This is a deeply predictable (and pedestrian) take, and I 100% expected to see it here (as I expect to see it in any technical forum).
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?
It's true! I awake each morning, enraged at the lack of rigour in my dreams. I turn to my wife to tell her I found it hard to suspend my disbelief. She transforms into a crab. Every night it gets worse.
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.
> 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 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.
> If not, the only thing you'd enjoy are media targeted at pre-schoolers and young children.
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.
The article makes the argument that the plot being hard to follow is in fact to the film's benefit. So unless you require "depth" to be plot depth, that doesn't match #2.
There are qualities other than "plot depth" that can be enhanced by ambiguity. Most people don't watch a film solely for the plot.
Only you are claiming it’s only purpose is to make it more difficult to follow. There are a hundred valid reasons to have non-sequitur or ambiguity beyond the literal first-level surface analysis of just making it harder to understand.
> 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.
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.
> 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)
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.
You're mistaking the point of a (notionally) narrative medium. It doesn't HAVE to be linear storytelling.
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!
There's a difference between ambiguity that's integrated into a story and ambiguity that's forced on the viewer. If the only thing that makes the movie ambiguous is that the final shot of the film isn't five minutes longer, then that is the type of film I hate. All Is Lost, The Grey, Save Yourselves, etc. If it's woven into the story from the beginning then I have no issue with it even if it may not be for me.
> 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.
> 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?
The enjoyment of figuring out what's going on in something like Mulholland Drive is rather similar to the enjoyment of debugging a complex bug. There's a frustration about it not immediately making sense, but there's also a pleasure to working it out.
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.
You're describing a mediocre programmer. How do you choose between two algorithms: small-scale runtime, large-scale runtime, effort to write, effort to maintain, etc. Folks who can't cope with ambiguity will make a single-measure heuristic and pull the trigger immediately. It's great for their 'goal accomplished' statistic, which mediocre managers love, but that isn't what a good programmer would do.
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).
It's interesting that you're citing a film made 60 years before the 21st century as an example of a 21st century trend. If anything, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Star Wars tried to explain where the force comes from. Christopher Nolan includes ridiculously detailed exposition dumps explaining everything (in spite of the ambiguous ending of Inception, everything about how the world worked was explained in meticulous detail). Even the canonical mystery box master himself, Damon Lindelof, took to heart all the backlash about the non-explanation ending of Lost. Nobody expected The Leftovers would ever give an explanation of what caused the Sudden Departure, but it did.
Heck, even David Lynch himself gave Laura Palmer an origin story in Twin Peaks: The Return! And even where he tried to preserve some mystery, the companion book by Mark Frost explained all of it.
I really root for Nolan; I very much liked Interstellar and enjoyed Tenet, but I think he's a clear example of someone who excelled so much at a commercial medium that the get-the-most-butts-in-seats factor necessitates the exposition diarrhea. There's just enough ambiguity for the common pseudo-news-site or vlogger to make "the ending of $FILMTITLE REALLY explained" content.
I think Lynch, who's learned to "rule over small films than serve large corporate ones" [1], probably bent over a little bit to get The Return made, but I still left with as many, if not more, questions as I had coming in.
Like any other technique, leaving on a question can be a poor substitute for a more fitting ending, but when done properly it can reinforce a core theme within the work.
I am not a huge Inception fan, but I do think the cut at the end is an important part of the movie and a good example of effective ambiguity. It might scratch an itch to show the top falling of hold longer (to confirm he is in a dream), but what value comes from that resolution? Ending the film before the answer allows us to think about what we've seen earlier to try and answer it for ourselves. Even though the movie is over, the audience is left with a part to play as they leave the theater.
I feel similarly about the "twist" that "it was just a dream!" or something similar. It's already fiction. It's already made up. If I wanted to be stuck with just the stories & endings and such I could make up, I wouldn't be coming to you for a story. Not that there isn't room for ambiguity or complexity or anything, but, I already know what I think. I'm here precisely to find out what someone else thinks, and "well, what do you think?" is not very helpful.
"It was just a dream" only works if it suggests an actual ending. Eg. Brazil, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I don't think it's a viable twist in itself.
Not the Sid Sheinberg "Love Conquers All" ending, if that's what you're getting at! I did watch it once, hard to believe that seemed like a good idea to anybody. Makes me wonder how many other great films we lost to that kind of studio butchery.
Exactly none of those are what ambiguity means. Ambiguity means that there are multiple resolutions that fit the existing evidence equally well.
That doesn't mean you get to decide. Ambiguity isn't choose your own adventure. You aren't having agency assigned to you in order to be the ultimate arbiter.
Ambiguity is the opposite. You are having agency withheld and being told by the author that you don't get to know.
It's an exercise in accepting that some things are unknowable and a challenge to you to find enjoyment in the story despite that.
Maybe you fail at that challenge. That's ok. Some people demand their art be unlike life, in that everything is always fully explained. But some people enjoy the construction, the ride, and the occasional recollection and reconsideration as time goes on. Ambiguous art is for for them.
But it's not a choose your own adventure story for anyone.
It depends on the film. Without getting into a long rambling film analysis, there are certainly films (Inception is probably one), for example, in which the ending really is ambiguous and those assert otherwise are probably looking a little too deeply into discerning patterns in the tea leaves. There are others (probably including Total Recall) where there is a logical argument to be made as to why the film actually ended in a particular way.
I love being made to think during a movie. I despise the movie ending without an ending.
It's incredibly easy to set up a scenario that could have multiple endings, but it's hard to see what the ending actually is before it happens.
It's a lot more entertaining and satisfying to view that scenario to the end and then have the tale end in a satisfying way.
Any idiot can come up with an ending to those tales. (And they do, because you'll find them posted on the internet afterwards, even if the movie already has one!) Only good writers can come up with good endings.
Sometimes I enjoy not being satisfied. On a few occasions, I've even not watched or read the end of a work, just to keep the possibilities open in my mind. Stories with big open questions have the ability to stick with me longer. Sometimes I like that.
Ambiguity, the planting of multiple possible interpretations, has been a part of art forever. All art: literature, painting, etc. I would even say it’s an integral part of the best art.
Yes, but not ambiguity about the basic facts of a story. That's a modern thing as far as I know. It's also a risky artistic move because it thwarts one of the main satisfactions in a story, the resolution of tension. If you're going to take that away, you'd better 'give' something that's equally satisfying, or else the reader/viewer will feel cheated.
> but not ambiguity about the basic facts of a story.
Really?? The "unreliably narrator" is a classic literary device that introduces ambiguity about the basic facts of many well loved stories. See "Wuthering Heights" as an almost 200 year old example, or "The Handmaid's Tale" as an extreme example of factual ambiguity from about 40 years ago.
Unreliable narrator is something different. How do you know the narrator is unreliable in the first place? Because the story includes enough information to contradict them. The narrator is unreliable, but the author is not—you're relying on the author to subtly inform you that the narrator can't be trusted. That's a device which goes back much earlier, at least to the romantics. What we're talking about here is different. "Unreliable author" might be a good name for it though.
I think this has become a modern trend especially in long-form art (television, book series), where it's been noticed that mystery plots are a good way of attracting and maintaining an audience with much less effort than crafting a satisfying narrative takes. That's how we get things like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, or the Game of Thrones TV show (perhaps the ASOIAF books as well, but time will tell), as two prime examples of captivating the audience without a clear plan.
This may not be a counterexample, because they are probably classified as modern, but people carry on disputes about the basic elements of the plots of Nabokov’s novels. There is no general agreement about the actual plot of Transparent Things, and a lot of argument over what really happened in Lolita. In many of his works, such as Pale Fire and Bend Sinister, you have to think a lot just to apprehend what the plot was, and when you get it, it is as if the author has emerged at the end to consume the story from the beginning, in a glorious spiral of invention. The ambiguity itself is the main element of the plot.
Pardon my EDIT: The Prisoner, from 1967-8, was when ambiguity came to American TV, and with it Art (although there were precursors). To this day people argue about the plot of that one. People were so distressed at what they perceived, at the time, to be a lack of resolution (or their inability to deal with metaphor) that McGoohan had to go into hiding for a while. Really, the problem is that most people just don’t pay attention.
Nabokov was most certainly modern and veering into postmodern at the end.
I was totally thinking about The Prisoner as an example when this came up today! It's clear that McGoohan had gotten bored with neatly constructed thrillers, and wanted to create an allegory and explore deeper themes. The great thing about that show is that every individual episode was a neatly constructed thriller in its own right, even though it always ended back at ambiguous-square-zero (why is he in the village? will he escape or won't he?).
At the same time, it's pretty clear that he had no idea how to actually end the thing, and he told Lew Grade that shortly before they filmed the ending. I think the fiasco of the unsatisfying ending was only partly that people wanted an explanation which McGoohan didn't want to give them because it wasn't the point of the series. It's also that he kind of winged the ending and it just wasn't that good, compared to the high level of the previous episodes. So in a way it did fail the audience, even if at the same time the audience was failing to 'get' the art.
I was so into art film in college because of the cheap weird art film video store down the street.
Having digested so much and having 30 years to think about, I just don't think the medium lends itself to art well. The medium lends itself to cohesive pedestrian narratives. Going beyond that mostly just ends up with bad art and nonsense.
Big Sleep has nothing on Warhol's Sleep. I mean I actually rented Warhol's Sleep before...
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.
(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.
This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something.
"You decide how it ended"
"You decide if she lived or died"
"Their motivations for doing that are up to you"
"It means whatever you want it to mean"
It's an excuse for lazy writing and for being too cowardly to make decisions.