[HN Gopher] The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
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The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made?
Author : DrNuke
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-08-17 08:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| jbgreer wrote:
| I'm a big fan of 'The Big Sleep', Kubrick & Lynch. I also enjoy
| nonfiction literature that dumps you in the middle of the story.
| I find encountering unfamiliar words, characters, etc.
| interesting, and the extra work to figure out the context is
| satisfying. My wife, on the other hand, hates that sort of thing,
| such that I recognize there are works I cannot recommend to her,
| or movies we can only watch with my finger on a pause button,
| ready to explain. She's not dumb, but she certainly has less
| appreciation or patience to put up with that sort of thing.
| version_five wrote:
| 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 really get you
| anywhere. I've read all the Marlow novels, a while ago now, but
| I'd be challenged to give a decent summary of any of them. Its
| about the individual scenes.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| This is very much my experience of those novels. Not quite as
| opaque as Conrad's "Heart of darkness" but I get the idea that
| you are supposed to be as much in the dark about what is
| happening to Marlowe as Marlowe is himself. It helps with the
| immersion.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| TV has shifted this way, where its now common to have long
| running series where different writers, directors, etc. across
| every episode. Everything is logical in its immediate context
| but can seem illogical in the broader context of the entire
| series/show.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, lots of characters change at random, just when you think
| you know them.
| blowski wrote:
| 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.
| tclancy wrote:
| Same, but have you read the book? I really like Chandler and
| have read it a number of times so I feel like there's a leg up.
| For instance, the Sean Reagan character doesn't really exist in
| the movie and barely registers when I watch it whereas his
| story is perhaps the biggest thing in the book.
| chippy wrote:
| Now realise that, compared to movies from the last generation,
| its the bafflement is the actual story, not the twists and
| turns. In other words, 40 years ago, this news article would
| bizarre! Everyone who saw the film would have grokked the way
| the movie was told.
|
| Its like the amazing difference between medieval and modern art
| works is the difference in how metaphor and meaning is
| represented rather than the actual story represented. However
| some might say that it's the story that counts and thats whats
| interesting.
|
| To be a cultural historian today must be very frustrating.
| monkeyfacebag wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They are certainly baffling without subtitles since the
| speech is not audible.
| handrous wrote:
| > On the other hand, we just saw The Green Knight and that
| one will throw you.
|
| I think I'm going to need at least two more viewings to get
| from "OK, I see it saying a _lot_ of things about several
| themes or ideas, and I can tell what at least some of those
| themes or ideas are, but I have only the vaguest idea _what_
| it 's saying about them" to "ah, now I get it."
|
| Great movie.
| leephillips wrote:
| I love it and have seen it several times, but I still don't
| know what's going on. I believe you, though, because my
| girlfriend in college tried to explain it to a friend and me
| after we had all watched it. She had been able to follow it,
| but we were lost.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Primer has got to be the most baffling movie ever made,
| impossible to keep track of the timelines! Still an awesome
| movie!
| Causality1 wrote:
| _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.
| chowells wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| nimih wrote:
| Ah yes, the famously lazy and cowardly filmmakers Stanley
| Kubrick and David Lynch.
| ratww wrote:
| I don't think those two are a good example of the trend.
| Especially Lynch. While he leaves a lot of small details for
| interpretation, he does it from the beginning and doesn't ask
| the viewers to decide between a story-changing yes/no answer
| like Inception. It's like Hitchcock's McGuffin: would be fun
| to know but it doesn't detract from the story.
|
| Even Twin Peaks second season famous cliffhanger leaves no
| doubt about what happened to Bob and Agent Cooper.
| nimih wrote:
| Admittedly, Kubrick is the better example here than Lynch:
| 2001 is a stellar example of both "Their motivations for
| doing that are up to you" (w/r/t HAL's behavior) and "It
| means whatever you want it to mean" (Kubrick quite famously
| refused to provide any sort of guidance whatsoever as to
| how it should be interpreted)
|
| For Lynch, Mulholland Drive was on my mind--probably since
| it was mentioned in the article--as the ending (and,
| honestly, the narrative structure as a whole) requires the
| viewer to bring quite a lot of assuming and surmising to
| the table in order to arrive at something coherent. Perhaps
| the OP meant to purposefully exclude explicitly surreal and
| abstract works from their critique, but that's certainly
| not the tone I got from their post.
|
| Perhaps a better counter example could've been Kelly
| Reichardt's filmography, as she is also quite clearly a
| meticulous and thoughtful filmmaker (I remember hearing a
| profile of her on some NPR show a number of years ago that
| talked about the amount of time she spent getting even the
| ambient bird songs in Certain Women accurate, or reading
| her comments about how she would've filmed First Cow in a
| different aspect ratio if she had known COVID was going to
| keep it from being widely seen in theaters), but typically
| cuts off the narrative abruptly, leaving plenty of loose
| ends dangling: Meek's Cutoff and First Cow are probably the
| best examples.
|
| As an aside, I feel like the point of Nolan leaving the
| ending of Inception with an open-ended yes-no question is
| intended to highlight that, from the character's
| perspective, the answer no longer matters. I dislike the
| film for other reasons, and don't particularly like Nolan's
| screenplays in general, but that particular choice seems
| pretty reasonable in the broader narrative context of the
| film.
| dang wrote:
| 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 must have just gotten it
| wrong the first time.)
| stuart78 wrote:
| Like any other technique, leaving on a question can be a poor
| substitute for a more fitting ending, but when done properly it
| can reinforce a core theme within the work.
|
| I am not a huge Inception fan, but I do think the cut at the
| end is an important part of the movie and a good example of
| effective ambiguity. It might scratch an itch to show the top
| falling of hold longer (to confirm he is in a dream), but what
| value comes from that resolution? Ending the film before the
| answer allows us to think about what we've seen earlier to try
| and answer it for ourselves. Even though the movie is over, the
| audience is left with a part to play as they leave the theater.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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 through, say, a
| Mondrian exhibit and spouting "my kid can do that."
|
| I do not know why this correlation exists. I could make
| guesses, tying the exacting nature of programming with an
| attraction to well-defined and explicit storytelling, but it is
| what it is.
|
| THE BIG SLEEP is awesome. MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a tremendous (and
| award-winning) film. Ambiguity and vagueness are integral to
| art (and life!).
|
| Years ago, I saw a play by Maria Irene Fornes called THE
| DANUBE. It's a bizarre, baffling, and beautiful piece, and you
| cannot really approach it like you would (say) a Marvel film
| expecting a traditional narrative. That's not what it's FOR.
| It's an experience. You have to let go of the desire to tick
| off plot points and characters like players in a football
| program and just experience the art on its own terms.
|
| Creating something that includes, or even hinges on, ambiguity
| is challenging in the extreme. It's like when jazz musicians
| break the "rules" of music and melody; you can only break the
| rules and have it work when you have really mastered the
| underlying craft.
|
| Exploring these kinds of challenging works can be incredibly
| rewarding. I encourage anyone reading this to do so. I long ago
| decided that if I only ever saw plays/read books/watched movies
| that I liked, I wasn't branching out enough. Find things that
| challenge you, and engage them on their own terms. Figure out
| why (for example) a host of professional movie critics loved
| Lynch's film when it left you cold and maybe even angry. What
| do they see that you don't?
| thom wrote:
| It's true! I awake each morning, enraged at the lack of
| rigour in my dreams. I turn to my wife to tell her I found it
| hard to suspend my disbelief. She transforms into a crab.
| Every night it gets worse.
| legerdemain wrote:
| You must be one of those art snobs that liked Last Year at
| Marienbad!
| Causality1 wrote:
| There's a difference between ambiguity that's integrated into
| a story and ambiguity that's forced on the viewer. If the
| only thing that makes the movie ambiguous is that the final
| shot of the film isn't five minutes longer, then that is the
| type of film I hate. All Is Lost, The Grey, Save Yourselves,
| etc. If it's woven into the story from the beginning then I
| have no issue with it even if it may not be for me.
| yupper32 wrote:
| I really dislike this take.
|
| Listen, it's fine if people enjoy nonlinear storytelling to
| make it an "experience" or a canvas with a few straight lines
| painted on it. But it _is_ stupid, to follow your quote.
|
| If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to
| follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to
| follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid. I'm not
| claiming The Big Sleep is even in this category, because I
| haven't seen it, but plenty of films and books are.
|
| If a canvas painted a solid color or with a few straight
| lines sells for millions, then that's stupid.
|
| People enjoy "stupid" things all the time, and that's fine.
| There's nothing really wrong with that.
|
| But the important part of my point is: only artists seem to
| think they're above it.
| nl wrote:
| > Listen, it's fine if people enjoy nonlinear storytelling
| to make it an "experience" or a canvas with a few straight
| lines painted on it. But it is stupid, to follow your
| quote.
|
| Why?
|
| Mondrian painting are the most beautiful, calming pieces of
| art I know of (just look at Composition C (No. III) with
| Red, Yellow and Blue)
|
| > If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to
| follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to
| follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid.
|
| Why?
|
| Other things use devices to make them more challenging, and
| this is generally accepted as entertaining. Think harder
| levels in video games, rules in sports and games etc.
|
| Why should stories be any different?
|
| And it should be noted there are different levels to this.
| For example, Shakespeare tells one story on the surface,
| but if that is all you understand then you miss the glory
| of Shakespeare: his use of literary devices to tell other,
| hidden stories underneath what you think you are reading.
|
| You seem to be using the word "stupid" to mean something
| like "non-obvious". That isn't what "stupid" means.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to
| follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to
| follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid.
|
| I don't know you, and even I know you disagree with your
| own statement. If not, the only thing you'd enjoy are media
| targeted at pre-schoolers and young children.
|
| Anything targeting and age beyond that is made more
| difficult to follow, by design to make it more challenging
| than what a young child can grasp. That allowed the creator
| to explore deeper subjects.
|
| Maybe you don't like things more challenging than your
| comfort zone, maybe you don't like more less linear
| depictions but do like them somewhat. Unless you can tell
| me you only consume media targeted at young children. Even
| you average Marvel film leaves plenty unsaid that needs to
| be infered, plenty unspoken to be felt. Non-linear
| narrative's to evoke a response in the viewe, false
| imagery, deception, feints and direct intuitional/emotional
| appeals.
|
| Now those might be targeted at just where you like them,
| but thats admiring you like them and you agree with the
| approach and that it's not stupid. It's just when thing
| slave your preferred zone you begin to dislike them.
| yupper32 wrote:
| > If not, the only thing you'd enjoy are media targeted
| at pre-schoolers and young children.
|
| Oh come on, you know I wasn't talking about that kind of
| challenge.
|
| There are two things:
|
| 1. Pieces that are more challenging to read/watch because
| the story is deeper and the challenging read is required
| to tell that story.
|
| 2. A piece that purposely makes it the story harder to
| follow, or is otherwise really difficult to follow,
| without adding much depth.
|
| I was clearly talking about #2.
|
| "In fact, the plot isn't impossible to follow - it's just
| extraordinarily difficult without a pen, a notepad and a
| pause button to hand." - The article
|
| That's just stupid, and absolutely falls into #2. It's a
| crime drama.
| nwienert wrote:
| Only you are claiming it's only purpose is to make it more
| difficult to follow. There are a hundred valid reasons to
| have non-sequitur or ambiguity beyond the literal first-
| level surface analysis of just making it harder to
| understand.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Programmers are generally unhappy with fuzziness or else they
| wouldn't be good programmers.
| klyrs wrote:
| You're describing a mediocre programmer. How do you choose
| between two algorithms: small-scale runtime, large-scale
| runtime, effort to write, effort to maintain, etc. Folks
| who can't cope with ambiguity will make a single-measure
| heuristic and pull the trigger immediately. It's great for
| their 'goal accomplished' statistic, which mediocre
| managers love, but that isn't what a _good_ programmer
| would do.
| Joeboy wrote:
| 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.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I absolutely agree.
|
| I _love_ being made to think during a movie. I _despise_ the
| movie ending without an ending.
|
| It's incredibly easy to set up a scenario that could have
| multiple endings, but it's hard to see what the ending actually
| is before it happens.
|
| It's a lot more entertaining and satisfying to view that
| scenario to the end and then have the tale end in a satisfying
| way.
|
| Any idiot can come up with an ending to those tales. (And they
| do, because you'll find them posted on the internet afterwards,
| even if the movie already has one!) Only good writers can come
| up with good endings.
| recursive wrote:
| Sometimes I enjoy _not_ being satisfied. On a few occasions,
| I 've even not watched or read the end of a work, just to
| keep the possibilities open in my mind. Stories with big open
| questions have the ability to stick with me longer. Sometimes
| I like that.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's interesting that you're citing a film made 60 years before
| the 21st century as an example of a 21st century trend. If
| anything, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Star
| Wars tried to explain where the force comes from. Christopher
| Nolan includes ridiculously detailed exposition dumps
| explaining everything (in spite of the ambiguous ending of
| Inception, everything about how the world worked was explained
| in meticulous detail). Even the canonical mystery box master
| himself, Damon Lindelof, took to heart all the backlash about
| the non-explanation ending of Lost. Nobody expected The
| Leftovers would ever give an explanation of what caused the
| Sudden Departure, but it did.
|
| Heck, even David Lynch himself gave Laura Palmer an origin
| story in Twin Peaks: The Return! And even where he tried to
| preserve some mystery, the companion book by Mark Frost
| explained all of it.
| psychomugs wrote:
| I really root for Nolan; I very much liked Interstellar and
| enjoyed Tenet, but I think he's a clear example of someone
| who excelled so much at a commercial medium that the get-the-
| most-butts-in-seats factor necessitates the exposition
| diarrhea. There's just enough ambiguity for the common
| pseudo-news-site or vlogger to make "the ending of $FILMTITLE
| REALLY explained" content.
|
| I think Lynch, who's learned to "rule over small films than
| serve large corporate ones" [1], probably bent over a little
| bit to get The Return made, but I still left with as many, if
| not more, questions as I had coming in.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/GopJ1x7vK2Q?t=567
| jerf wrote:
| I feel similarly about the "twist" that "it was just a dream!"
| or something similar. It's _already_ fiction. It 's already
| made up. If I wanted to be stuck with just the stories &
| endings and such I could make up, I wouldn't be coming to you
| for a story. Not that there isn't room for ambiguity or
| complexity or anything, but, I already _know_ what I think. I
| 'm here precisely to find out what someone _else_ thinks, and
| "well, what do _you_ think? " is not very helpful.
| Joeboy wrote:
| "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.
| recursive wrote:
| "Scenic Route" is another movie that does this. I like it.
| graposaymaname wrote:
| Well it might be at times.
|
| But there are movies/stories where it adds a whole different
| layer upon leaving that decision to the viewer.
|
| For me the final scene in Inception is a really good example of
| using the above said ambiguity.
| leephillips wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > 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.
| dang wrote:
| Unreliable narrator is something different. How do you
| know the narrator is unreliable in the first place?
| Because the story includes enough information to
| contradict them. The _narrator_ is unreliable, but the
| _author_ is not--in fact you 're relying on the author to
| subtly inform you that the narrator can't be trusted.
| That's a device which goes back much earlier, at least to
| the romantic period. But what we're talking about here is
| different. "Unreliable author" might be a good name for
| it though.
| leephillips wrote:
| 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 plot was, and when you get it,
| it is as if the author has emerged at the end to consume
| the story from the beginning, in a glorious spiral of
| invention. The ambiguity itself is the main element of the
| plot.
|
| Pardon my EDIT: _The Prisoner_ , from 1967-8, was when
| ambiguity came to American TV, and with it Art (although
| there were precursors). To this day people argue about the
| plot of that one. People were so distressed at what they
| perceived, at the time, to be a lack of resolution (or
| their inability to deal with metaphor) that McGoohan had to
| go into hiding for a while. Really, the problem is that
| most people just don't pay attention.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think this has become a modern trend especially in long-
| form art (television, book series), where it's been noticed
| that mystery plots are a good way of attracting and
| maintaining an audience with much less effort than crafting
| a satisfying narrative takes. That's how we get things like
| Lost, Battlestar Galactica, or the Game of Thrones TV show
| (perhaps the ASOIAF books as well, but time will tell), as
| two prime examples of captivating the audience without a
| clear plan.
| bazeblackwood wrote:
| The art understander has logged on.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post unsubstantive/flamebait comments to
| HN, and especially not snarky ones? We're trying for
| something different here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| meijer wrote:
| The young Lauren Bacall somehow looks very contemporary. No idea
| why...
| LarrySellers wrote:
| When I realized that _The Big Lebowski_ is _The Big Sleep_ +
| bowling it blew my mind
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| Definitely very inspired by. The whole Jackie Treehorn element
| in particular
| lqet wrote:
| Regarding classic film-noir movies, I found "The Lady from
| Shanghai" by Orson Welles _much_ more baffling, and also
| frustrating. The first time I watched it, I didn 't really get
| the plot. As a big Orson Welles fan, I assumed it was my fault
| and consulted Wikipedia. The Wikipedia understanding of the plot
| was equivalent to mine and didn't answer any questions, so I
| watched it a second time, and a third time. There are massive
| plot holes. I really believe that Welles was not interested in a
| coherent plot, he just needed a vehicle for beautiful
| cinematography and great acting. But it is _so_ frustrating if
| you try to follow a complicated plot, only to realise at the end
| of the movie that not even the director was able to understand
| it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The "Lost" miniseries is enjoyable only once you accept that it
| simply doesn't make any sense. Just enjoy the moments.
|
| Though "Lost" was on to something with the dialog "it's a
| snowglobe!" They could have followed up on that, leading to a
| satisfying conclusion, but as with everything else, it just
| went nowhere.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The "Lost" miniseries
|
| Is this different than the _Lost_ series of 6 seasons and 121
| episodes?
|
| Or is this just an unusual use of the prefix "mini-"?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I've heard a joke along the lines of "I loved LOST, it's a
| shame they only made one season" from multiple people.
| Whether they allow one or two seasons of the show to
| actually exist in their memory depends on the person.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes, that Lost.
| asdff wrote:
| I'm really surprised LOST still has that reputation years
| after release. Having seen the entire thing, I think the plot
| makes sense and there aren't very many holes. The writers
| omit a lot early on but I felt like it gets answered by the
| end as you learn more about the island. In the moment as it
| was being released year by year I can see how it was seen as
| confusing when you'd wait for a while to get an explanation,
| but these days you could binge the entire thing.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Having an "explanation" that it's all pointless magic is
| not an explanation.
|
| I suspect that the writers originally had a coherent story
| arc, but the show was so successful they had to extend,
| extend, extend it, which produced the incoherence.
| asdff wrote:
| Well, it is one of the most highly regarded series in
| history by critics, so some people thought the
| explanations were sufficient at least. Abrams and the
| writers were planning from the outset to do that many
| seasons and wrote a story bible outlining all the lore
| and mythology referenced throughout the writing. Having
| story arcs over the course of years was intentional and a
| novel idea at the time when most TV series plots were
| written on a per episode basis.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Why do you think it's highly regarded by critics?
|
| Final season's got a relatively low rating on rotten
| tomatoes.
|
| It's referenced as a joke series in my circles, if you
| want to refer to something pointlessly convoluted with no
| pay-off.
|
| Personally, I stopped at the beginning of season 3 when I
| realized the writers didn't have a clue where to go with
| the plot.
| handrous wrote:
| Whoa, we must follow very different critics. My
| impression is that it's usually referenced as a joke, or
| as an example of how _not_ to do things. I 'm not sure
| I've seen it unironically praised since back when it was
| still airing.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't remember enough about Welles' life and career without
| checking to be sure, but there's a good chance that the flaws
| are the result of welles' running out of money or having
| control of the film taken away by other producers due to his
| inability to meet deadlines.
| zabzonk wrote:
| 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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > But do films (or any art) have to "make sense"?
|
| In a lot of ways I think it depends on your role, and the role
| of the film in your experience. If your role is to enjoy, then
| I hope the film was created with your preferred perceptive
| style in mind.
|
| If your role is to write a paper on a film, maybe the make-
| sense films make that whole assignment much easier.
|
| Solaris is a tremendous sensory experience on its own. You can
| pick up on a lot of the implications by interpreting the film's
| sensory output as metaphor. From facial expressions to
| positioning, texture, and sound / music.
|
| A lot of people find that relaxing because the metaphor-
| extraction process is like a background process for them and it
| feeds their intuitive grasp of what's unfolding in the "big
| picture" of the film. They tend to take in and process much of
| life in the same way.
|
| At the same time, not everybody enjoys that, and it will make
| some people downright uncomfortable. To be comfortable with a
| film, maybe they need to be able to piece it together logically
| for example, or at least be able to create by themselves an
| explanation/exposition of the contents where one didn't exist
| before.
|
| Incidentally, I find the sensory-experiential/metaphorical
| approach (my go-to) much less fulfilling while watching films
| created by people who are more logical and detail-driven.
|
| For example, I was rewatching _The Spanish Prisoner_ the other
| day and it was painfully clear that Mamet really wanted viewers
| to track his labyrinth of aphoristic details.
|
| From a sensory-metaphor perspective there wasn't much to work
| with, and the film didn't seem to "make sense" from that
| intuitive standpoint.
|
| But it's less painful IMO, and maybe even more pleasurable,
| when you know the kind of gifts and preferred perspectives the
| director is working with, and at least you're aware that you
| can make a decision to change your perceptive focus, or watch
| something else. That aspect makes sense to me, and helps me
| watch films that wouldn't otherwise make sense in this way or
| that one.
| okareaman wrote:
| Whew! I thought it was just me.
| telesphore wrote:
| It's a matter of setting up expectations and balancing that with
| good story telling.
|
| Ambiguity, elision, out-of-order story telling, etc. are all part
| of art but it's a delicate balance. There's a contract that
| artists set up with the audience that will allow them to use
| these techniques. Primer is one of those where I'm OK with my
| confusion because the story was interesting without all the
| answers, and it was setup pretty early on that this wasn't an A
| to B story. On the other hand, the fade-to-black ending of The
| Sopranos was, in my opinion, a total violation of that contract.
| Nowhere did they setup that kind of ambiguity. Yes, it's a series
| vs. a movie but my point still stands.
|
| No Country for Old Men, again IMO, rides that line a little
| close. Sure the Bardem character checks his boots at the end but
| there were some other major gaps that I don't think were set up.
| It was well acted and produced but expectations were not managed
| so it still goes into my meh pile.
|
| When it works the it's a lot of fun figuring things out. I'll
| have to give The Big Sleep a try.
|
| Edit: At the other end of the spectrum, expository lumps are no
| fun either.
| lqet wrote:
| > On the other hand, the fade-to-black ending of The Sopranos
| was, in my opinion, a total violation of that contract. Nowhere
| did they setup that kind of ambiguity.
|
| I respectfully disagree. One of the qualities of "The Sopranos"
| was exactly that things weren't always spelled out explicitely.
| Also, I did not really find the ending to be extremely
| ambigious. I mean, it is pretty clear what happened.
| pjmorris wrote:
| 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 feel
| like that's what happened to either the script or the filming of
| 'The Big Sleep.'
|
| EDIT: Every third paragraph, link to Yegge post:
| https://gist.github.com/kislayverma/6681d4cce736cd7041e6c821...
| lqet wrote:
| This is also exactly how I felt when I first watched "The
| Godfather: Part 2". There was just so much left out, and so
| much of extreme significance was only _slightly_ hinted at
| (just take the scene where Michael realizes the betrayal!). If
| you only stop paying attention for a single scene, chances are
| that you will not get the plot. That not only makes you
| completely immersed in the movie, it also makes for very
| satisfying rewatches.
| zmp0989 wrote:
| Funny (to me) story about the first time I watched the first
| two Godfather films. I was in high school and home pretty
| ill. My dad rented both films for me. I was so out of it that
| I didn't know which family was the Corleones until midway
| through the 2nd movie.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| When I watch things with other people and I see them looking
| down at their phone during scenes like the one where Michael
| realizes the betrayal, I then know they're not going to have
| enjoyed the movie because they'll have missed a critical
| visual cue. I don't want to rewind the scene because that
| seems passive-aggressive but I also don't want to waste
| another two hours on their part on a movie that they almost
| certainly can't enjoy anymore.
| YeBanKo wrote:
| The linked article reads like a pure idolization. It's like
| Bible, except written not more than a thousand years ago but
| now, and by fishermen, but by sw engineers, the message is the
| same though.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Per TFA there was an early cut with Marlowe in voiceover
| explaining things. This was removed at some point, which does
| indeed support your theory.
| seph-reed wrote:
| 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 regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential
| interest in human affairs."
|
| This seems like an important character detail to have been left
| out.
| soneca wrote:
| 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.
| seph-reed wrote:
| > Just not on articles commenting Amazon workplace
| environment and such, as it should not be indeed
|
| I think the distinction between "evil" and "evil genius" is
| actually kind of important for a world that often anchors
| its reality to Hollywood narratives. It sets up a more
| believable antagonist, and makes it clear that -- unlike
| the grinch -- their heart is not likely to change.
|
| It also sets up the challenge: be smarter. If he was just
| greedy, it might be a race to the bottom (greed always
| wins). But in this case it's a race to the top
| (intelligence seems to win).
|
| I also think the distinction between "greed wins" and
| "smart wins" extends with a similar lack of mention into
| other popular "villains" like Elon or THE ZUCK.
|
| At least for me, knowing that the richest person in the
| world is also considered extremely smart by the smartest
| people he could pay to work with him... it makes me feel
| that -- unlike politics -- business is not yet a complete
| race to the bottom.
| yumaikas wrote:
| 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?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| yumaikas wrote:
| Lots of people with power shut down people who are smarter
| than them for being annoying, I guess is what I'm getting
| at.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I'd counter that by saying lots of people think they're
| being smart but in fact are just annoying pedants (like
| me!).
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I think the "smart" compliment is just common sence. Build
| up his ego, you might need him one day. Business 101.
|
| 1. Yes--he built an impressive company, and a company ripe
| for unionization. I've never understood why he allowed so
| much counterfeit merch on that site? I can't imagine why he
| didn't stifle that one.
|
| 2. He gave away billions in a preventable divorce.
|
| 3. Because of vanity, he wore those stupid cowboy hats
| during that amusement ride for wealthy people. Looking back
| that PR stunt could have been so much better.
|
| 4. I really think his forte is diligence, and drive
| testosterone gives a man. He was also first to market
| basically, and tenacious.
|
| Hell-- if he was truely a genius, he probally would have
| never started the company. I'll go farther. Being smart
| might be a impediment to a good businessman?
|
| 5. I don't know Bezos. I don't know any successful
| businessman, except one. The owner of Dentek. Oh yea, I do
| know the CA governor. Both are far from intelligent. They
| both came from wealthy families, and had sympathetic
| fathers financing,planning,inventing prototypes in every
| move in their lives. Intelligence had nothing to do with
| their success.
|
| 6. What makes Bezos special is it sounds like he didn't
| come from money, and didn't have the sterotypical wealthy
| father.
| blacksqr wrote:
| I remember I had to watch "The Long Goodbye" with Elliot Gould
| three times to figure out exactly what was going on [0]. A
| detective job in itself.
|
| A good movie nonetheless.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Long_Goodbye_(film)#A...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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-maker (as one would hope over the decades),
| but he expects that his audience would have kept up with him,
| introducing a kind of filmic vocabulary. I would say that
| _Mulholland Drive_ is much, much more comprehensible once you
| have understood what _Lost Highway_ is on about. In turn, _Lost
| Highway_ is an extended riff off of the dualism you would see in
| Twin Peaks and _Fire Walk With Me_. As to the second factor,
| Lynch is very heavy into TM and he would like to present images,
| sounds, and such to the viewer, and then find out what the viewer
| thinks of them. Not in a "this is up to you to puzzle out,"
| rather he is pitching rocks and skipping stones off of what he
| likely believes is to be a collective unconscious or a shared
| cultural experience, then being excited about what might pop up.
| It's a genuine interest, I think.
| RobertoG wrote:
| 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.
| earleybird wrote:
| Great artists are often misunderstood, many who are
| misunderstood are not great artists - The Sphinx :-)
| LarrySellers wrote:
| "I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept
| the fact that life doesn't make sense." -- David Lynch
| newsbinator wrote:
| > 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 rules.
|
| We accept we could get wiped out by an asteroid or a deadly
| plague, sure. That makes sense.
|
| We don't accept we could get wiped out by a Lynchian fever
| dream. That doesn't make sense.
| troutwine wrote:
| What sense does getting wiped out by a plague make?
| newsbinator wrote:
| 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
| psychomugs wrote:
| I've been on a mini Lynch binge recently (Twin Peaks, Blue
| Velvet, and a lot of his interviews on Linda Faludi's
| excellent channel [1]) and I feel like this quote sums him
| up.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVdYdogQM2xd29HUOED4EbQ
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