the planting of multiple possible interpretations, has been a part of art forever. All art: literature, painting, etc. I would even say it’s an integral part of the best art.

Yes, but not ambiguity about the basic facts of a story. That's a modern thing as far as I know. It's also a risky artistic move because it thwarts one of the main satisfactions in a story, the resolution of tension. If you're going to take that away, you'd better 'give' something that's equally satisfying, or else the reader/viewer will feel cheated.

> but not ambiguity about the basic facts of a story.

Really?? The "unreliably narrator" is a classic literary device that introduces ambiguity about the basic facts of many well loved stories. See "Wuthering Heights" as an almost 200 year old example, or "The Handmaid's Tale" as an extreme example of factual ambiguity from about 40 years ago.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#27

Post by zabzonk » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

I remember watching it (I'd seen it before) with an audience of stoner undergrads at St. Andrews University (not the brightest of people - I was at Edinburgh) and having to explain what exactly was going on, not helped by being somewhat stoned myself.

But do films (or any art) have to "make sense"? For example, I've never really worked out what the original "Solaris" is about, but it doesn't stop it from being both scary and moving.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#28

Post by yumaikas » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

seph-reed wrote: post #18

pjmorris wrote: post #9

I was amazed and astonished when I first saw 'The Big Sleep', early in my college career. I'd never seen a movie I had a hard time following before, and I was captivated. There's an old Steve Yegge post where he described presenting for Jeff Bezos. I'm paraphrasing, but Yegge said something like after writing the presentation (no slides), delete every fifth paragraph to keep Bezos intrigued enough to pay attention. I…

This was a really nice read. I've made a habit lately of "checking out" on having any opinion about anything I can't truly analyze. And this is a great example of why. I'm surrounded in content telling me why Bezos is a monster, and they make a good argument. But for all that hatred, I've never once heard a single mention of him being smart, let alone intimidatingly smart, let alone "a first class genius" or "better…

I wonder how much of "smart" is due to his power, and how much of it is due to his intellect.

I say this not because I don't believe he doesn't have an impressive intellect, but because, well, what if someone had his intellect, but worked in an Amazon warehouse due to circumstances outside of their control?

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#29

Post by yumaikas » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

yumaikas wrote: post #28

seph-reed wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a really nice read. I've made a habit lately of "checking out" on having any opinion about anything I can't truly analyze. And this is a great example of why. I'm surrounded in content telling me why Bezos is a monster, and they make a good argument. But for all that hatred, I've never once heard a single mention of him being smart, let alone intimidatingly smart, let alone "a first class genius" or "better…

I wonder how much of "smart" is due to his power, and how much of it is due to his intellect. I say this not because I don't believe he doesn't have an impressive intellect, but because, well, what if someone had his intellect, but worked in an Amazon warehouse due to circumstances outside of their control?

Lots of people with power shut down people who are smarter than them for being annoying, I guess is what I'm getting at.

Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?

#30

Post by Joeboy » Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

ryandvm wrote: post #20

ubermonkey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a deeply predictable (and pedestrian) take, and I 100% expected to see it here (as I expect to see it in any technical forum). Highly technical people -- developers, engineers, etc -- are much more likely (at least in my experience) to react negatively to nonlinear storytelling. Further, the reaction is almost never "wow, not for me" but instead "THIS IS STUPID". It's essentially the equivalent of walking thr…

Programmers are generally unhappy with fuzziness or else they wouldn't be good programmers.

The enjoyment of figuring out what's going on in something like Mulholland Drive is rather similar to the enjoyment of debugging a complex bug. There's a frustration about it not immediately making sense, but there's also a pleasure to working it out.

Primer on the other hand, I think all you can really do is accept that there are big unexplained gaps in the story, and no amount of debugging is going to help. I personally take that as a fun hint of a larger story you're not seeing.

Never seen The Big Sleep so not sure which it's more like.