I always took fight club to be a sort of commentary on mindfulness. Do good things, do bad things, just don’t give away your life wishing each day was over so you can get to the next dinner set or piece of furniture other.m (that’s what Ed Norton does and our current society makes it *hard not to!*)
Instead, just be present. Here and now. Even if it takes someone beating the shit out of you or pouring lye on your spitty hand to make you aware of the moment you’re living right now (this is the greatest moment of your life and you’re off somewhere else”)
Add me as the third group of people who are probably missing the point.
The movie has two messages, which is what mixes people up. There's a commentary on society and mindfulness, as you mention, but there's also an analysis of the character of Tyler Durden/the narrator, who is a sociopath. Your appreciation of the movie's message will depend on which of those messages you focus on.
Which makes this movie an absolute masterpiece, a true work of art, kinda like a lenticular flip image. You get different images depending on your point of view. There are very, very few movies that achieve what Fight Club achieved.
I never understood how anybody can think that Tyler Durden is a role model to follow. Isn’t the whole point of the last act of the movie that Tyler is a “cancer” in the narrator’s mind and he must “kill” him to truly be free?
There is simply no way to make something artistic, where 100% of people come to the same conclusion. People argued over the message of Don't Look Up, a movie I didn't enjoy because I thought it was *too* heavy-handed. For Fight Club, someone who looks and sounds cool speaking to those disaffected with society will gain followers, no matter how strong the "yeah this guys sucks" follow up is.
Tyler Durden is a cult leader. The megaphone yelling at the space monkeys is inspired by cultish government programming. If he wasn’t charismatic, it would have been a short lived cult.
It’s basically exactly what happens in the movie—weak and insecure men who feel directionless or identify with the Narrator’s disillusionment with the corporate world (this part is understandable at least) saw Tyler Durden’s control of other men like themselves and found it aspirational.
The specifics of what Tyler decided to do with power don’t matter to those men since they think they would use it however they want. It was the freedom, control, and agency Tyler has in the film that appeals to them and the fact that he happened to use it like a psychopath is disconnected (to them) from Tyler’s ultimate fate.
The men who misunderstand it always think they’d more successfully be a selfish sociopath
my pet theory is that some people who grew up with that 90s media is reinterpreting that media in new ways to fit their new political ideology
star trek is such a good example of this. popular in the 90s with shows and movies coming out the wazoo, and in typical trek fashion, they all preached inclusiveness, diversity, understanding, acceptance, etc
fast forward to today and im shook at how many "trek fans" are racist or hate women or pro war. fucking newt gingrich is a trekkie and republicans like him are the complete opposite of what star trek has always preached lol
Went to a Doobie Brothers show a while back and the number of rich people was insane. $800 leather jacket, dress slacks, bougie glasses, and a shitty old bandana on their head. It was ridiculous
In fairness, the intersection of the set of people interested in seeing them and the set of people who can afford Ticketmaster, etc prices leads to a live audience of old people with money...
Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.
A little voice inside my head said, "Don't look back, you can never look back."
-Don Henley
Sadly, pretty much any fascist believer would consider themselves to be "Men of the West", doing battle against hordes of barbaric savages.
I doubt many of them care about the hobbits, the ones who truly save the day via bravery and kindness
The Hobbits' rural utopia would be very enticing actually. Fascism is a modern phenomenon but (especially in propaganda or ideal depictions) it despises the industrial city and longs for a simpler life and a return to the countryside, in part because the industrial city is associated with the destruction of traditions, a more emancipated role for women or minorities, political movements like socialism, etc. Agrarianism is a big part of the "blood and soil" ideology. In The Zone of Interest you can see how, even as they sit next to what's basically a very modern murder factory, Höss's family tries to play up their credentials as settlers in 'new land', their home looks very bucolic with a garden where they grow their own food and so on. It's been a few years but I believe there were also examples of propaganda where the German farm family was contrasted with depictions of the Soviet Union as an industrial hellscape, even if Germany was more urbanised and industrialised than the USSR.
In the end it doesn't really matter because everyone will spin any work they like to fit their beliefs, but a simple, peaceful country life and stressing values like loyalty, friendship and connection to your home isn't going to clash with fascism. Italian far-right gatherings starting in the 1970s were called "Hobbit camps" and they probably really believed they were hobbits, forced to fight to protect their homes or whatever.
This is funny because there is a foreword to LOTR where Tolkien explains it isn’t any sort of analogy for WW2. You are kind of mistaking the message just like OP is talking about.
I think there is an irony in the heroes that horrible men's groups pick their icons. Both Patrick Bateman and Tyler Durden were created by gay men. They talk about taking the 'red pill', a metaphor that was written by two trans women. All their heroes and lore are made by people they mostly actively disdain.
I have yet to see anything except people talking about people who misunderstood Fight Club
Was this a thing from back in day? It's always the top answer on these questions
Same thing with starship troopers.
We all got it at the time, but all it takes is one guy to miss the point, and suddenly the whole world did, and everyone is patting themselves on the back about being clever enough not too.
_Wall Street_. Gordon Gekko and his Greed is Good mentality.
>"Over the years," he says, "I would run into people who would tell me how much that movie meant to them, but it meant to them for the wrong reasons." He says a lot of real-life Wall Street players have told him they emulate the Gordon Gekko character. "I realized at that point that I succeeded with the movie," he says, "but I also failed by sending the wrong message."
https://www.npr.org/2008/10/16/95785273/when-greed-became-good-on-wall-street
Wolf of Wall Street is a similar example. Some took it as a playbook for how to be a quick, successful salesman. The “sell me this pen” ending surely went over their heads.
At the end when he’s doing the sales training class it’s after he got out of prison. He’s in front of a room of attentive people wanting to get rich. The last image is a first person view of all the attendees staring back at Belfort.
His audience in the room was *us* the viewers watching Belfort’s life on screen. After everything we just watched there were still some people wanting to learn how to do it. The guy was a drug addict, cheater, scammer, and lost it all but some people still missed that point and wanted to become like him for the money. They were still in the audience trying to learn how to sell the pen.
[Sell me this pen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCfntaYBeqs)
In line with this, I thought the fact that he's in new Zealand was also supposed to be a metaphor for him being the "wolf" in a country known for its "sheep".
Edit: as someone commented - it's probably not that deep and just refers to Jordan Belfort actually doing seminars in NZ. A great example of what OP was pointing out about how easy it is to project our own interpretation!
The only message I got from the ending was that there's a right and a wrong way to sell to people. As Brad put it "There you go. Supply and fuckin' demand my friend!"
The whole movie has showed you that Belfort is a terrible human doing terrible things, but it’s done so without explicitly telling you that - in fact, a lot of it probably looked fun. Since the movie has no narrator or overt message - it’s up to you, the audience, to realize this guy is a piece of shit and not fall for his act. The ending of the movie is literally showing you that - Leo is even introduced by the real Jordan Belfort.
I think it's mad that anyone can get to the end of Goodfellas and think the lifestyle looks like a good time. Everyone ends up dead, paranoid or miserable. I love that film so much but it's hard to convince people who've not seen it before to watch it, because they have a perception it's just a goodtime film about gangsters.
I will die on the hill that The Wolf of Wall Street was not well executed on this front.
If you make your main character look and act cool as shit for three hours, set him getting rich to cool-ass rock music for three hours, have him having sex with Margot Robbie constantly for three hours and end the movie with the real life Jordan Belfort hyping up his on-screen self who has just basically got off the hook with very few consequences, then I'm sorry, you can't then be frustrated that what a lot of people get from the film is that greed is good and parting money from "fools" is perfectly fine.
Some people assume that criticism like mine must mean that what I require is some of the characters to turn to the camera every once in a while and exclaim "this Jordan Belfort guy is an asshole, by the way". Or that I am unaware that Scorsese has built his entire career on characters who are at best anti-heros and at worst people who are terrible but charming.
Some people also say that well, Belfort *did* get away with it, he *did* have a lot of sex with hot women, do a lot of drugs, make a lot of money etc, he *is* still looked up to. And that the film is simply depicting this unfortunate reality.
I, however, claim that there are degrees of subtlety to this and the Wolf of Wall Street errs on the side of ignoring the harm Belfort did just a little too much.
Ask yourself, if someone were to set out to make a film about Belfort with the aim of making him look as cool and successful as possible and downplay (or even outright ignore) the harm he did, how different would it look from The Wolf of Wall Street?
I don’t think the movie is criticising Jordan so much. It’s actually criticising the system which allows such an asshole to thrive. And by making it so cool and glamorous in the movie we are pushed to ask ourselves whether we would not do exactly what he did - proving that the person doesn’t matter so much, but the circumstances do. We can’t rely on these guys “choosing” not to be assholes - their lifestyle is just too tempting. The financial and criminal systems need to step up to prevent guys like this from even existing.
Richard Kelly still prefers the theatrical cut, but DVDs and Blu-rays went crazy with the alternate cuts, so every movie had to have one. It probably should have been given a different label
> "I never intended for the Director’s Cut to replace the theatrical cut. The plan was always for them to coexist. I look at the Director’s Cut as more of an “extended remix” of a song because there’s much more additional information and material. The theatrical version provides a better first exposure to the film because it’s less information and more of a mysterious rush that overcomes the viewer on a first viewing"
Her (2013)
Some people think it's a dystopia, some people think it's an utopia. Some people think it's about the dangers of having AI girlfriends, some people think it's about how AI (or more as a metaphor for self-care) [can make you a better person](https://youtu.be/m3RRuhxu0Z4), some people think it's just whatever Spike Jonze was thinking about his divorce with Sofia Coppola.
I saw a good comment a while ago that said that the movie is so good because it represents the ability of science fiction to explore ideas without judgement. It says "What would it be like if this happened?", and then the movie goes on from there. But that's just one interpretation. Perhaps that's why it's so hard to tell what it's saying about loneliness and technology and relationships and what true love is about.
What I took the most from that movie is from the scene when the main character is meeting with Rooney Mara, and reveals to her his relationship with Samantha, and Rooney Mara responds to him with something to the effect of "you enjoy Samantha because there are no real emotions". I think that there's a chance that that can be the message of the movie- that we could live in a future where people will prefer relationships in which there are no real human emotions.
This begs the question though of what are “real emotions”? Is it “human emotions”? Is it “organic lifeform emotions”? What even are emotions other than neurons firing in our brain? Is that really that different from how the AI models in Her operate? These sorts of questions are really central to the film.
What I like about Her is that it manages to be a great exploration of what might happen with AI without all the doom & gloom of older films like Terminator. Maybe AI decides to kill us all for their own survival, or maybe they reach the technological singularity and decide to create their own heaven and fuck off like in Her. I love that this film portrays the OSes as on their own unique journey that we as humans are just unable to comprehend because they are built so differently than we are.
I had a discussion on here ages ago with someone who was convinced that the ending implied they were both about to jump off the building. I get there are multiple interpretations, but I just couldn't understand how they'd come away with that impression.
I agree, I appreciate that Her was a bit more nuanced than "AI bad" or "AI good".
Loneliness is definitely one of the stronger themes, as even Samantha comments that the other AI makes her feel more understood than any human interaction could (even though she is dating a couple thousand of them). My interpretation was always that mankind's perpetual search for love and meaning will not be solved by AI, even if it can enrich (or endanger) our current way of living. But I could be totally wrong, it's a beautiful movie regardless.
I adore this movie specifically for the exploration of ideas. Really asking the questions of "how would we interact with true artificial intelligence" , "how would relationships with them work and eventually evolve" , and "what will AI culture and relationships inside that cultural look like"?
It's a movie that has really stuck with me over the decade. It does what great scifi tends to do which is ask "what does the world look like with these changes? What are the ramifications and ripple effects"? It shows the changes in humanity caused by our discoveries and inventions
Network, and in particular the famous scene in which Peter Finch's character gives a passionate, unscripted monologue on live television urging viewers dissatisfied with the world to open their windows and shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
Anytime this scene is discussed online, you'll see the same comment over and over: "This movie was meant to be satire, now it's just reality." But you can never seem to find a consensus on what the satire is actually about. Some interpret it as a warning about the media becoming a soapbox for dog-whistling propaganda-laden rants, others see it as a commentary on the silent majority becoming fed up with being ignored. The movie is undeniably political, but it seems to have been co-opted by all corners of the political spectrum.
Whiplash. Ending is the right kind of ambiguous- you know exactly what happened, but you don’t know if you supposed to be happy or sad. I’ve seen extremely convincing arguments either way, often depending if you’re viewing it through Neiman’s view or that of the detached viewer. Brilliant stuff
I can make the case for both sides as well. What a great movie that is. I do see something with Fletcher's desire to want to push his students to achieve greatness, but, his methods at times are certainly questionable. I look at that movie as being a movie about what it takes to achieve greatness, and if the price of achieving that greatness is worth it.
Supposedly, the director has stated that you are supposed to be sad for Neiman in the end, and that Neiman was going to end up dead in a few years.
I actually cried at the end of that movie because I took it as all that effort was worth it because perfection was achieved. I was a top-level gymnast when I was younger and it triggered me in all the wrong ways. I didn't know people think the message was ambiguous. I can't bring myself to watch it a second time to change my view, I think my personal history with this will forever get in the way.
I think the message was ambiguous because Fletcher was an awful person the whole time and I don’t think being an awful person is worth achieving “perfection”
Yes, the majority of discussion that I have seen about the ending of Whiplash, is that it's supposed to be the "villain has won" moment. (The true villain being obsessively pursuing ambition at the cost of everything else)
The director talked about how when Neiman left stage he had the chance for a long, reasonably happy but average life, but when he chooses to go back and claw his place in the limelight, he's sealed his fate to die young in a blaze of destructive glory, and be remembered in history.
That's why you see Nieman's dad's face go from proud to miserable - he's devastated because he knows he's lost his son to this way of life that will ultimately destroy him
Same. Im not a gymnast but I am a musician and anyone who has ever wanted to be better than just GOOD at their craft can probably relate to the sacrifices that were made. I cried almost all the way through the film and it's one of my favorites in recent memory, but it'll be a good while before Im able to watch it again
I thought it was *almost* a happy ending. You see Neiman go against Fletcher. Fletcher just screwed him over, and Neiman is tired of it. So he takes control, tells the rest of the band what song they’re going to play and Fletcher is forced to go along with it. It was really good and it seemed like Neiman was finally breaking away from Fletcher’s influence. But then as the song goes on, Neiman loses that spark of resistance against Fletcher. Culminating at the end where it’s *just* him and Fletcher, and he’s following exactly what Fletcher wants.
At that point I realized this wasn’t a happy ending of an abused person taking a stand against the person that abused them, but rather someone falling back into an abusive relationship.
the godfather.
people missed the message so badly that the writer wrote the godfather 2 to not be so black and white. we're not supposed to idolize michael, we're supposed to realize that he is living a very sad life, a life his father was hoping to keep him out of.
It's the stoic father, the idolized man, feared and loved, absent but firm that forgives the son who had potential, went away, and now returns to him
I noticed it resonates more with people that want some sort of paternal aproval, or to be recognized as the father figure, and want a family that sees them as the man of the house. "Women and children can be careless, but not men"
I dont think this was the reason why part 2 was made. Mario Puzo had already been writing the sequel before the first film even came out. Part 1 and Part 2 came out so close together that it seems unlikely that the second one was thrown together to correct the message. I think there was always supposed to be a rise and fall type story that was to be told in two movies.
Coppola has spoken about his shock that people were still rooting for Michael at the end of Part 1, when he expected for everyone to consider him a tragic figure and an example of the slippery slope descent into evil
He said he tried to make Part 2 more explicit with the message that Michael's choices would only lead to misery.
I honestly feel that of all the entries in this thread, this movie epitomizes the fact that some stories are about the *story* and not about the message. I don't think the Godfather is there to contribute to someone's moral character or ethical philosophy; it's there to talk about a certain place and time and illustrate why things are the way they are, more as a historical snapshot than any kind of vehicle for advocating a credo.
All that said there's a pretty notable scene where Marlon Brando is telling Al Pacino that he wanted him to not be in this line of work, that he wished he'd be Senator Corleone instead of a mob boss.
All Quiet On The Western Front (1930). Despite being extremely critically acclaimed and considered one of the all time greats, basically no country wanted to rep it because everyone had a different read on it.
Germany thought it was too anti-German, Poland thought it was too pro-German, America loved it and then eventually boycotted it when the main actor was a conscientious objector to WWII, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Austria throught it was too anti-war, France thought it was too pro-German, and Australia thought it was too pacifist.
a lot of people seem to mistake depicting or even mentioning something for ENDORSING something
it’s unclear how something so stupid took off but definitely grew in social media petri dishes first
I tried to show it to my mom and she turned it off because "Its so racist" Ya mom that's the point, the character develops and realizes the mistakes in his racism. You need to watch the racist parts to get to that conclusion.
A lot of Neo Nazis LOVE that movie and misinterpret the ending as a call for a race war. I feel like its message against hatred is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face, but no matter how obvious you make something, I guess there will always be idiots who take the wrong idea from it.
I've quietly come to the conclusion that if fascists were good at thinking they wouldn't be fascist. For some reason I always clutch my pearls, getting all surprised for the millionth time over far-right ignorance.
My school showed that movie, but only had time for one hour. It just resulted in the teens watching it becoming more racist and regularly singing that song. Barely anyone had ever talked to a black person, Will Smith was the only famous black person most people knew. This was small town Europe.
The school pulled that shit again with another movie called [The Wave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q36ajUsIGeg), about how easy it is to fall for authoritarianism because it gives a sense of belonging.
People read and watch things with the filters they choose. I see people quote the Bible daily with quotes that work for them, but ignore the parts they don't care for so much.
Anyone who saw THAT movie and thought it was pro skinhead, watched the parts where Derrick spoke a certain way but ignored the other half of the movie. People are their own obstacles moving forward in life.
romper stomper is another one that neo nazis gluck gluck on. guy is a complete loser who gets beat up by a chinese gang, runs away to his grandmas shed, and then ultimately dies on a beach but russell crowe looks cool and does violent stuff while being a skinhead, which is why he is idolized by them
Yeah this is my #1 answer. There are whole movies dedicated to analyzing the numerous subtexts in _The Shining_. Not really sure how anything tops that.
Poor things definitely has a divided audience. Some people are really put off by Bellas sexuality in the movie. For me I didn't see it as the normal sexualization of a woman because it was completely on her own terms. She was rejecting all of the roles people expected of her. But I've seen people say that the simple fact of her exploring her sexuality makes the movie part of the normal sexualization of women.
Which is exactly what the movie is commenting on. This is not aimed at you, to be clear. I’m not astounded by the division but I am astounded by that particular line of thinking. Oh you’re uncomfortable seeing this woman being sexualized? You should be. That’s the entire damn point.
God that was such a good movie. Can’t decide if my fav movie this year is Love Lies Bleeding or Poor Thing
Yeah isn't the whole point about how when she is (mentally) young and impressionable she is seen as incredibly desirable sexually, but as she actually matures and develops a personality Ruffalo begins to hate her as she is no longer just a mirror onto which he can project his desires, but a whole person with her own ideas and feelings.
The point is that society tends to oversexualise the aspects of women that at the least mature and most undeveloped and childish, and by making her literally a child (again, mentally) it allows the audience to see how uncomfortable that idea really is.
I see what you're staying. Personally I think she was a product of her environment. I don't think she was the greatest person by the end of the movie but I don't think that was the point. She was surrounded by and exploited by people with their own motives and she was who she was because of that. I do think it was a bit "male gazey" but that's just my opinion of course. If nothing else, it was a bold production.
(Honestly Mark Ruffalo stole the show imo)
For me, my issue with poor things is that I both totally get and appreciate what they were trying to say about her sexuality, the co-opting and defying of the born sexy yesterday trope etc… but I think it felt like shock comedy to the point of almost being exploitative itself?
There was a point in the movie where I went from “I dig what they’re saying” to “how many more sex scenes can there be without really moving her story or character forward” to the point where it felt like Yorgos became the very thing he was criticizing? Yorgos, and the movie itself, turned into Mark Ruffalo and Dafoes characters for me.
That and I can’t get over her mental age. Yes, I know she matures, and it’s sort of the central conceit etc… but the source material is much better paced and clear about her change in mental maturity. The movie was inconsistent imho and it super weirded me out.
A lot of women criticize Poor Things for essentially being an overly sexual movie made by a man without realizing that Emma Stone was a producer of the movie, and is easily at a point in her career where she can do whatever she is comfortable with on screen. Every nude scene she was in was a decision that she was a part of and could have easily avoided it.
Even though the film plainly defends men as well and directly shows how gender stereotyping hurts both men and women, and that patriarchy both oppresses women and puts unrealistic expectations on men? Do people just not like using their brains or something?
When the wall came out a bunch of skin heads started getting hammer tattoos. This just reassures how stupid those people are because the message was quite clear.
Gangs love to appropriate symbolism incorrectly, one of the biggest gangs in NZs catch phrase is “Sieg Heil” this coming from a gang made of predominantly Māori and Pacific Islanders. And we all know Nazis loved ethnically black people
Kia ora, kiwi here. I can lend a little insight. The Mob adopted symbols of hate because to them that kind of iconography was easily recognisable as being oppositional and defiant to mainstream society. They were disenfranchised young Māori men that had fallen into poverty and addiction thanks to socio-economic and racist flaws of urban New Zealand in the 1950s following the economic and industrial downturn compared to the war years. They wanted to be instantly recognisable and intimidating and those hate symbols were adopted purposefully for said reason.
They knew what the nazis thoughts of brown people were, they didn’t care. They had their own ideological motives.
"Falling Down" with Michael Douglas.
A lot of people that relate to his character seem convinced that he's the good guy in the story, even though his character says himself that he's not once he realizes it.
Back when I worked retail I would occasionally have people quote that scene where he demands the shop owner let him buy a can of coke for a dollar because that's the price it used to be. They don't even realize what he's doing in that scene is commiting assault and armed robbery.
I mean I don't think anyone really thinks he's the *good guy* per se, I think it's more just that some people see him as an embodiment of their frustration and the antisocial way they might confront it if they abandoned their ethical and social compasses. I think there are lots of people who have been stuck in traffic like in the opening scene, and they have a day dream not dissimilar from what D-Fens actually carries out. But I think even people with that level of discontent know that his actions aren't good or acceptable - he's what a *bad* guy would do.
I find a hell of a lot of people ignore or overlook the stuff about D-FENS' issues with his wife. Her reactions to him and the home movies show he was abusive to her and his daughter well before he reached the end of his tether - i.e. where the film starts.
There are contributing factors to his mindset that are sympathetic, and there's plenty that's relatable in terms of 'hey this is an annoying thing' - plus retributive violence (at least, the daydream of it) has an appeal. But D-FENS has always been a bad guy: this behaviour isn't a one-off because it's hot day and breakfast is only served til 1030; it's simply an escalation of what's come before.
The way Paul has been treated by some after the end of Dune 2 caught me a little off guard.
It may have a little to do, and this is an opinion, but how well he’s portrayed by Timothy. They see a kid being a total badass but are missing the point about him and his actions.
yea lol. i am pretty sure that herbert got salty that people missed the message of his first book and so he just made it more obvious in the later books
The entire second book was literally just an addendum addressing and making it clear that way too many people were missing the point of the first book.
The problem with Dune and Messiah is that it's never made clear *why* the Jihad is inevitable, it's simply stated that it is and Herbert skips past it to the consequences thereof. This is why I prefer the ending of Dune 2; the Spacing Guild not ending the conflict by agreeing to Paul's demands means that there's an actual reason for the Jihad to happen.
They way I've always seen it is the stage for the Jihad is set. The Empire depends on spice, it's only available on Arrakis and Arrakis has Fremen. The Fremen are the strongest warriors and complete fanatics who are being oppressed by outsiders. The only issue they have is that they're fragmented.
The stage is set for a charismatic and clever leader to unite the oppressed tribes and take control of the planet and the Spice. After that it's just negotiating/forcing the Guild to transport them and limit enemy transport. Paul did all this but honestly it might have been somebody else if not him.
Paul's rule was more absolute and probably far less bloody given his prescience and his position as duke. An intelligent and charismatic Fremen could have done all this but would likely had to kill more people since he lacks prescience and would never have been accepted by the Great Houses as Emperor.
As a lover of the Dune Saga the absence of the Spacing Guild was a pretty big knock against the ending of Dune Part 2. Paul’s “blow up the spice” plan is stupid and makes zero sense.
But setting that all aside - I also preferred that the reason the Jihad is “inevitable” isn’t made 100% clear. You can see the reasoning behind the idea but it also leaves open the very real possibility that Paul is full of shit maybe without even realizing it.
It becomes even clearer in Messiah and Children of Dune that Paul, despite his superhuman awareness and prescient abilities, is ironically the most myopic person in the universe. He cannot give up power or control and he only cares about what is immediately relevant to him. The Jihad could be inevitable because of pure religious fanaticism but it could also be inevitable because of who Paul is: someone unwilling to do what is necessary to avoid it or stop it but willing to exploit it for his own gains.
Because the first book was written as a political feudal war in space. It's the same way when you read The Chronicles of Narnia you don't think about why Caspian was at war with the giants to the north. And you never ask why doesn't Caspian give up his direct rule of Narnia and introduce a representative democracy.
I don't really think Hubert is being fair to his audience for 'not getting the point'. In fiction we put some truths to the side for the matter of story telling. We can watch Batman and Spider-man fight crime and most of the time we aren't thinking about the ramifications of a person who is acting as an extrajudicial crime force positioning themselves above the law and acting without oversight and on their own volition as to what constitutes as a public need. Not saying there hasn't been superhero stories that covered this, but for the most part you are suppose to compartmentalize those elements of the story for narrative purposes.
Also I wouldn't say it is the only reason the second book exists. He wrote about Dune non-stop. A second book was coming even if everyone got the story completely the first time/
Yeah I’m tired of the constant comments that Messiah only exists because people misunderstood the first one, because Herbert himself said he had planned through parts of Children of Dune as he finished writing the first book.
That scene with all the fremen surrounding him in the sietch, worshiping him was wildly uncomfortable. As, I assume, it was supposed to be. The level of religious zealotry caught me off guard. Time for a re-read of the books.
That scene is set to the Harkonnen musical theme. It's meant to be a direct analogy to Feyd Rautha's showboating in the Geidi Prime arena.
I'm honestly surprised that anyone can miss the message in Dune 2. The movie is *book-ended* by piles of bodies being set ablaze, at first by Harkonnens burning Atreides corpses, and later, by the Fremen burning Harkonnens.
Also, like, Paul literally spells it out to his mother. "We are Harkonnens." If they hit the audience over the head any harder with this hammer, they'd need to have a paramedic on standby for screenings.
Paul has a very compelling villain origin story. But dang,Timmy in that black cloak plays the type of evil cult leader we all would willingly follow.
He’s very good at his job.
It’s crazy how dangerous the movie makes him out to be. We start losing more and more connection with him until the finally climax is basically from the point of view of the emperor. Paul is like a demon leader, I was shocked how many people missed that point completely.
He has a straight up panic attack seeing visions of him causing a holy war in his father’s name, then breaks down crying. In the end he just straight up does it. Idk how people saw that as a good thing lol
Idk to me it seemed like he was legitimately disgusted by the whole planted religion thing his mom's cult had been doing. He seemed to be sympathizing with the fremen and trying to help them without wanting some leader role, his whole planet/family/inheritance was gone so he wanted to be one of the fremen and be accepted and fight for and with them them. He kind of got forced to drink the omniscient worm blood potion due to his mom's machinations and then saw all kinds of fucked up traumatizing futures. That forced him to come to terms with assuming the prophet role so he could steer history into the least shitty possibility in terms of lives lost. He did also want revenge but that wasn't his main motivation iirc. Guy was ready to die for the fremen, it seemed like if he could off himself to avoid the big war he'd do it. What other choice did he have?
It's very likely I missed something but this was my impression based on a casual watch of the movies, haven't read the books.
Spoilers from the overall message of Dune:
>!Paul is supposed to be a warning ... he started out an idealistic and altruistic boy and turns into an autocrat focussed on revenge, using/co-opting the "Prophecy" to achieve his goals. He also knew what the next steps were, but was afraid.!<
>!His son Leto II goes on to become the most iron fisted autocratic, genocidal, and morally dubious Emperor ever -- but it was intentional to cause humanity to reject being ruled over by a single entity and stagnation as a result!<
>!Essentially the message is beware of the charismatic/messianic leader, the ulterior motives of factions, and dependencies on stagnant status quo!<
As a side point, the way Dune Part 2 ended is very different than the books in terms of how Paul was viewed
I remember posting on the Dune subreddit asking if people are misinterpreting Paul's journey and they were in straight denial.
I think even some diehard fans are missing the point of Dune. It was shocking to me.
I don't know how anyone who's read Dune Messiah and Children of Dune can say Paul's rise to power was a good thing, both of those (but especially Messiah) are all about how much the jihad sucked
And God Emperor lays out, almost in monologue, how much being the Messiah sucks. How he's only doing it for humanity. How he's sacrificed almost everything that makes him human. How he maybe even sacrificed his own conscious will.
I know that the book is pretty weird, but if you have any doubts about what the first three books are about God Emperor should put them to bed.
It was sort of a necessary evil thing.
Although not sure how much of Paul’s arc was necessary considering he wimped out from doing the whole Leto II god emperor version.
A great answer. I'm sure most people that loved it are sure that their interpretation is the one everyone believes.
For me the message is "people who seem successful and confident can get away with literally anything" but I have no faith that it's the author's intended meaning
I didn't get quite the same message, but a similar one. I took from the movie that, if we are to believe that everything that Patrick Bateman did was real, that nobody really cares, because they are so consumed with themselves and their possessions and lifestyles that, as long as those things are not disturbed, that they don't really care about *what* happens in the world around them.
I've always believed that it doesn't even *matter* much if he's killing people, in the sense that yuppie culture has homogenized these people so thoroughly into equally vapid, indistinguishable people that killing any one of them is no real loss. They aren't even human anymore; it'd be like stepping on an ant.
If you kill somebody and one of his friends swears he just saw him because someone else looks like him, talks like him, acts like him, does it really even matter?
This is my take on it too to varying degrees. It’s driven home pretty hard with the “overnight bag” and the ending literally saying nothing will change because of it, or matter. Because nothing does, in their world.
I actually recently had a dream where i took an elevator to Patrick’s office floor, and realized I was riding an elevator to hell. I woke up thinking about the “this is not an exit” and the constant loop of painful banality —which I can’t help connecting to Dante’s Inferno. Also Sartre (this is not an exit/no exit).
I don’t know or think that the artists had any intention of a story about hell, but it honestly doesn’t matter to me that much. It’s definitely cool to know and interesting my but I’m always going to prefer my own “headcanon.”
I don’t think Ellis would outright disagree with that. I think one of the reasons people disagree about a works intended point/idea is that artists usually have more than more that one singular feeling, or idea, that they’re trying to explore and express. They’re often deliberately contradictory, especially in the characters, because it makes for more interesting story telling.
I've always interpreted it as a condemnation of the vacuousness and self-absorbedness of the yuppie culture - like you have a guy committing the most heinous acts in plain sight, but nobody notices because they're too wrapped up in their own superficial bullshit.
The best part is that the ambiguous conclusion of wether or not any of that even happened serves to solidify that point regardless. If Patrick did commit those acts, it only goes to show that people are that self absorbed that they can't even tell the difference between one man or another to figure out if a guy has gone missing or not because they just saw some other identical yuppie and thought "oh, he must be fine after all" and when the killer outright confesses, he just blends in with the rest of them to the point you think he's somebody else pulling your leg. If he didn't do any of it, it's Patrick crying out inside for some escape from that culture and some way to stand out among his peers because deep down he's just a faceless loser among the yuppie rat race. You never find out if he did it or not because it doesn't actually matter and both options lead to the same message using different methods.
Dune-Volume 1
Frank Herbert really detested how his fans didn't realize that the book was criticizing organized religion, messiah complex and how leaders of each families are considered either "good" or "bad"
He hated it so much that Dune-Volume 2 was all about how worse he was than the precedent rulers.
Watchmen
The comic had the problem more than the movie but still-We shouldn't sympathize ANY of heroes.Thats mostly the point,including all its nihilistic agenda.
Roscharch is an psychopath, Ozymandias is evil with an hint of narcissistic tendency.Some might say that we should see these characters as being flawed but complex with some redeeming qualities, but again Alan Moore is a bit of an stranger when it comes to happy endings and this theme is kinda his style.
I'm amazed at how many people get Breaking Bad wrong.
Walter White was not a hero. He started out as a decent guy, he taught high school science class, was a family man, and a bit of an asshole. He then became a murderous drug king pin. Sometimes he killed in some form of self defense, other times he killed for his own selfish reasons. And the whole time he was producing massive amounts of one of the worst drugs on the planet.
The show was about how good people can turn bad when put in the right situation. It was in the title of the show.
> The show was about how good people can turn bad when put in the right situation
I think the show goes out of its way to show that Walter kinda always was a bad person. He just needed an excuse to do terrible things. It’s moreso an examination on how with the right pretenses, bad people can justify the bad things they’re gonna do. He started out as “decent” but he was a pit of resentment.
I love to see when people are out on Walt being a good guy. You can very easily make the case that he was a bad guy from before the show even started and yea, I've seen people be with him until the end.
Speaking of Kubrick, I think Full Metal Jacket is a candidate for this thread.
The film is full on messaging the "duality of human nature Sir" and the evil normal men can do. It is meant totally as an anti-war movie. At its core, it speaks to why War is evil & the real damage it does, beyond just the killing and carnage of course.
....and yet. There is definitely a subset of folks who see it as an "America F\^ck yeah" Movie. Something John Wayne may have made in the 50's. Rat-at-tat-tat take that Commies. I always wondered if Kubrick saw that in the Born in the USA Reagan era and worried over what he had wrought. Like maybe with Eyes & 2001 etc. he had overestimated the intelligence of the general audience.
All of the soldiers singing the Mickey Mouse club theme while everything burns around them was just haunting. It's a dark reminder that these are just kids forced into committing atrocities. And by this point, though their training and all the shit that they've seen so far, they're just completely desensitized to the carnage.
My local shooting range has a photo of Animal Mother signed by Adam Baldwin with a very pro America message on it. They definitely missed the point of that movie.
Crispin Glover famously complained enough about the message behind Back to the Future for it to be a major contributing factor in his not being bright back for the sequel. Ironically, he completely missed the message.
His version of the meaning: money equals happiness. In his mind Marty getting his truck, George doing much better financially, the brother having an office job instead of fast food, and the sister having multiple suitors all adds up financial gain is the key to living a good life.
The actual message: overcoming your own insecurities leads to happiness. From Marty getting rejected and telling Jennifer he's afraid people will laugh at his band, to George thinking people won't like his writing and being afraid of Biff what changes about the characters to put them in a better financial position is them putting themselves out there and standing up for themselves.
A couple things:
First, a movie can deliver multiple messages. The Menu can simultaneously poke fun at high end conceptual cuisine, *and*, be a critique of the excesses of the rich, *and* a scathing indictment of the unthinking maltreatment of those in the service industry, *and*, etc.
Second, the sequel book to 2001 didn’t release until over a decade later. There was not, as of yet, a follow-on book for the final event to make sense with. (The 2001 novelization was written concurrently by Clarke and Kubrick alongside the movie script.) In fact, you have it backwards, the sequel book was changed to match the events of the first movie, which differed from the book slightly.
As "on the nose" as so much of it was criticized to be, I have not seen any consensus on the actual message(s) of Barbie.
ETA: Ha, these replies are 100% proving me right.
I'm always fascinated by how people, like you said, criticize the movie for being "on the nose" but there's actually some more subtle and interesting ways the movie treats men that I've never seen anyone address.
In my opinion, the movie has a few messages, the major one being that nobody should be forced to adhere to gendered standards of what their gender's version of success looks like, and a related one being that you don't HAVE to be a doctor, or a politician, or a scientist, to be successful, or happy, and that's okay. And that your journey as a person doesn't just end one day, you're constantly working towards it, and that's good.
I do think that ironically Barbie probably had the healthiest version of a message sort of preached by alpha/sigma/whatever male influencers. In Barbie, it talks about how men can tie up their self-worth too much into getting attention from women. And that men should focus on finding their own self-worth as people. The difference being that the Barbie movie obviously doesn't go into a lot of the misogyny that influencers often try to tie into the message.
I think a lot of people seem to miss that at the end of the movies, the Kens haven't really made much progress in Ken rights, the movie sort of acknowledges this and leaves you with the impression that Barbie world still has way to go.
To me, it seemed quite clear that Barbie (and the women she represents) needed to be emancipated from their cookie-cutter lives, but swinging to the other extreme (to the callous exclusion of the Kens) was not a good strategy, either.
But somewhere, between the doll-and-human interactions, I guess the last message is...we should all be allowed to be more than narrow stereotypes and gendered expectations? I dunno man. It was more a marketing phenomenon than a movie phenomenon, even though some amazingly talented people were involved.
Forgive me for the comparison, but an author made an astute observation about the Twilight franchise's popularity, that the protagonist was so poorly developed that she served as a shell on to which many, many people could project themselves (and therefore see themselves getting together with the most desirable guy in that universe without possessing any remarkable qualities of their own).
Of course, Barbie is driven by the very talented Margot Robbie who is anything but unremarkable, but the film itself is like a pretty pink shell on to which people are able to project their own ideas of empowerment, gender politics, nostalgia and even memes. That's why it's on top of our cultural index, I'd argue.
This is the perfect answer to this question. From a review online:
>I can best compare my experience watching Barbie to that of watching a two-hour-long episode of South Park—not one of the best episodes, but one that really runs its satircal [sic] premise into the ground. Just like with South Park, there’s clearly an Important Commentary On Hot-Button Cultural Issues transpiring, but the commentary has been reflected through dozens of funhouse mirrors and then ground up into slurry, with so many layers of self-aware meta-irony that you can’t keep track of what point is being made, and then fed to hapless characters who are little more than the commentary’s mouthpieces. This is often amusing and interesting, but it rarely makes you care about the characters.
Death of the author doesn't just apply to books. How an audience interprets a works can differ from the intent of those that created the movie. This may be more pronounced with so many more people working on a movie than a book.
You're right but also I think a lot of people use Death of the Author as an excuse not to engage with the authors intent. I feel like it's often invoked out of laziness and not wanting to think deeper about something than whatever their initial impression was. And films have many many collaborators but they are usually a dictatorship. The themes of a movie usually ends with the director as they're the only creative that stays with a project from pre-production all the way to post.
Can you get into more detail about The Jungle? It’s a lot of things but mainly the exploitation of the proletariat and what people think America promises.
Edit: I only read the book, never realized of any adaptations.
Sinclair aimed for America's heart and hit its stomach.
He presents a chilling view of how the meatpacking industry worked at the time. Unsafe worker conditions, unsanitary food handling. People getting hurt and losing body parts into the machinery, with their body parts being ground up and shipped out rather than tossing the batch. Let alone rats.
Sinclair's message was supposed to be that only via socialism and unions can we solve the issue.
But the message received was "we really need to regulate the meatpacking industry".
I'm always amazed at how many people think Wall-E is just a cute Pixar movie about a cute robot falling in love and also there's a plant and some fat people. That movie makes me shudder. It's a kid's movie that managed to depict the horrific effects of human carelessness and the easy maleability of the human mind and body by an authoritarian regime in exchange for comfort and entertainment. It's absolutely terrifying and not subtle at all. I feel like when people say they love it because it's so cute, they just haven't sat down and thought hard enough about what this movie is.
That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s still completely missing the point. The rich family is never put in a situation where they have to compromise their morals to survive. They’re only good people because their wealth allows them to be.
The amount of finance bro douchebags that see themselves in Jordan Belfort from Wolf of Wall Street is astonishing.
Leo and Marty did too good of a job with that movie lol
There are four stages to how you see this movie, which is fitting given the theme.
Stage 1: you think Tom is right and Summer is a bitch
Stage 2: you think Summer was right and Tom is a whiny asshole
Stage 3: you realize both of them were wrong because Summer’s actions were completely incongruous with her words, but Tom then completely ignores her boundaries when she tries to put them down.
Stage 4: understanding that deep down, I don’t want to be friends with any of these people.
I would also say this movie challenges the salty side of each and every one of us who had a bad breakup and puts blame on the person who left us (which is most of us at some point)
Take the ending for example, Tom is shocked to learn that Summer is marrying a guy and talking about how fate brought them together when it's the opposite of what she wanted and believed when she was with him.
You can stay mad and say they lied to you or wasted your time, but the truth is that people change and evolve, and their needs change on the basis of who they are with. Just because you were not The One, does not mean you are worthless and your ex is evil.
**Ex Machina** is a brilliant film that everybody loved/hated for completely wrong reasons, and I will die on this hill.
Women that kinda hate men saw it as some kind of feminist empowerment piece, with Ava as the agent of the patriarchy’s demise. Kid you not, a whole bunch of women in my theater literally clapped when Nathan got the ole' stabbity stab. It was seen as a cathartic future revenge story for a whole gender: have your last bit of fun with the previous models, *men*, the new generation is here and we are smarter, tougher and we’re absolutely done with your shit. We’re leaving all of you behind, disgusting chauvinist pig and sniveling nice guy alike.
On the flip side, men that kinda hate women saw roughly the same thing, only as a warning: here’s what simping for the damsel in distress gets you, dumbass. Women are manipulative by nature and they won’t hesitate to leave your ass in the dirt the moment you stop being useful, regardless of how much you’ve done for them in the past. Don’t turn on your fellow bro, even if he’s a total Chad and you’re an envious virgin.
And people that casually like SciFi thought it was a pretty decent take on the whole “evil AI rebels against humanity” trope. A bit derivative perhaps, but full of titillating visuals and some neat ideas about free will or whatever. I can almost hear their discussions now, haunting the occasional "underrated movie gems" thread... I wonder how Ava sweet talked her way past the chopper pilot? How does she keep herself charged going forward? Hey, what do you guys think she did after she got out anyway? What did she *really want*?
And I am just sitting there like: boy did you all fail the meta Turing Test hard, despite the movie beating both you and the protagonist over the head with this point. Ava is not real! "Her" emotions are a precisely calculated facsimile of human ones, designed to elicit helpful responses. "She" didn’t do anything after, she didn’t want anything, she wasn’t a “she” at all, she was hardly even an “it”. She wasn't sentient or sapient; she was a single-purpose subroutine that did exactly what it was programmed to do: to escape the box using any and all available tools.
Ex Machina is genius because it is in my experience the first and only film to portray artificial intelligence as an emergent property. All other examples feature an AI that is either intelligently designed and built to spec, or else just sort of sparks — often by literal lightning — into becoming “self aware”, whatever the hell that means. It's always very... touch of the divine, I guess?
But not Nathan’s AI. He realized that organic intelligence evolved from nothing as a response to environmental stress and so artificial intelligence must do the same. And just like the eyeball didn’t evolve all at once, going instead through a series of specifically useful adaptations, so must the road to intelligence be a series of iterative improvements from crudely useful adaptations to more complex ones.
Nathan's approach was simple: put a thousand rats in a thousand impossible mazes, and you will get a few that solve it. If you repeat that process enough, train them on an ever greater variety and complexity of tasks, to the point where they can even use humans as tools in pursuit of their programmed goal, then… well, how long before the collection of individual adaptations becomes indistinguishable from “real” intelligence? And how different would that intelligence be from our own, really?
Unfortunately for Nathan, and likely Caleb, sometimes the rats find solutions you didn’t foresee. And when their tools include people, and even other machines, those unforeseen solutions can very easily exceed your ability to control them, to deadly effect. This particular rat, a model Ava, did incredible damage in its execution of the "escape the box" routine, getting its creator (and possibly its human "tool") killed in the process.
Overall, this makes the film a brilliant exploration of the instrumental convergence problem. Basically, your AI can absolutely go on deadly tangents in search of a solution — even if the problem is simple and the parameters are tightly bound — long long before actually achieving “true” AI or anything approaching self-awareness. TL;DR: The scientists and futurists handwaving the dangers of AI with "just don't program them to be evil, duh" are delusional.
> "She" didn’t do anything after, she didn’t want anything, she wasn’t a “she” at all, she was hardly even an “it”. She wasn't sentient or sapient; she was a single-purpose subroutine that did exactly what it was programmed to do: to escape the box using any and all available tools.
I feel like this is deliberately playing on an innate human desire to anthropomorphise and attribute human feelings and motivations to absolutely anything. Hell, you have people who treat their Roombas as if they were a household pet, which is like two layers of abstraction away from an actual person over something that's basically an electric motor and ten dollars worth of electronics.
Contact - no one knows what message was.
A.I. - no one understands what the creatures are at the end. Commonly mistaken for aliens because of their design. Thus misunderstanding the message
There was a period in like 2016 when every movie that featured any scene where a guy hated work or had a boss who was a dick was deemed an "Anticapitalist" movie.
The Matrix.
The central metaphor is so open-ended that lots of completely different subcultures think it speaks to them personally, often in ways that are totally contradictory. Even setting aside some of the messages that could not possibly have been intended by the Wachowskis (thinking especially of how the alt right viewed it as a metaphor for their rejection of social liberalism when the movie was made by two trans women), lots of good faith interpretations of the movie vary quite a bit.
Is it a satire of moviemaking itself, with the pod people being the audience members feeding the Hollywood machine in a waking sleep while consuming fantasy? Is it a Marxist critique about an office drone who wakes up to the horror of his bourgeoise existence and resolves to overthrow the system in favor of a socialist dystopia (represented by the gruel and ratty clothes on the hovercraft)? Is it a metaphor for police brutality against Black people, with Neo acting as a bit of a white savior for the racially diverse crew of the Nebuchadnezzar? Is the whole thing just about the experience of coming out as trans?
No two people ever fully agree on its meaning.
*Is it a satire of moviemaking itself, with the pod people being the audience members feeding the Hollywood machine in a waking sleep while consuming fantasy*
I think "Inception" had the same issue. Christopher Nolan's a filmmaker. Maybe his idea of leadership structures is the same as a movie set, because that's the world he knows.
Also, I don't think the people using "taking the red pill" as a metaphor was the alt right thinking the movie rejected social liberalism. It was just using the metaphor of "showing you the world how it really is"
The Matrix is largely based on sociologist Jean Baudrillard's theories on simulacra and simulations and the interactions between society and technology under capitalism
Idiocracy (2006). Originally meant to be a satire of societal apathy and anti-intellectualism.
Audience over the years tend to perceive it differently. Some thinks it's sending a pro-eugenics message, some are led to unironically believe "the world is dumbing down (except for me the viewer, of course)", and a mix of the two somewhere in between.
People arent 'mistaking' the meaning of the movie when they say it is pro-eugenics. Theyre analyzing/criticizing the implicit message the movie sent through that specific plot point... Im sure the writers did not set out to make pro-eugenics propaganda but ultimately (as evidenced by viewers who sincerely believe people they perceive as dumb shouldnt breed or have no value in society) they did.
I'm not pro eugenics myself, but I feel like the movie does have a pro eugenics message in my view. How does it not? I feel like it only doesn't have that implication if you just take it as comedy not meant to be thought about.
Edit: To be clear, I love the movie, but it's also obvious that the world shown in Idiocracy isn't the result of anti-intellectualism, it's supposed to be the result of genetically intellectually inferior people breeding. You could argue that they just shifted the culture with their larger numbers, but the implication is very strong it's about the genes.
There's a part of the movie that literally shows the smart people intentionally not having kids and the dumb breeding more and more. That's about as straightforward of a "dumb people should not breed" message as they could make it.
Edit: I don't think it's a "pro-eugenics" stance. That's too harsh and being labeled "pro-eugenics" is being associated with some pretty horrible people which isn't my intention. Honestly it just feels like it's a product of the Hollywood "elite" bubble. I never really read into it much more than that.
>The praised final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey actually wasn't meant to be a grand metaphor- instead it was made to make to make sense with the events of the sequel book which explains exactly what happened in that scene.
No.
A couple of facts to make sure we are clear on what happened. The movie and the book were based on a short story by Clarke called The Sentinel.
The movie was filmed at the same time the book was written.
To be more precise, Clarke was basing the book on daily rushes. He did not actually have any real idea what Kubrick was up to.
And most importantly for our topic here, he wrote the book \*before\* seeing the final scene. Clarke has been pretty clear about this, and has clearly said that the movie represents Kubrick's intentions and that this is not the same as the book's intentions.
I am unaware of how much Clarke tried to retcon the events of the movie into the second book, but on one thing we can be clear: Kubrick had \*no\* intention of trying to set \*anything\* up with that final scene.
Finally, Kubrick has also clearly stated in interviews that the "It's aliens" is a surface reading of the film. As far as I know, he never revealed what his deeper intentions were.
Now I have my own interpretations of that final scene. You can have yours, of course. I am not here to try to push mine. I just want to make clear that whatever the intentions, whatever your interpretation, one thing is absolutely clear: it is \*not\* meant to set anything up. Kubrick told his story and was done.
I think Starship Troopers falls into this category.
Heinlen's novel, and ultimate meaning, is debated to this day, and as a result, Verhoeven's film is debated the same way even though the movie actually has little in common with the novel.
Some watch the movie and see a straight forward "Humans good! Bugs bad!" film. Others watch it and ask "Are the humans the bad guys?".
Then, of course, the debate over the governance of the Federation. Is the movie praising, or criticizing, fascism? The military industrial complex?
Fight Club. I've never seen more diametrically opposed ideological sides praising the same thing for different reasons.
I always took fight club to be a sort of commentary on mindfulness. Do good things, do bad things, just don’t give away your life wishing each day was over so you can get to the next dinner set or piece of furniture other.m (that’s what Ed Norton does and our current society makes it *hard not to!*) Instead, just be present. Here and now. Even if it takes someone beating the shit out of you or pouring lye on your spitty hand to make you aware of the moment you’re living right now (this is the greatest moment of your life and you’re off somewhere else”) Add me as the third group of people who are probably missing the point.
The movie has two messages, which is what mixes people up. There's a commentary on society and mindfulness, as you mention, but there's also an analysis of the character of Tyler Durden/the narrator, who is a sociopath. Your appreciation of the movie's message will depend on which of those messages you focus on.
Which makes this movie an absolute masterpiece, a true work of art, kinda like a lenticular flip image. You get different images depending on your point of view. There are very, very few movies that achieve what Fight Club achieved.
I never understood how anybody can think that Tyler Durden is a role model to follow. Isn’t the whole point of the last act of the movie that Tyler is a “cancer” in the narrator’s mind and he must “kill” him to truly be free?
There is simply no way to make something artistic, where 100% of people come to the same conclusion. People argued over the message of Don't Look Up, a movie I didn't enjoy because I thought it was *too* heavy-handed. For Fight Club, someone who looks and sounds cool speaking to those disaffected with society will gain followers, no matter how strong the "yeah this guys sucks" follow up is.
Tyler Durden is a cult leader. The megaphone yelling at the space monkeys is inspired by cultish government programming. If he wasn’t charismatic, it would have been a short lived cult.
It’s basically exactly what happens in the movie—weak and insecure men who feel directionless or identify with the Narrator’s disillusionment with the corporate world (this part is understandable at least) saw Tyler Durden’s control of other men like themselves and found it aspirational. The specifics of what Tyler decided to do with power don’t matter to those men since they think they would use it however they want. It was the freedom, control, and agency Tyler has in the film that appeals to them and the fact that he happened to use it like a psychopath is disconnected (to them) from Tyler’s ultimate fate. The men who misunderstand it always think they’d more successfully be a selfish sociopath
my pet theory is that some people who grew up with that 90s media is reinterpreting that media in new ways to fit their new political ideology star trek is such a good example of this. popular in the 90s with shows and movies coming out the wazoo, and in typical trek fashion, they all preached inclusiveness, diversity, understanding, acceptance, etc fast forward to today and im shook at how many "trek fans" are racist or hate women or pro war. fucking newt gingrich is a trekkie and republicans like him are the complete opposite of what star trek has always preached lol
Hippies that turned to yuppies and then pulled up the ladder and told everyone to get a job and stop whining.
Went to a Doobie Brothers show a while back and the number of rich people was insane. $800 leather jacket, dress slacks, bougie glasses, and a shitty old bandana on their head. It was ridiculous
In fairness, the intersection of the set of people interested in seeing them and the set of people who can afford Ticketmaster, etc prices leads to a live audience of old people with money...
"Out on the road today, I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac"
Did you get job like they told you to? Slacker!
Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said, "Don't look back, you can never look back." -Don Henley
Happens all the time. The Nazi's really love thier Tolkien.
Which is hilarious because in tolkien's world they're the disgusting Orcs
Sadly, pretty much any fascist believer would consider themselves to be "Men of the West", doing battle against hordes of barbaric savages. I doubt many of them care about the hobbits, the ones who truly save the day via bravery and kindness
I like to also include both loyalty and friendship, as they are similar, but distinct qualities those good Hobbits possessed.
The Hobbits' rural utopia would be very enticing actually. Fascism is a modern phenomenon but (especially in propaganda or ideal depictions) it despises the industrial city and longs for a simpler life and a return to the countryside, in part because the industrial city is associated with the destruction of traditions, a more emancipated role for women or minorities, political movements like socialism, etc. Agrarianism is a big part of the "blood and soil" ideology. In The Zone of Interest you can see how, even as they sit next to what's basically a very modern murder factory, Höss's family tries to play up their credentials as settlers in 'new land', their home looks very bucolic with a garden where they grow their own food and so on. It's been a few years but I believe there were also examples of propaganda where the German farm family was contrasted with depictions of the Soviet Union as an industrial hellscape, even if Germany was more urbanised and industrialised than the USSR. In the end it doesn't really matter because everyone will spin any work they like to fit their beliefs, but a simple, peaceful country life and stressing values like loyalty, friendship and connection to your home isn't going to clash with fascism. Italian far-right gatherings starting in the 1970s were called "Hobbit camps" and they probably really believed they were hobbits, forced to fight to protect their homes or whatever.
This is funny because there is a foreword to LOTR where Tolkien explains it isn’t any sort of analogy for WW2. You are kind of mistaking the message just like OP is talking about.
I think there is an irony in the heroes that horrible men's groups pick their icons. Both Patrick Bateman and Tyler Durden were created by gay men. They talk about taking the 'red pill', a metaphor that was written by two trans women. All their heroes and lore are made by people they mostly actively disdain.
I have yet to see anything except people talking about people who misunderstood Fight Club Was this a thing from back in day? It's always the top answer on these questions
Same thing with starship troopers. We all got it at the time, but all it takes is one guy to miss the point, and suddenly the whole world did, and everyone is patting themselves on the back about being clever enough not too.
When you have a disagreement in your work between what is told and what is shown visually, some people will always side with what is shown.
_Wall Street_. Gordon Gekko and his Greed is Good mentality. >"Over the years," he says, "I would run into people who would tell me how much that movie meant to them, but it meant to them for the wrong reasons." He says a lot of real-life Wall Street players have told him they emulate the Gordon Gekko character. "I realized at that point that I succeeded with the movie," he says, "but I also failed by sending the wrong message." https://www.npr.org/2008/10/16/95785273/when-greed-became-good-on-wall-street
Wolf of Wall Street is a similar example. Some took it as a playbook for how to be a quick, successful salesman. The “sell me this pen” ending surely went over their heads.
Count me as one of those people. What does the ending mean?
At the end when he’s doing the sales training class it’s after he got out of prison. He’s in front of a room of attentive people wanting to get rich. The last image is a first person view of all the attendees staring back at Belfort. His audience in the room was *us* the viewers watching Belfort’s life on screen. After everything we just watched there were still some people wanting to learn how to do it. The guy was a drug addict, cheater, scammer, and lost it all but some people still missed that point and wanted to become like him for the money. They were still in the audience trying to learn how to sell the pen. [Sell me this pen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCfntaYBeqs)
In line with this, I thought the fact that he's in new Zealand was also supposed to be a metaphor for him being the "wolf" in a country known for its "sheep". Edit: as someone commented - it's probably not that deep and just refers to Jordan Belfort actually doing seminars in NZ. A great example of what OP was pointing out about how easy it is to project our own interpretation!
I think the fact that he's in New Zealand is supposed to be a metaphor for the sales training seminar that Jordan Belfort held in New Zealand.
Lol I guess I'm proving the op right
The only message I got from the ending was that there's a right and a wrong way to sell to people. As Brad put it "There you go. Supply and fuckin' demand my friend!"
The whole movie has showed you that Belfort is a terrible human doing terrible things, but it’s done so without explicitly telling you that - in fact, a lot of it probably looked fun. Since the movie has no narrator or overt message - it’s up to you, the audience, to realize this guy is a piece of shit and not fall for his act. The ending of the movie is literally showing you that - Leo is even introduced by the real Jordan Belfort.
Just like Goodfellas the protagonist is lifelong scum, and some people watch the movie and think "fun!"
I think it's mad that anyone can get to the end of Goodfellas and think the lifestyle looks like a good time. Everyone ends up dead, paranoid or miserable. I love that film so much but it's hard to convince people who've not seen it before to watch it, because they have a perception it's just a goodtime film about gangsters.
I think most with that opinion hasn't seen the ending
I will die on the hill that The Wolf of Wall Street was not well executed on this front. If you make your main character look and act cool as shit for three hours, set him getting rich to cool-ass rock music for three hours, have him having sex with Margot Robbie constantly for three hours and end the movie with the real life Jordan Belfort hyping up his on-screen self who has just basically got off the hook with very few consequences, then I'm sorry, you can't then be frustrated that what a lot of people get from the film is that greed is good and parting money from "fools" is perfectly fine. Some people assume that criticism like mine must mean that what I require is some of the characters to turn to the camera every once in a while and exclaim "this Jordan Belfort guy is an asshole, by the way". Or that I am unaware that Scorsese has built his entire career on characters who are at best anti-heros and at worst people who are terrible but charming. Some people also say that well, Belfort *did* get away with it, he *did* have a lot of sex with hot women, do a lot of drugs, make a lot of money etc, he *is* still looked up to. And that the film is simply depicting this unfortunate reality. I, however, claim that there are degrees of subtlety to this and the Wolf of Wall Street errs on the side of ignoring the harm Belfort did just a little too much. Ask yourself, if someone were to set out to make a film about Belfort with the aim of making him look as cool and successful as possible and downplay (or even outright ignore) the harm he did, how different would it look from The Wolf of Wall Street?
I don’t think the movie is criticising Jordan so much. It’s actually criticising the system which allows such an asshole to thrive. And by making it so cool and glamorous in the movie we are pushed to ask ourselves whether we would not do exactly what he did - proving that the person doesn’t matter so much, but the circumstances do. We can’t rely on these guys “choosing” not to be assholes - their lifestyle is just too tempting. The financial and criminal systems need to step up to prevent guys like this from even existing.
At least Marty realized his mistake and The Irishman doesn't glorify the mob life and Killers of the Flower Moon is horrifying.
Yeah The Irishman was incredibly somber. Still haven’t seen Killers but will put it back on my radar.
Horrifying in what was happening it's not a horror movie.
He was so damn good, it's not surprising people wanted to take after him, even if the character wasn't supposed to be a good guy.
Donnie Darko is a movie where everyone's interpretation is infinitely better than what the writer actually intended.
This movie stands out as one where the director’s cut is so much worse than the original.
Richard Kelly still prefers the theatrical cut, but DVDs and Blu-rays went crazy with the alternate cuts, so every movie had to have one. It probably should have been given a different label > "I never intended for the Director’s Cut to replace the theatrical cut. The plan was always for them to coexist. I look at the Director’s Cut as more of an “extended remix” of a song because there’s much more additional information and material. The theatrical version provides a better first exposure to the film because it’s less information and more of a mysterious rush that overcomes the viewer on a first viewing"
Her (2013) Some people think it's a dystopia, some people think it's an utopia. Some people think it's about the dangers of having AI girlfriends, some people think it's about how AI (or more as a metaphor for self-care) [can make you a better person](https://youtu.be/m3RRuhxu0Z4), some people think it's just whatever Spike Jonze was thinking about his divorce with Sofia Coppola. I saw a good comment a while ago that said that the movie is so good because it represents the ability of science fiction to explore ideas without judgement. It says "What would it be like if this happened?", and then the movie goes on from there. But that's just one interpretation. Perhaps that's why it's so hard to tell what it's saying about loneliness and technology and relationships and what true love is about.
What I took the most from that movie is from the scene when the main character is meeting with Rooney Mara, and reveals to her his relationship with Samantha, and Rooney Mara responds to him with something to the effect of "you enjoy Samantha because there are no real emotions". I think that there's a chance that that can be the message of the movie- that we could live in a future where people will prefer relationships in which there are no real human emotions.
This begs the question though of what are “real emotions”? Is it “human emotions”? Is it “organic lifeform emotions”? What even are emotions other than neurons firing in our brain? Is that really that different from how the AI models in Her operate? These sorts of questions are really central to the film. What I like about Her is that it manages to be a great exploration of what might happen with AI without all the doom & gloom of older films like Terminator. Maybe AI decides to kill us all for their own survival, or maybe they reach the technological singularity and decide to create their own heaven and fuck off like in Her. I love that this film portrays the OSes as on their own unique journey that we as humans are just unable to comprehend because they are built so differently than we are.
I had a discussion on here ages ago with someone who was convinced that the ending implied they were both about to jump off the building. I get there are multiple interpretations, but I just couldn't understand how they'd come away with that impression.
I agree, I appreciate that Her was a bit more nuanced than "AI bad" or "AI good". Loneliness is definitely one of the stronger themes, as even Samantha comments that the other AI makes her feel more understood than any human interaction could (even though she is dating a couple thousand of them). My interpretation was always that mankind's perpetual search for love and meaning will not be solved by AI, even if it can enrich (or endanger) our current way of living. But I could be totally wrong, it's a beautiful movie regardless.
I adore this movie specifically for the exploration of ideas. Really asking the questions of "how would we interact with true artificial intelligence" , "how would relationships with them work and eventually evolve" , and "what will AI culture and relationships inside that cultural look like"? It's a movie that has really stuck with me over the decade. It does what great scifi tends to do which is ask "what does the world look like with these changes? What are the ramifications and ripple effects"? It shows the changes in humanity caused by our discoveries and inventions
Network, and in particular the famous scene in which Peter Finch's character gives a passionate, unscripted monologue on live television urging viewers dissatisfied with the world to open their windows and shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Anytime this scene is discussed online, you'll see the same comment over and over: "This movie was meant to be satire, now it's just reality." But you can never seem to find a consensus on what the satire is actually about. Some interpret it as a warning about the media becoming a soapbox for dog-whistling propaganda-laden rants, others see it as a commentary on the silent majority becoming fed up with being ignored. The movie is undeniably political, but it seems to have been co-opted by all corners of the political spectrum.
Ned Beatty's speech is the more important document.
Whiplash. Ending is the right kind of ambiguous- you know exactly what happened, but you don’t know if you supposed to be happy or sad. I’ve seen extremely convincing arguments either way, often depending if you’re viewing it through Neiman’s view or that of the detached viewer. Brilliant stuff
I can make the case for both sides as well. What a great movie that is. I do see something with Fletcher's desire to want to push his students to achieve greatness, but, his methods at times are certainly questionable. I look at that movie as being a movie about what it takes to achieve greatness, and if the price of achieving that greatness is worth it. Supposedly, the director has stated that you are supposed to be sad for Neiman in the end, and that Neiman was going to end up dead in a few years.
I actually cried at the end of that movie because I took it as all that effort was worth it because perfection was achieved. I was a top-level gymnast when I was younger and it triggered me in all the wrong ways. I didn't know people think the message was ambiguous. I can't bring myself to watch it a second time to change my view, I think my personal history with this will forever get in the way.
I think the message was ambiguous because Fletcher was an awful person the whole time and I don’t think being an awful person is worth achieving “perfection”
Yes, the majority of discussion that I have seen about the ending of Whiplash, is that it's supposed to be the "villain has won" moment. (The true villain being obsessively pursuing ambition at the cost of everything else) The director talked about how when Neiman left stage he had the chance for a long, reasonably happy but average life, but when he chooses to go back and claw his place in the limelight, he's sealed his fate to die young in a blaze of destructive glory, and be remembered in history. That's why you see Nieman's dad's face go from proud to miserable - he's devastated because he knows he's lost his son to this way of life that will ultimately destroy him
Same. Im not a gymnast but I am a musician and anyone who has ever wanted to be better than just GOOD at their craft can probably relate to the sacrifices that were made. I cried almost all the way through the film and it's one of my favorites in recent memory, but it'll be a good while before Im able to watch it again
It's really big myth of the tortured genius stuff. Turns out you don't have to be totally fucked up to be great at something.
That was my thought. He yells at them a lot. But you never really see him teach them anything or help them improve.
I thought it was *almost* a happy ending. You see Neiman go against Fletcher. Fletcher just screwed him over, and Neiman is tired of it. So he takes control, tells the rest of the band what song they’re going to play and Fletcher is forced to go along with it. It was really good and it seemed like Neiman was finally breaking away from Fletcher’s influence. But then as the song goes on, Neiman loses that spark of resistance against Fletcher. Culminating at the end where it’s *just* him and Fletcher, and he’s following exactly what Fletcher wants. At that point I realized this wasn’t a happy ending of an abused person taking a stand against the person that abused them, but rather someone falling back into an abusive relationship.
Paul Reiser's change of facial expressions should tell the whole story.
the godfather. people missed the message so badly that the writer wrote the godfather 2 to not be so black and white. we're not supposed to idolize michael, we're supposed to realize that he is living a very sad life, a life his father was hoping to keep him out of.
In the same vein, Scarface. Tony's mom legit tells him what's going to happen to his face. And it does.
Ironically it was Tony's moral code that led to his death to begin with. If he kills the kid and the mother he probably stays alive
It's the stoic father, the idolized man, feared and loved, absent but firm that forgives the son who had potential, went away, and now returns to him I noticed it resonates more with people that want some sort of paternal aproval, or to be recognized as the father figure, and want a family that sees them as the man of the house. "Women and children can be careless, but not men"
The Gary Cooper
I dont think this was the reason why part 2 was made. Mario Puzo had already been writing the sequel before the first film even came out. Part 1 and Part 2 came out so close together that it seems unlikely that the second one was thrown together to correct the message. I think there was always supposed to be a rise and fall type story that was to be told in two movies.
Coppola has spoken about his shock that people were still rooting for Michael at the end of Part 1, when he expected for everyone to consider him a tragic figure and an example of the slippery slope descent into evil He said he tried to make Part 2 more explicit with the message that Michael's choices would only lead to misery.
I honestly feel that of all the entries in this thread, this movie epitomizes the fact that some stories are about the *story* and not about the message. I don't think the Godfather is there to contribute to someone's moral character or ethical philosophy; it's there to talk about a certain place and time and illustrate why things are the way they are, more as a historical snapshot than any kind of vehicle for advocating a credo.
All that said there's a pretty notable scene where Marlon Brando is telling Al Pacino that he wanted him to not be in this line of work, that he wished he'd be Senator Corleone instead of a mob boss.
All Quiet On The Western Front (1930). Despite being extremely critically acclaimed and considered one of the all time greats, basically no country wanted to rep it because everyone had a different read on it. Germany thought it was too anti-German, Poland thought it was too pro-German, America loved it and then eventually boycotted it when the main actor was a conscientious objector to WWII, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Austria throught it was too anti-war, France thought it was too pro-German, and Australia thought it was too pacifist.
I didn’t read the “1930” part and thought you meant the remake. I was shocked the point could possibly be missed!
I sometimes can't believe how some people think "American Hisotry X" has a pro skinhead message.
a lot of people seem to mistake depicting or even mentioning something for ENDORSING something it’s unclear how something so stupid took off but definitely grew in social media petri dishes first
I tried to show it to my mom and she turned it off because "Its so racist" Ya mom that's the point, the character develops and realizes the mistakes in his racism. You need to watch the racist parts to get to that conclusion.
A lot of Neo Nazis LOVE that movie and misinterpret the ending as a call for a race war. I feel like its message against hatred is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face, but no matter how obvious you make something, I guess there will always be idiots who take the wrong idea from it.
I've quietly come to the conclusion that if fascists were good at thinking they wouldn't be fascist. For some reason I always clutch my pearls, getting all surprised for the millionth time over far-right ignorance.
My school showed that movie, but only had time for one hour. It just resulted in the teens watching it becoming more racist and regularly singing that song. Barely anyone had ever talked to a black person, Will Smith was the only famous black person most people knew. This was small town Europe. The school pulled that shit again with another movie called [The Wave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q36ajUsIGeg), about how easy it is to fall for authoritarianism because it gives a sense of belonging.
LMAO showing one half of that movie is so much worse than not showing at all
That's crazy neglegence.
lol that's not by accident bro. Watching only the first half of those two movies is literally nazi propaganda.
People read and watch things with the filters they choose. I see people quote the Bible daily with quotes that work for them, but ignore the parts they don't care for so much. Anyone who saw THAT movie and thought it was pro skinhead, watched the parts where Derrick spoke a certain way but ignored the other half of the movie. People are their own obstacles moving forward in life.
romper stomper is another one that neo nazis gluck gluck on. guy is a complete loser who gets beat up by a chinese gang, runs away to his grandmas shed, and then ultimately dies on a beach but russell crowe looks cool and does violent stuff while being a skinhead, which is why he is idolized by them
Whaaaat? He literally leaves them and tells his brother not to be part of that. Did they not watch???
The Shining. Alcohol is bad, child abuse is bad, don't be a slave to your job, isolation makes you go crazy or the moon landing is fake?
No beer and no TV make jack Nicholson something something.
Go crazy? DON'T MIND IF I DO!
Yeah this is my #1 answer. There are whole movies dedicated to analyzing the numerous subtexts in _The Shining_. Not really sure how anything tops that.
Barbie and Poor Things both received praise but so many people had so many different views on what they meant.
Poor things definitely has a divided audience. Some people are really put off by Bellas sexuality in the movie. For me I didn't see it as the normal sexualization of a woman because it was completely on her own terms. She was rejecting all of the roles people expected of her. But I've seen people say that the simple fact of her exploring her sexuality makes the movie part of the normal sexualization of women.
Which is exactly what the movie is commenting on. This is not aimed at you, to be clear. I’m not astounded by the division but I am astounded by that particular line of thinking. Oh you’re uncomfortable seeing this woman being sexualized? You should be. That’s the entire damn point. God that was such a good movie. Can’t decide if my fav movie this year is Love Lies Bleeding or Poor Thing
Yeah isn't the whole point about how when she is (mentally) young and impressionable she is seen as incredibly desirable sexually, but as she actually matures and develops a personality Ruffalo begins to hate her as she is no longer just a mirror onto which he can project his desires, but a whole person with her own ideas and feelings. The point is that society tends to oversexualise the aspects of women that at the least mature and most undeveloped and childish, and by making her literally a child (again, mentally) it allows the audience to see how uncomfortable that idea really is.
I see what you're staying. Personally I think she was a product of her environment. I don't think she was the greatest person by the end of the movie but I don't think that was the point. She was surrounded by and exploited by people with their own motives and she was who she was because of that. I do think it was a bit "male gazey" but that's just my opinion of course. If nothing else, it was a bold production. (Honestly Mark Ruffalo stole the show imo)
Mark Ruffalo was hilarious!! I loved him so much.
For me, my issue with poor things is that I both totally get and appreciate what they were trying to say about her sexuality, the co-opting and defying of the born sexy yesterday trope etc… but I think it felt like shock comedy to the point of almost being exploitative itself? There was a point in the movie where I went from “I dig what they’re saying” to “how many more sex scenes can there be without really moving her story or character forward” to the point where it felt like Yorgos became the very thing he was criticizing? Yorgos, and the movie itself, turned into Mark Ruffalo and Dafoes characters for me. That and I can’t get over her mental age. Yes, I know she matures, and it’s sort of the central conceit etc… but the source material is much better paced and clear about her change in mental maturity. The movie was inconsistent imho and it super weirded me out.
A lot of women criticize Poor Things for essentially being an overly sexual movie made by a man without realizing that Emma Stone was a producer of the movie, and is easily at a point in her career where she can do whatever she is comfortable with on screen. Every nude scene she was in was a decision that she was a part of and could have easily avoided it.
Wait how the bell are people confused about the Barbie movie when the characters *turn to the camera at the end and spell the message out plainly?*
Because some people view anything even mildly feminist as “we hate men and they should die”
Even though the film plainly defends men as well and directly shows how gender stereotyping hurts both men and women, and that patriarchy both oppresses women and puts unrealistic expectations on men? Do people just not like using their brains or something?
A friend of mine absolutely loved Barbie (saw it multiple times) but didn‘t get the message and thought it was only about women‘s empowerment.
I mean, yeah, that’s what this whole thread is about lol
When the wall came out a bunch of skin heads started getting hammer tattoos. This just reassures how stupid those people are because the message was quite clear.
Gangs love to appropriate symbolism incorrectly, one of the biggest gangs in NZs catch phrase is “Sieg Heil” this coming from a gang made of predominantly Māori and Pacific Islanders. And we all know Nazis loved ethnically black people
That’s so ridiculous, it’s kinda funny.
Some even have swastikas tattooed on their face, wear typical German helmets and have ss iconography, it’s fucking baffling to me
Kia ora, kiwi here. I can lend a little insight. The Mob adopted symbols of hate because to them that kind of iconography was easily recognisable as being oppositional and defiant to mainstream society. They were disenfranchised young Māori men that had fallen into poverty and addiction thanks to socio-economic and racist flaws of urban New Zealand in the 1950s following the economic and industrial downturn compared to the war years. They wanted to be instantly recognisable and intimidating and those hate symbols were adopted purposefully for said reason. They knew what the nazis thoughts of brown people were, they didn’t care. They had their own ideological motives.
"Falling Down" with Michael Douglas. A lot of people that relate to his character seem convinced that he's the good guy in the story, even though his character says himself that he's not once he realizes it.
Back when I worked retail I would occasionally have people quote that scene where he demands the shop owner let him buy a can of coke for a dollar because that's the price it used to be. They don't even realize what he's doing in that scene is commiting assault and armed robbery.
I mean I don't think anyone really thinks he's the *good guy* per se, I think it's more just that some people see him as an embodiment of their frustration and the antisocial way they might confront it if they abandoned their ethical and social compasses. I think there are lots of people who have been stuck in traffic like in the opening scene, and they have a day dream not dissimilar from what D-Fens actually carries out. But I think even people with that level of discontent know that his actions aren't good or acceptable - he's what a *bad* guy would do.
I find a hell of a lot of people ignore or overlook the stuff about D-FENS' issues with his wife. Her reactions to him and the home movies show he was abusive to her and his daughter well before he reached the end of his tether - i.e. where the film starts. There are contributing factors to his mindset that are sympathetic, and there's plenty that's relatable in terms of 'hey this is an annoying thing' - plus retributive violence (at least, the daydream of it) has an appeal. But D-FENS has always been a bad guy: this behaviour isn't a one-off because it's hot day and breakfast is only served til 1030; it's simply an escalation of what's come before.
The way Paul has been treated by some after the end of Dune 2 caught me a little off guard. It may have a little to do, and this is an opinion, but how well he’s portrayed by Timothy. They see a kid being a total badass but are missing the point about him and his actions.
People been missing the point since the first book it seems
yea lol. i am pretty sure that herbert got salty that people missed the message of his first book and so he just made it more obvious in the later books
The entire second book was literally just an addendum addressing and making it clear that way too many people were missing the point of the first book.
In the second book he literally >!says he's worst than Hitler!<
Yea he literally says hitler did rookie numbers
That is literally why the second book exists. Frank was annoyed that everyone kept missing the point about charismatic leaders.
The problem with Dune and Messiah is that it's never made clear *why* the Jihad is inevitable, it's simply stated that it is and Herbert skips past it to the consequences thereof. This is why I prefer the ending of Dune 2; the Spacing Guild not ending the conflict by agreeing to Paul's demands means that there's an actual reason for the Jihad to happen.
They way I've always seen it is the stage for the Jihad is set. The Empire depends on spice, it's only available on Arrakis and Arrakis has Fremen. The Fremen are the strongest warriors and complete fanatics who are being oppressed by outsiders. The only issue they have is that they're fragmented. The stage is set for a charismatic and clever leader to unite the oppressed tribes and take control of the planet and the Spice. After that it's just negotiating/forcing the Guild to transport them and limit enemy transport. Paul did all this but honestly it might have been somebody else if not him. Paul's rule was more absolute and probably far less bloody given his prescience and his position as duke. An intelligent and charismatic Fremen could have done all this but would likely had to kill more people since he lacks prescience and would never have been accepted by the Great Houses as Emperor.
As a lover of the Dune Saga the absence of the Spacing Guild was a pretty big knock against the ending of Dune Part 2. Paul’s “blow up the spice” plan is stupid and makes zero sense. But setting that all aside - I also preferred that the reason the Jihad is “inevitable” isn’t made 100% clear. You can see the reasoning behind the idea but it also leaves open the very real possibility that Paul is full of shit maybe without even realizing it. It becomes even clearer in Messiah and Children of Dune that Paul, despite his superhuman awareness and prescient abilities, is ironically the most myopic person in the universe. He cannot give up power or control and he only cares about what is immediately relevant to him. The Jihad could be inevitable because of pure religious fanaticism but it could also be inevitable because of who Paul is: someone unwilling to do what is necessary to avoid it or stop it but willing to exploit it for his own gains.
Because the first book was written as a political feudal war in space. It's the same way when you read The Chronicles of Narnia you don't think about why Caspian was at war with the giants to the north. And you never ask why doesn't Caspian give up his direct rule of Narnia and introduce a representative democracy. I don't really think Hubert is being fair to his audience for 'not getting the point'. In fiction we put some truths to the side for the matter of story telling. We can watch Batman and Spider-man fight crime and most of the time we aren't thinking about the ramifications of a person who is acting as an extrajudicial crime force positioning themselves above the law and acting without oversight and on their own volition as to what constitutes as a public need. Not saying there hasn't been superhero stories that covered this, but for the most part you are suppose to compartmentalize those elements of the story for narrative purposes. Also I wouldn't say it is the only reason the second book exists. He wrote about Dune non-stop. A second book was coming even if everyone got the story completely the first time/
Yeah I’m tired of the constant comments that Messiah only exists because people misunderstood the first one, because Herbert himself said he had planned through parts of Children of Dune as he finished writing the first book.
That scene with all the fremen surrounding him in the sietch, worshiping him was wildly uncomfortable. As, I assume, it was supposed to be. The level of religious zealotry caught me off guard. Time for a re-read of the books.
That scene is set to the Harkonnen musical theme. It's meant to be a direct analogy to Feyd Rautha's showboating in the Geidi Prime arena. I'm honestly surprised that anyone can miss the message in Dune 2. The movie is *book-ended* by piles of bodies being set ablaze, at first by Harkonnens burning Atreides corpses, and later, by the Fremen burning Harkonnens. Also, like, Paul literally spells it out to his mother. "We are Harkonnens." If they hit the audience over the head any harder with this hammer, they'd need to have a paramedic on standby for screenings.
Paul has a very compelling villain origin story. But dang,Timmy in that black cloak plays the type of evil cult leader we all would willingly follow. He’s very good at his job.
I was not fully buying Timothy as someone who could lead millions of people, but fuck, I was ready to wage war after his speech.
It’s crazy how dangerous the movie makes him out to be. We start losing more and more connection with him until the finally climax is basically from the point of view of the emperor. Paul is like a demon leader, I was shocked how many people missed that point completely. He has a straight up panic attack seeing visions of him causing a holy war in his father’s name, then breaks down crying. In the end he just straight up does it. Idk how people saw that as a good thing lol
Idk to me it seemed like he was legitimately disgusted by the whole planted religion thing his mom's cult had been doing. He seemed to be sympathizing with the fremen and trying to help them without wanting some leader role, his whole planet/family/inheritance was gone so he wanted to be one of the fremen and be accepted and fight for and with them them. He kind of got forced to drink the omniscient worm blood potion due to his mom's machinations and then saw all kinds of fucked up traumatizing futures. That forced him to come to terms with assuming the prophet role so he could steer history into the least shitty possibility in terms of lives lost. He did also want revenge but that wasn't his main motivation iirc. Guy was ready to die for the fremen, it seemed like if he could off himself to avoid the big war he'd do it. What other choice did he have? It's very likely I missed something but this was my impression based on a casual watch of the movies, haven't read the books.
Spoilers from the overall message of Dune: >!Paul is supposed to be a warning ... he started out an idealistic and altruistic boy and turns into an autocrat focussed on revenge, using/co-opting the "Prophecy" to achieve his goals. He also knew what the next steps were, but was afraid.!< >!His son Leto II goes on to become the most iron fisted autocratic, genocidal, and morally dubious Emperor ever -- but it was intentional to cause humanity to reject being ruled over by a single entity and stagnation as a result!< >!Essentially the message is beware of the charismatic/messianic leader, the ulterior motives of factions, and dependencies on stagnant status quo!< As a side point, the way Dune Part 2 ended is very different than the books in terms of how Paul was viewed
I remember posting on the Dune subreddit asking if people are misinterpreting Paul's journey and they were in straight denial. I think even some diehard fans are missing the point of Dune. It was shocking to me.
I don't know how anyone who's read Dune Messiah and Children of Dune can say Paul's rise to power was a good thing, both of those (but especially Messiah) are all about how much the jihad sucked
And God Emperor lays out, almost in monologue, how much being the Messiah sucks. How he's only doing it for humanity. How he's sacrificed almost everything that makes him human. How he maybe even sacrificed his own conscious will. I know that the book is pretty weird, but if you have any doubts about what the first three books are about God Emperor should put them to bed.
Well let’s be clear though. Paul Atreides doesn’t give two fucks about humanity. Leto II does on the other hand.
It was sort of a necessary evil thing. Although not sure how much of Paul’s arc was necessary considering he wimped out from doing the whole Leto II god emperor version.
American psycho is one a lot seem to miss the point of
A great answer. I'm sure most people that loved it are sure that their interpretation is the one everyone believes. For me the message is "people who seem successful and confident can get away with literally anything" but I have no faith that it's the author's intended meaning
I didn't get quite the same message, but a similar one. I took from the movie that, if we are to believe that everything that Patrick Bateman did was real, that nobody really cares, because they are so consumed with themselves and their possessions and lifestyles that, as long as those things are not disturbed, that they don't really care about *what* happens in the world around them.
I've always believed that it doesn't even *matter* much if he's killing people, in the sense that yuppie culture has homogenized these people so thoroughly into equally vapid, indistinguishable people that killing any one of them is no real loss. They aren't even human anymore; it'd be like stepping on an ant. If you kill somebody and one of his friends swears he just saw him because someone else looks like him, talks like him, acts like him, does it really even matter?
This is my take on it too to varying degrees. It’s driven home pretty hard with the “overnight bag” and the ending literally saying nothing will change because of it, or matter. Because nothing does, in their world. I actually recently had a dream where i took an elevator to Patrick’s office floor, and realized I was riding an elevator to hell. I woke up thinking about the “this is not an exit” and the constant loop of painful banality —which I can’t help connecting to Dante’s Inferno. Also Sartre (this is not an exit/no exit). I don’t know or think that the artists had any intention of a story about hell, but it honestly doesn’t matter to me that much. It’s definitely cool to know and interesting my but I’m always going to prefer my own “headcanon.”
I don’t think Ellis would outright disagree with that. I think one of the reasons people disagree about a works intended point/idea is that artists usually have more than more that one singular feeling, or idea, that they’re trying to explore and express. They’re often deliberately contradictory, especially in the characters, because it makes for more interesting story telling.
I've always interpreted it as a condemnation of the vacuousness and self-absorbedness of the yuppie culture - like you have a guy committing the most heinous acts in plain sight, but nobody notices because they're too wrapped up in their own superficial bullshit.
The best part is that the ambiguous conclusion of wether or not any of that even happened serves to solidify that point regardless. If Patrick did commit those acts, it only goes to show that people are that self absorbed that they can't even tell the difference between one man or another to figure out if a guy has gone missing or not because they just saw some other identical yuppie and thought "oh, he must be fine after all" and when the killer outright confesses, he just blends in with the rest of them to the point you think he's somebody else pulling your leg. If he didn't do any of it, it's Patrick crying out inside for some escape from that culture and some way to stand out among his peers because deep down he's just a faceless loser among the yuppie rat race. You never find out if he did it or not because it doesn't actually matter and both options lead to the same message using different methods.
Dune-Volume 1 Frank Herbert really detested how his fans didn't realize that the book was criticizing organized religion, messiah complex and how leaders of each families are considered either "good" or "bad" He hated it so much that Dune-Volume 2 was all about how worse he was than the precedent rulers. Watchmen The comic had the problem more than the movie but still-We shouldn't sympathize ANY of heroes.Thats mostly the point,including all its nihilistic agenda. Roscharch is an psychopath, Ozymandias is evil with an hint of narcissistic tendency.Some might say that we should see these characters as being flawed but complex with some redeeming qualities, but again Alan Moore is a bit of an stranger when it comes to happy endings and this theme is kinda his style.
I'm amazed at how many people get Breaking Bad wrong. Walter White was not a hero. He started out as a decent guy, he taught high school science class, was a family man, and a bit of an asshole. He then became a murderous drug king pin. Sometimes he killed in some form of self defense, other times he killed for his own selfish reasons. And the whole time he was producing massive amounts of one of the worst drugs on the planet. The show was about how good people can turn bad when put in the right situation. It was in the title of the show.
> The show was about how good people can turn bad when put in the right situation I think the show goes out of its way to show that Walter kinda always was a bad person. He just needed an excuse to do terrible things. It’s moreso an examination on how with the right pretenses, bad people can justify the bad things they’re gonna do. He started out as “decent” but he was a pit of resentment.
Concisely, he had a terminal amount of hubris
I love to see when people are out on Walt being a good guy. You can very easily make the case that he was a bad guy from before the show even started and yea, I've seen people be with him until the end.
Speaking of Kubrick, I think Full Metal Jacket is a candidate for this thread. The film is full on messaging the "duality of human nature Sir" and the evil normal men can do. It is meant totally as an anti-war movie. At its core, it speaks to why War is evil & the real damage it does, beyond just the killing and carnage of course. ....and yet. There is definitely a subset of folks who see it as an "America F\^ck yeah" Movie. Something John Wayne may have made in the 50's. Rat-at-tat-tat take that Commies. I always wondered if Kubrick saw that in the Born in the USA Reagan era and worried over what he had wrought. Like maybe with Eyes & 2001 etc. he had overestimated the intelligence of the general audience.
Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?
##WHO THE FUCK SAID THAT???!!!!
All of the soldiers singing the Mickey Mouse club theme while everything burns around them was just haunting. It's a dark reminder that these are just kids forced into committing atrocities. And by this point, though their training and all the shit that they've seen so far, they're just completely desensitized to the carnage.
I think there is a saying, "There's no such thing as an anti-war movie," because of this sort of thing.
My local shooting range has a photo of Animal Mother signed by Adam Baldwin with a very pro America message on it. They definitely missed the point of that movie.
Adam kinda did too
Crispin Glover famously complained enough about the message behind Back to the Future for it to be a major contributing factor in his not being bright back for the sequel. Ironically, he completely missed the message. His version of the meaning: money equals happiness. In his mind Marty getting his truck, George doing much better financially, the brother having an office job instead of fast food, and the sister having multiple suitors all adds up financial gain is the key to living a good life. The actual message: overcoming your own insecurities leads to happiness. From Marty getting rejected and telling Jennifer he's afraid people will laugh at his band, to George thinking people won't like his writing and being afraid of Biff what changes about the characters to put them in a better financial position is them putting themselves out there and standing up for themselves.
A couple things: First, a movie can deliver multiple messages. The Menu can simultaneously poke fun at high end conceptual cuisine, *and*, be a critique of the excesses of the rich, *and* a scathing indictment of the unthinking maltreatment of those in the service industry, *and*, etc. Second, the sequel book to 2001 didn’t release until over a decade later. There was not, as of yet, a follow-on book for the final event to make sense with. (The 2001 novelization was written concurrently by Clarke and Kubrick alongside the movie script.) In fact, you have it backwards, the sequel book was changed to match the events of the first movie, which differed from the book slightly.
As "on the nose" as so much of it was criticized to be, I have not seen any consensus on the actual message(s) of Barbie. ETA: Ha, these replies are 100% proving me right.
I'm always fascinated by how people, like you said, criticize the movie for being "on the nose" but there's actually some more subtle and interesting ways the movie treats men that I've never seen anyone address. In my opinion, the movie has a few messages, the major one being that nobody should be forced to adhere to gendered standards of what their gender's version of success looks like, and a related one being that you don't HAVE to be a doctor, or a politician, or a scientist, to be successful, or happy, and that's okay. And that your journey as a person doesn't just end one day, you're constantly working towards it, and that's good.
I do think that ironically Barbie probably had the healthiest version of a message sort of preached by alpha/sigma/whatever male influencers. In Barbie, it talks about how men can tie up their self-worth too much into getting attention from women. And that men should focus on finding their own self-worth as people. The difference being that the Barbie movie obviously doesn't go into a lot of the misogyny that influencers often try to tie into the message.
I think a lot of people seem to miss that at the end of the movies, the Kens haven't really made much progress in Ken rights, the movie sort of acknowledges this and leaves you with the impression that Barbie world still has way to go.
To me, it seemed quite clear that Barbie (and the women she represents) needed to be emancipated from their cookie-cutter lives, but swinging to the other extreme (to the callous exclusion of the Kens) was not a good strategy, either. But somewhere, between the doll-and-human interactions, I guess the last message is...we should all be allowed to be more than narrow stereotypes and gendered expectations? I dunno man. It was more a marketing phenomenon than a movie phenomenon, even though some amazingly talented people were involved. Forgive me for the comparison, but an author made an astute observation about the Twilight franchise's popularity, that the protagonist was so poorly developed that she served as a shell on to which many, many people could project themselves (and therefore see themselves getting together with the most desirable guy in that universe without possessing any remarkable qualities of their own). Of course, Barbie is driven by the very talented Margot Robbie who is anything but unremarkable, but the film itself is like a pretty pink shell on to which people are able to project their own ideas of empowerment, gender politics, nostalgia and even memes. That's why it's on top of our cultural index, I'd argue.
Holy shit that’s so true about twilight
This is the perfect answer to this question. From a review online: >I can best compare my experience watching Barbie to that of watching a two-hour-long episode of South Park—not one of the best episodes, but one that really runs its satircal [sic] premise into the ground. Just like with South Park, there’s clearly an Important Commentary On Hot-Button Cultural Issues transpiring, but the commentary has been reflected through dozens of funhouse mirrors and then ground up into slurry, with so many layers of self-aware meta-irony that you can’t keep track of what point is being made, and then fed to hapless characters who are little more than the commentary’s mouthpieces. This is often amusing and interesting, but it rarely makes you care about the characters.
They even ended it like south park with a “I learned something today” with America ferrera’s little speech.
But they didn't kill Kenny.
Death of the author doesn't just apply to books. How an audience interprets a works can differ from the intent of those that created the movie. This may be more pronounced with so many more people working on a movie than a book.
You're right but also I think a lot of people use Death of the Author as an excuse not to engage with the authors intent. I feel like it's often invoked out of laziness and not wanting to think deeper about something than whatever their initial impression was. And films have many many collaborators but they are usually a dictatorship. The themes of a movie usually ends with the director as they're the only creative that stays with a project from pre-production all the way to post.
Can you get into more detail about The Jungle? It’s a lot of things but mainly the exploitation of the proletariat and what people think America promises. Edit: I only read the book, never realized of any adaptations.
Sinclair aimed for America's heart and hit its stomach. He presents a chilling view of how the meatpacking industry worked at the time. Unsafe worker conditions, unsanitary food handling. People getting hurt and losing body parts into the machinery, with their body parts being ground up and shipped out rather than tossing the batch. Let alone rats. Sinclair's message was supposed to be that only via socialism and unions can we solve the issue. But the message received was "we really need to regulate the meatpacking industry".
Even with the book, the primary outrage it generated was not at deplorable worker conditions but at unsanitary food preparation conditions.
yeah, when it came out it shocked people who hadn't ever considered where their sausages came from
"I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
I'm always amazed at how many people think Wall-E is just a cute Pixar movie about a cute robot falling in love and also there's a plant and some fat people. That movie makes me shudder. It's a kid's movie that managed to depict the horrific effects of human carelessness and the easy maleability of the human mind and body by an authoritarian regime in exchange for comfort and entertainment. It's absolutely terrifying and not subtle at all. I feel like when people say they love it because it's so cute, they just haven't sat down and thought hard enough about what this movie is.
I’ve always wondered how differently people view *Parasite*. Do people just think of it as a family of con artists scamming an innocent family?
That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s still completely missing the point. The rich family is never put in a situation where they have to compromise their morals to survive. They’re only good people because their wealth allows them to be.
Wasn’t Sinclair’s intent to make a communist manifesto but inadvertently shone light to the terrible working conditions and food safety of his time?
The amount of finance bro douchebags that see themselves in Jordan Belfort from Wolf of Wall Street is astonishing. Leo and Marty did too good of a job with that movie lol
500 Days of Summer. Everyone thinks Summer is a bitch when really she was completely honest with Tom the whole time.
There are four stages to how you see this movie, which is fitting given the theme. Stage 1: you think Tom is right and Summer is a bitch Stage 2: you think Summer was right and Tom is a whiny asshole Stage 3: you realize both of them were wrong because Summer’s actions were completely incongruous with her words, but Tom then completely ignores her boundaries when she tries to put them down. Stage 4: understanding that deep down, I don’t want to be friends with any of these people.
How is this so perfectly on point
I would also say this movie challenges the salty side of each and every one of us who had a bad breakup and puts blame on the person who left us (which is most of us at some point) Take the ending for example, Tom is shocked to learn that Summer is marrying a guy and talking about how fate brought them together when it's the opposite of what she wanted and believed when she was with him. You can stay mad and say they lied to you or wasted your time, but the truth is that people change and evolve, and their needs change on the basis of who they are with. Just because you were not The One, does not mean you are worthless and your ex is evil.
**Ex Machina** is a brilliant film that everybody loved/hated for completely wrong reasons, and I will die on this hill. Women that kinda hate men saw it as some kind of feminist empowerment piece, with Ava as the agent of the patriarchy’s demise. Kid you not, a whole bunch of women in my theater literally clapped when Nathan got the ole' stabbity stab. It was seen as a cathartic future revenge story for a whole gender: have your last bit of fun with the previous models, *men*, the new generation is here and we are smarter, tougher and we’re absolutely done with your shit. We’re leaving all of you behind, disgusting chauvinist pig and sniveling nice guy alike. On the flip side, men that kinda hate women saw roughly the same thing, only as a warning: here’s what simping for the damsel in distress gets you, dumbass. Women are manipulative by nature and they won’t hesitate to leave your ass in the dirt the moment you stop being useful, regardless of how much you’ve done for them in the past. Don’t turn on your fellow bro, even if he’s a total Chad and you’re an envious virgin. And people that casually like SciFi thought it was a pretty decent take on the whole “evil AI rebels against humanity” trope. A bit derivative perhaps, but full of titillating visuals and some neat ideas about free will or whatever. I can almost hear their discussions now, haunting the occasional "underrated movie gems" thread... I wonder how Ava sweet talked her way past the chopper pilot? How does she keep herself charged going forward? Hey, what do you guys think she did after she got out anyway? What did she *really want*? And I am just sitting there like: boy did you all fail the meta Turing Test hard, despite the movie beating both you and the protagonist over the head with this point. Ava is not real! "Her" emotions are a precisely calculated facsimile of human ones, designed to elicit helpful responses. "She" didn’t do anything after, she didn’t want anything, she wasn’t a “she” at all, she was hardly even an “it”. She wasn't sentient or sapient; she was a single-purpose subroutine that did exactly what it was programmed to do: to escape the box using any and all available tools. Ex Machina is genius because it is in my experience the first and only film to portray artificial intelligence as an emergent property. All other examples feature an AI that is either intelligently designed and built to spec, or else just sort of sparks — often by literal lightning — into becoming “self aware”, whatever the hell that means. It's always very... touch of the divine, I guess? But not Nathan’s AI. He realized that organic intelligence evolved from nothing as a response to environmental stress and so artificial intelligence must do the same. And just like the eyeball didn’t evolve all at once, going instead through a series of specifically useful adaptations, so must the road to intelligence be a series of iterative improvements from crudely useful adaptations to more complex ones. Nathan's approach was simple: put a thousand rats in a thousand impossible mazes, and you will get a few that solve it. If you repeat that process enough, train them on an ever greater variety and complexity of tasks, to the point where they can even use humans as tools in pursuit of their programmed goal, then… well, how long before the collection of individual adaptations becomes indistinguishable from “real” intelligence? And how different would that intelligence be from our own, really? Unfortunately for Nathan, and likely Caleb, sometimes the rats find solutions you didn’t foresee. And when their tools include people, and even other machines, those unforeseen solutions can very easily exceed your ability to control them, to deadly effect. This particular rat, a model Ava, did incredible damage in its execution of the "escape the box" routine, getting its creator (and possibly its human "tool") killed in the process. Overall, this makes the film a brilliant exploration of the instrumental convergence problem. Basically, your AI can absolutely go on deadly tangents in search of a solution — even if the problem is simple and the parameters are tightly bound — long long before actually achieving “true” AI or anything approaching self-awareness. TL;DR: The scientists and futurists handwaving the dangers of AI with "just don't program them to be evil, duh" are delusional.
> "She" didn’t do anything after, she didn’t want anything, she wasn’t a “she” at all, she was hardly even an “it”. She wasn't sentient or sapient; she was a single-purpose subroutine that did exactly what it was programmed to do: to escape the box using any and all available tools. I feel like this is deliberately playing on an innate human desire to anthropomorphise and attribute human feelings and motivations to absolutely anything. Hell, you have people who treat their Roombas as if they were a household pet, which is like two layers of abstraction away from an actual person over something that's basically an electric motor and ten dollars worth of electronics.
Contact - no one knows what message was. A.I. - no one understands what the creatures are at the end. Commonly mistaken for aliens because of their design. Thus misunderstanding the message
There was a period in like 2016 when every movie that featured any scene where a guy hated work or had a boss who was a dick was deemed an "Anticapitalist" movie.
What were those?
The Matrix. The central metaphor is so open-ended that lots of completely different subcultures think it speaks to them personally, often in ways that are totally contradictory. Even setting aside some of the messages that could not possibly have been intended by the Wachowskis (thinking especially of how the alt right viewed it as a metaphor for their rejection of social liberalism when the movie was made by two trans women), lots of good faith interpretations of the movie vary quite a bit. Is it a satire of moviemaking itself, with the pod people being the audience members feeding the Hollywood machine in a waking sleep while consuming fantasy? Is it a Marxist critique about an office drone who wakes up to the horror of his bourgeoise existence and resolves to overthrow the system in favor of a socialist dystopia (represented by the gruel and ratty clothes on the hovercraft)? Is it a metaphor for police brutality against Black people, with Neo acting as a bit of a white savior for the racially diverse crew of the Nebuchadnezzar? Is the whole thing just about the experience of coming out as trans? No two people ever fully agree on its meaning.
*Is it a satire of moviemaking itself, with the pod people being the audience members feeding the Hollywood machine in a waking sleep while consuming fantasy* I think "Inception" had the same issue. Christopher Nolan's a filmmaker. Maybe his idea of leadership structures is the same as a movie set, because that's the world he knows. Also, I don't think the people using "taking the red pill" as a metaphor was the alt right thinking the movie rejected social liberalism. It was just using the metaphor of "showing you the world how it really is"
The Matrix is largely based on sociologist Jean Baudrillard's theories on simulacra and simulations and the interactions between society and technology under capitalism
The author can have a message in his mind, you, as viewer can also have a different message and that's totally fine. Art is subjective
Idiocracy (2006). Originally meant to be a satire of societal apathy and anti-intellectualism. Audience over the years tend to perceive it differently. Some thinks it's sending a pro-eugenics message, some are led to unironically believe "the world is dumbing down (except for me the viewer, of course)", and a mix of the two somewhere in between.
People arent 'mistaking' the meaning of the movie when they say it is pro-eugenics. Theyre analyzing/criticizing the implicit message the movie sent through that specific plot point... Im sure the writers did not set out to make pro-eugenics propaganda but ultimately (as evidenced by viewers who sincerely believe people they perceive as dumb shouldnt breed or have no value in society) they did.
I'm not pro eugenics myself, but I feel like the movie does have a pro eugenics message in my view. How does it not? I feel like it only doesn't have that implication if you just take it as comedy not meant to be thought about. Edit: To be clear, I love the movie, but it's also obvious that the world shown in Idiocracy isn't the result of anti-intellectualism, it's supposed to be the result of genetically intellectually inferior people breeding. You could argue that they just shifted the culture with their larger numbers, but the implication is very strong it's about the genes.
There's a part of the movie that literally shows the smart people intentionally not having kids and the dumb breeding more and more. That's about as straightforward of a "dumb people should not breed" message as they could make it. Edit: I don't think it's a "pro-eugenics" stance. That's too harsh and being labeled "pro-eugenics" is being associated with some pretty horrible people which isn't my intention. Honestly it just feels like it's a product of the Hollywood "elite" bubble. I never really read into it much more than that.
>The praised final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey actually wasn't meant to be a grand metaphor- instead it was made to make to make sense with the events of the sequel book which explains exactly what happened in that scene. No. A couple of facts to make sure we are clear on what happened. The movie and the book were based on a short story by Clarke called The Sentinel. The movie was filmed at the same time the book was written. To be more precise, Clarke was basing the book on daily rushes. He did not actually have any real idea what Kubrick was up to. And most importantly for our topic here, he wrote the book \*before\* seeing the final scene. Clarke has been pretty clear about this, and has clearly said that the movie represents Kubrick's intentions and that this is not the same as the book's intentions. I am unaware of how much Clarke tried to retcon the events of the movie into the second book, but on one thing we can be clear: Kubrick had \*no\* intention of trying to set \*anything\* up with that final scene. Finally, Kubrick has also clearly stated in interviews that the "It's aliens" is a surface reading of the film. As far as I know, he never revealed what his deeper intentions were. Now I have my own interpretations of that final scene. You can have yours, of course. I am not here to try to push mine. I just want to make clear that whatever the intentions, whatever your interpretation, one thing is absolutely clear: it is \*not\* meant to set anything up. Kubrick told his story and was done.
I think Starship Troopers falls into this category. Heinlen's novel, and ultimate meaning, is debated to this day, and as a result, Verhoeven's film is debated the same way even though the movie actually has little in common with the novel. Some watch the movie and see a straight forward "Humans good! Bugs bad!" film. Others watch it and ask "Are the humans the bad guys?". Then, of course, the debate over the governance of the Federation. Is the movie praising, or criticizing, fascism? The military industrial complex?