Re:And the winner is…who cares?
by tsimionescu on Monday April 26, 2021 @04:07PM
(#26947394)
Oh, absolutely - seeing commentary before the movie seems a sure fire way to destroy the authentic emotional experience of the art. And there is absolutely also a tendency to stretch art analysis way past breaking in some academic circles, seeing symbolism in everything, psychoanalyzing the author's choices etc (Michel Foucault had a joke from one of his characters - 'read Freud enough and you'll end up believing that a penis is nothing more than a phallic symbol').
Still, in pop culture and the mass market, I think the scales are tipped well to the side I'm mentioning. One interesting case study has been the movie Annihilation - a very obviously symbollic film, but one which has often been reviewed almost exclusively in terms of it's world (what were the alien's plans? Was that the real Lena at the end?), especially if you look at places like YouTube.
As usual with art, this is a cultural thing. For example, I visit Bologna, in Italy, every summer and in the central square of the old city there's an open-air film festival where they show a different movie for free every night, I think for all three months of summer. I've sat through a couple of them and there's always a lengthy introduction to the movie by some kind of artsy person who gets up on the stage and speaks for half an hour analysing the movie's significance and going into depth in the symbolism of scenes, like the "blue=sad" thing in the joke you quote. I mean, I like artsy fartsy movies (the stuff Hollywood usually tags as "world cinema"... yeah, guess what, the rest of the world also makes movies) but the analysis can get a bit boring and I resent the attempt to direct me to look at particular details that the speaker wants me to pay attention to. I want to notice the details I notice. So much analysis just spoils the movie for me - and the same goes for any work of art. It's not that I can't find something deep in art, but I want to understand what is in my head and in my heart and not be spoon-fed whatever the artistic establishment has chosen I have to notice.