Please don't post snarky comments or shallow dismissals. If you know more than other people, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. That's more in the intended spirit of this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

(Btw - re Lynch - I watched Blue Velvet after many years and was surprised at how satisfyingly the plot did line up. I'm not saying that's true of his other work. But I had had the impression that BV was in the fashionably-ambiguous style and when I saw it again I realized I got that wrong.)

I don’t think those two are a good example of the trend. Especially Lynch. While he leaves a lot of small details for interpretation, he does it from the beginning and doesn’t ask the viewers to decide between a story-changing yes/no answer like Inception. It’s like Hitchcock’s McGuffin: would be fun to know but it doesn’t detract from the story.

Even Twin Peaks second season famous cliffhanger leaves no doubt about what happened to Bob and Agent Cooper.

Admittedly, Kubrick is the better example here than Lynch: 2001 is a stellar example of both "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" (w/r/t HAL's behavior) and "It means whatever you want it to mean" (Kubrick quite famously refused to provide any sort of guidance whatsoever as to how it should be interpreted)

For Lynch, Mulholland Drive was on my mind--probably since it was mentioned in the article--as the ending (and, honestly, the narrative structure as a whole) requires the viewer to bring quite a lot of assuming and surmising to the table in order to arrive at something coherent. Perhaps the OP meant to purposefully exclude explicitly surreal and abstract works from their critique, but that's certainly not the tone I got from their post.

Perhaps a better counter example could've been Kelly Reichardt's filmography, as she is also quite clearly a meticulous and thoughtful filmmaker (I remember hearing a profile of her on some NPR show a number of years ago that talked about the amount of time she spent getting even the ambient bird songs in Certain Women accurate, or reading her comments about how she would've filmed First Cow in a different aspect ratio if she had known COVID was going to keep it from being widely seen in theaters), but typically cuts off the narrative abruptly, leaving plenty of loose ends dangling: Meek's Cutoff and First Cow are probably the best examples.

As an aside, I feel like the point of Nolan leaving the ending of Inception with an open-ended yes-no question is intended to highlight that, from the character's perspective, the answer no longer matters. I dislike the film for other reasons, and don't particularly like Nolan's screenplays in general, but that particular choice seems pretty reasonable in the broader narrative context of the film.