141–150 of 160 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It was just a dream" only works if it suggests an actual ending. Eg. Brazil, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I don't think it's a viable twist in itself.
Which ending of Brazil?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This may not be a counterexample, because they are probably classified as modern, but people carry on disputes about the basic elements of the plots of Nabokov’s novels. There is no general agreement about the actual plot of Transparent Things , and a lot of argument over what really happened in Lolita . In many of his works, such as Pale Fire and Bend Sinister , you have to think a lot just to apprehend what the plo…
I was totally thinking about The Prisoner as an example when this came up today! It's clear that McGoohan had gotten bored with neatly constructed thrillers, and wanted to create an allegory and explore deeper themes. The great thing about that show is that every individual episode was a neatly constructed thriller in its own right, even though it always ended back at ambiguous-square-zero (why is he in the village? will he escape or won't he?).
At the same time, it's pretty clear that he had no idea how to actually end the thing, and he told Lew Grade that shortly before they filmed the ending. I think the fiasco of the unsatisfying ending was only partly that people wanted an explanation which McGoohan didn't want to give them because it wasn't the point of the series. It's also that he kind of winged the ending and it just wasn't that good, compared to the high level of the previous episodes. So in a way it did fail the audience, even if at the same time the audience was failing to 'get' the art.
Edit: this is fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfXqtDgvpL8
Take 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…
That's great insight about Lynch. I was totally puzzled by Mulholland Drive, then I read an explanation in a IMDB review, watch it again, and I was amazed that everything made sense. It was encrypted and somebody gave me the keys. That's really an artistic experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm familiar with both quotes, but I think we're barking up the wrong tree by trying to intepret them literally. "Based on a true story" is not what makes a film plausible to us... We instinctively engage in a willing suspension of disbelief when we're prompted by literature, even when we directly know that the story is false. Fargo includes that text because the film is an homage to the hardboiled crime fiction genr…
>"Based on a true story" is not what makes a film plausible to us It wasn't the only thing that made Fargo seem plausible. But it permitted people to suspend disbelief, because it was enough like a weird news story. Saying the same thing about Raising Arizona wouldn't make it realistic, granted. And it isn't license to tell any story that is true, no matter how unbelievable. >You've misunderstood what Nicola Morgan i…
I apologize if I've offended you, I'm really not trying to be pedantic, or a dick. I just believe that your intepretation lacks some critical context.
Now, I admit, I'm feeling a little confused, and I suspect that I may have missed something you said earlier.
I think my key point is that the human capacity for a willing suspension of disbelief is totally unrelated to how realistic or factual we believe the story to be... Most of us regularly consume wildly unrealistic fiction that we KNOW is pretty far from reality. Consider Game of Thrones and Star Wars... both massively popular, and neither making any claims of factual realism.
Our social primate brains are wired to be constantly trying to understand each other. We're driven to try to predict the reactions of the peers, mates, competitors, and enemies in our social groups. The details are informed by our own learning and life experiences, but at the core is an obsessive, hard-wired anxiety about what is going on in everyone else's heads.
Literature exploits our internal empathizing behavior by presenting us with depictions (on screen, on stage, in text, etc) of characters exhibiting human-like behavior. In response, our social mind instinctively starts to try to make sense of whatever is depicted. Our minds are drawn into attempting to model what is going on inside the characters, just as if they're normal human beings.
For believeability, it's not really relevant whether the characters physically resemble human beings... We can equally empathize with robots, animals, gods, etc. The important thing is that the characters perform in ways to which our brains can assign some human meaning.
When Nicola Morgan points out that factual truth isn't relevant to believeability, she's talking about the fact that real humans sometimes behave in ways that don't compute, and our empathizing process fails to model them for us.
Does that make sense? Are we actually in agreement here, and maybe I just misunderstood something on your end?
One thing I'd add to the article is that a key feature of the Marlow novels is their meandering plots. I read once that Raymond Chandler stories are about the journey, not the destination, so basically you're following Marlow around as he does stuff (that is mentioned in the article). The stuff he does is locally interesting, and it makes the stories good. But judging the stories based on their plot synopsis doesn't…
https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Raymond_Cha...
The plays are rarely rebroadcast on the BBC:
One thing I'd add to the article is that a key feature of the Marlow novels is their meandering plots. I read once that Raymond Chandler stories are about the journey, not the destination, so basically you're following Marlow around as he does stuff (that is mentioned in the article). The stuff he does is locally interesting, and it makes the stories good. But judging the stories based on their plot synopsis doesn't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could look at it a dozen different ways, depending on your sense-making framework: * God did it (makes sense- God does cataclysmic stuff) * Nature did it (makes sense- biology is a jerk and we haven't mastered it yet) * Humans did it by mistake (makes sense- we make huge errors all the time) * etc
Sure. In the context of Lynch's work things that happen without sense are often intra-textual in his work or hint at some interior sense that is obscure to the characters, audience. Why do characters (dead!) from Twin Peaks show up in Mulholland Drive? Well, that _might_ be touched on in Twin Peaks season 3 or maybe it isn't. Kinda up to you. Seems to me that's Lynch's point. In daily life we're all willing to accept…
In other words, I disagree with Mark Twain: Reality has to make sense, whereas fiction can be made arbitrarily nonsensical.
(However, doing so may make it bad fiction, whereas reality is not subject to any such appeal.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Being smart isn't good enough. One must also be motivated, be willing to put in the effort, and not be discouraged by repeated failure. I had a friend once who was very smart. He was always starting new projects to make money, and always quit at the first or second obstacle.
And even then they will most likely fail. So they need a lot of luck, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's great insight about Lynch. I was totally puzzled by Mulholland Drive, then I read an explanation in a IMDB review, watch it again, and I was amazed that everything made sense. It was encrypted and somebody gave me the keys. That's really an artistic experience.
Do you still have that link somewhere?