creative work hot takes
@kotep true, but counterpoint - I watched The Favourite recently, and the end of that movie left me completely confused. It wasn't until I read an article dissecting it that a bunch of things I'd missed clicked into place, and suddenly I felt like I could make sense of something that was previously incomprehensible.
So yeah, I don't think there's One True Meaning to things, but I don't think explainers are all necessarily bad. Sometimes folks need the help
creative work hot takes
@abe_e_seedy @kotep I think a certain genre of this explainer stuff is actually fan fiction (for the record, I think fanfic is fine) because it doesn't just present all the clues leading up to the ending but uses those to manufacture story or meaning beyond the end of the film to tie it up neatly. I think there's a natural tendency to want to dissect / discuss a compelling thing you just watched -
creative work hot takes
@abe_e_seedy @kotep but there's definitely something insidious about not being able to enjoy media unless you can 'solve' it - AKA you need to feel like you understand what will happen next and how the story 'actually' resolves beyond the 'artificial' end point of the film/book/whatever
creative work hot takes
@abe_e_seedy @kotep this also necessarily reduces the discourse around a work from 'what is it trying to say' to 'what is the true intent of the resolution and what happens next'. How many people have you heard trying to dissect what happens in lost versus what it means and what they were trying to say. It's weird that the most popular genre of media analysis are these explainer vids that interact with the text at such a surface level. IDK.