Listen, it's fine if people enjoy nonlinear storytelling to make it an "experience" or a canvas with a few straight lines painted on it. But it is stupid, to follow your quote.
If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid. I'm not claiming The Big Sleep is even in this category, because I haven't seen it, but plenty of films and books are.
If a canvas painted a solid color or with a few straight lines sells for millions, then that's stupid.
People enjoy "stupid" things all the time, and that's fine. There's nothing really wrong with that.
But the important part of my point is: only artists seem to think they're above it.
I don't know you, and even I know you disagree with your own statement. If not, the only thing you'd enjoy are media targeted at pre-schoolers and young children.
Anything targeting and age beyond that is made more difficult to follow, by design to make it more challenging than what a young child can grasp. That allowed the creator to explore deeper subjects.
Maybe you don't like things more challenging than your comfort zone, maybe you don't like more less linear depictions but do like them somewhat. Unless you can tell me you only consume media targeted at young children. Even you average Marvel film leaves plenty unsaid that needs to be infered, plenty unspoken to be felt. Non-linear narrative's to evoke a response in the viewe, false imagery, deception, feints and direct intuitional/emotional appeals.
Now those might be targeted at just where you like them, but thats admiring you like them and you agree with the approach and that it's not stupid. It's just when thing slave your preferred zone you begin to dislike them.
Oh come on, you know I wasn't talking about that kind of challenge.
There are two things:
1. Pieces that are more challenging to read/watch because the story is deeper and the challenging read is required to tell that story.
2. A piece that purposely makes it the story harder to follow, or is otherwise really difficult to follow, without adding much depth.
I was clearly talking about #2.
"In fact, the plot isn't impossible to follow – it's just extraordinarily difficult without a pen, a notepad and a pause button to hand." - The article
That's just stupid, and absolutely falls into #2. It's a crime drama.
There are qualities other than "plot depth" that can be enhanced by ambiguity. Most people don't watch a film solely for the plot.
> It's a crime drama.
Is that prescriptive or descriptive?
Why?
Mondrian painting are the most beautiful, calming pieces of art I know of (just look at Composition C (No. III) with Red, Yellow and Blue)
> If you're using devices to make a story more difficult to follow, just for the sake of making it more difficult to follow for the "challenge", then that's stupid.
Why?
Other things use devices to make them more challenging, and this is generally accepted as entertaining. Think harder levels in video games, rules in sports and games etc.
Why should stories be any different?
And it should be noted there are different levels to this. For example, Shakespeare tells one story on the surface, but if that is all you understand then you miss the glory of Shakespeare: his use of literary devices to tell other, hidden stories underneath what you think you are reading.
You seem to be using the word "stupid" to mean something like "non-obvious". That isn't what "stupid" means.
And it sold for $50 million, which is the stupid part here. The value is not in the piece itself. We're getting a bit distracted talking about paintings though.
> Think harder levels in video games, rules in sports and games etc.
The equivalent here would be a nearly impossible game. One that doesn't tell you the goal or the controls. And you randomly jump from level 1 to level 400 to level 33.
And then some silly pretentious person says "Well why does the game need to be linear?" "You know just like real life you have to figure out the controls!" "It's not actually meant to be played" "The challenge is figuring out what's going on"
That'd be stupid. Is there a niche of people that would like it? Probably.
> You seem to be using the word "stupid" to mean something like "non-obvious". That isn't what "stupid" means.
Stupid isn't a great word for this, I just used it to follow the person I was responding to.
"Extremely Pretentious", maybe? "Ridiculous"?
Difficult texts are their own reward. Not everything has to spoon-feed you the plot. And enjoying things like a Lynch film doesn't mean you don't also enjoy highly conventional narratives like the aforementioned Marvel films.
>If a canvas painted a solid color or with a few straight lines sells for millions, then that's stupid.
Thank god we have you here to explain how the experts are all just plain wrong!
> Exploring these kinds of challenging works can be incredibly rewarding. I encourage anyone reading this to do so. I long ago decided that if I only ever saw plays/read books/watched movies that I liked, I wasn't branching out enough. Find things that challenge you, and engage them on their own terms. Figure out why (for example) a host of professional movie critics loved Lynch's film when it left you cold and maybe even angry. What do they see that you don't?
I've had that experience. But I've had it in response to many phenomena, artificial and natural, not just critically respected artworks. If you approach other things on the same terms, you can find the same depth and reward - even when there's no there there.
> Creating something that includes, or even hinges on, ambiguity is challenging in the extreme. It's like when jazz musicians break the "rules" of music and melody; you can only break the rules and have it work when you have really mastered the underlying craft.
Citation needed. The effectiveness of GPT etc. suggest that poetic ambiguity may be the cheap trick that many of us have long thought it was; similarly I've seen a few cases where when a critic takes schizophrenic writings seriously and has much the same response as they do to respected artists. Has anyone actually done a double-blind trial comparing "good" and "bad" high-ambiguity works? (e.g. if you make those professional movie critics write their responses independently, without knowledge of the creators, and then compare those responses in an objective way, are they actually more correlated than chance?)
In a world where ambiguity didn't actually take a lot of artistic skill, and whether a high-ambiguity work was perceived as good or bad was more a function of art-community politics (e.g. who the creator is), what would you expect to be different?
Peak HN comment right here.
Primer on the other hand, I think all you can really do is accept that there are big unexplained gaps in the story, and no amount of debugging is going to help. I personally take that as a fun hint of a larger story you're not seeing.
Never seen The Big Sleep so not sure which it's more like.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I do want to point out that there definitely ARE a lot of people who immediately ascribe snobbery to folks who enjoy complex film, or art that requires thought, or wine above two-buck-chuck, or beer other than Miller Lite, or whatever.
It's a pretty silly thing to do (and one that I'm pretty sure you're doing only in jest, let me be clear).
Highly technical people -- developers, engineers, etc -- are much more likely (at least in my experience) to react negatively to nonlinear storytelling. Further, the reaction is almost never "wow, not for me" but instead "THIS IS STUPID".
It's essentially the equivalent of walking through, say, a Mondrian exhibit and spouting "my kid can do that."
I do not know why this correlation exists. I could make guesses, tying the exacting nature of programming with an attraction to well-defined and explicit storytelling, but it is what it is.
THE BIG SLEEP is awesome. MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a tremendous (and award-winning) film. Ambiguity and vagueness are integral to art (and life!).
Years ago, I saw a play by Maria Irene Fornes called THE DANUBE. It's a bizarre, baffling, and beautiful piece, and you cannot really approach it like you would (say) a Marvel film expecting a traditional narrative. That's not what it's FOR. It's an experience. You have to let go of the desire to tick off plot points and characters like players in a football program and just experience the art on its own terms.
Creating something that includes, or even hinges on, ambiguity is challenging in the extreme. It's like when jazz musicians break the "rules" of music and melody; you can only break the rules and have it work when you have really mastered the underlying craft.
Exploring these kinds of challenging works can be incredibly rewarding. I encourage anyone reading this to do so. I long ago decided that if I only ever saw plays/read books/watched movies that I liked, I wasn't branching out enough. Find things that challenge you, and engage them on their own terms. Figure out why (for example) a host of professional movie critics loved Lynch's film when it left you cold and maybe even angry. What do they see that you don't?