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The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
111–120 of 160 posts
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#112I 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…
You usually find that in anything talking about his DE Shaw background.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. Most people, in most cultures, don't accept it as fact that life doesn't make sense. What % of people would agree with the statement "everything happens for a reason"? Or even "because God did it". Of those who don't think everything happens for a reason (i.e. life makes sense... to someone), the vast majority nevertheless believe we live in a universe of physical…
What sense does getting wiped out by a plague make?
The GP is just making assertions about cultural anthropology, with basically zero evidence or argument supporting their assertions. I wouldnt bother trying to argue with them, directly... I would not expect them to have any real expertise on the subject, so I expect you'll just get more of the same quality.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sense does getting wiped out by a plague make?
A lot of religious people I know would just say that god had his reasons and that's good enough. You don't need to understand why, the very core of religion is to believe that god "acts in misterious ways" and if something happened then it's because god wanted it to happen. Maybe those people have sinned. Maybe that's god's way to teach people a lesson. Or maybe it's something entirely else and we just don't know yet…
For most of history this was how people viewed life and death.
If you tried telling them it was just nature, bad luck, and an uncaring universe they would have viewed you as a naive simpleton.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#115Take Dark City . I believe the studio forced a new opening that more or less explained everything rather than letting you puzzle it all out. I didn't find the movie too hard to work through, but I think Hollywood execs have a fairly low estimation of the audience's intellect. Lynch is a bit harder. Lynch is atypical in two ways that play off of one another. First and most obviously, he has been developing as a film-m…
The corollary is one should start David Lynch from Eraser head :) Which in a way is his easiest film because you can't read it in a superficial level, there's simply no superficial level. You go straight to the cipher.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of religious people I know would just say that god had his reasons and that's good enough. You don't need to understand why, the very core of religion is to believe that god "acts in misterious ways" and if something happened then it's because god wanted it to happen. Maybe those people have sinned. Maybe that's god's way to teach people a lesson. Or maybe it's something entirely else and we just don't know yet…
For most of history this was how people viewed life and death. If you tried telling them it was just nature, bad luck, and an uncaring universe they would have viewed you as a naive simpleton.
> uncaring universe
What "caring universe" do you measure things against to see it's not caring?
How can you have yin without yang, in other words?
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, lots of characters change at random, just when you think you know them.
I find this in a lot of Netflix shows, where the season is ostensibly building to some revelation about who the killer or mole or whoever is, but each episode plays out like it was based only on prompts from the previous ones and not according to some planned story arc. At the end you don't see everything fall into place, you learn that there was a relationship that was not alluded to in any way through the rest of t…
Exquisite Corpse the miniseries! It might be interesting to do that deliberately.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
“I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.” -- David Lynch
> They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. Most people, in most cultures, don't accept it as fact that life doesn't make sense. What % of people would agree with the statement "everything happens for a reason"? Or even "because God did it". Of those who don't think everything happens for a reason (i.e. life makes sense... to someone), the vast majority nevertheless believe we live in a universe of physical…
You've misunderstood the David Lynch quote. He's observing the fact that people have the instinctive ability to rationalize about the reality we observe, in order to maintain a consistent theory of our own existence in it... We can be surprised or shocked at what we witness, but we must somehow integrate it into our mental picture of reality. Often as not, our mental picture isn't particularly accurate... We have to fill in the gaps with our imagination.
Film & literary theory starts from an understanding of this phenomenon. It's the basis of willing suspension of disbelief. We don't have to try to fill in the gaps with our imagination, when we see/hear/read the corpus of a story... Our minds tend to start playing along, automatically, when prompted.
Plenty of people have proved perfectly willing to entertain the idea of getting wiped out by asteroid or plague... But also, plenty of people have proved willing to entertain the idea that we live in a constructed artificial reality, a la "The Matrix".
Our religious beliefs are just as nutty and varied as movie premises, and that's not a coincidence, because religious beliefs basically emerge from the same mental phenomenon as literature.
I mean, it makes no sense that an invisible Sky-Father supernaturally impregnated a Jewish teenage girl, two thousand years ago, and that the resulting child could reverse thermodynamic processes at will... But nearly 1/3 of the world says they believe it like that, more or less.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#119For anyone who had trouble understanding the plot of The Big Sleep, I would really like to hear what the difficult points were for you. It's one of my favorite movies and while the plot was convoluted, I never felt it was confusing. I see this as an opportunity to understand how some other people process narratives.
Re: The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sense does getting wiped out by a plague make?
The GP is just making assertions about cultural anthropology, with basically zero evidence or argument supporting their assertions. I wouldnt bother trying to argue with them, directly... I would not expect them to have any real expertise on the subject, so I expect you'll just get more of the same quality.
The quote about "the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense" has been around in some form for around two centuries in western culture.
References:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/15/truth-stranger/
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/RealityIsUnrea...
The quote from Lynch makes it sound as though the obvious way to get people to accept an implausible story didn't occur to him.
Simply have some small print at the beginning that says "based on a true story". As I recall, that's what was done with the movie Fargo.
"Important point: just because it has happened in real life does not make it believable in a story. If a reader says she didn’t believe such a thing would happen, it is no defence for you to say, "Oh, but that did happen! In 1982 I was walking along..." — Nicola Morgan, Write To Be Published