Intent vs Reading
Back when David Fincher’s Gone Girl came out, it landed right at the center of a brewing storm of social movements for gender equality, making it the ideal target for controversy. The film tells the story of Amy Dunne, a wealthy psychopath who stages her own disappearance to frame her cheating husband for her murder. However, that’s only scratching the surface, and as its plot advances we enter a downward spiral of false allegations, domestic violence, emotional blackmail and death. Many lauded it as a new feminist milestone, while others saw it as a ludicrous way to channel the worst sentiments of men’s rights advocates into a single work of fiction. Author Gillian Flynn, having endured a similar fallout with the release of her original novel, came out in defense of her work for a second time by saying that her idea of feminism includes the ability to write ill-natured women. Nevertheless, the debate went on.
Whatever you may think of Gone Girl—and full disclosure here, I think it’s great—, it became a good example of the clash between storyteller intentions and audience interpretation that happens sometimes. This can be due to external factors that are out of the filmmakers’ control, or it can be more of a creative slip on their end. A myriad of things can influence an individual’s perception of a movie, and to be fair, an essential part of every story always exists within whoever is experiencing it. At times, it can be more important to be able to feel that a film is trying to say something than knowing what that something is exactly. There are those who argue that’s up to each spectator to say. However, no one wants their portrayal of high society during the French Revolution to be seen as a commentary on, say, the perils of salmon fishing in the Atlantic. Let alone have a sector of people coming up with toxic messages that are the direct opposite of what the creators stand for, as it happened with Gone Girl. And here is where things can get complicated.
During a pre-production meeting, I once found myself asking a director what the intent of the movie we were making was. I was worried that the story was getting muddy, and I wasn’t sure if audiences were going to be able to make anything out of it. In hindsight, no one in that room could have answered my question. We were at a point where the script was still being developed as we spoke, and much of the story department’s job was to explore the many directions in which the project could go. Still, I did get an answer, and this was that audiences were free to interpret whatever they wanted in the movie. That’s a valid position. It certainly can help ideas grow unconstrained. Don’t hold your audience’s hand, let them navigate the story at will, see where it takes them. But it does come with its own series of setbacks.
More often than not, people’s readings of fiction are harmless. They tend to be reflections of their own life experiences, or a response to the prevailing social mood at a given time. At their most inconsequential, they are just individual views that make the story more enjoyable for each person, without any further ramifications. The TV series Lost took great advantage of this, using the amplifying power of the internet to bolster a global exchange of audience’s takes on the show’s bewildering storylines, in what eventually became one giant brainstorming session to figure out where everything was going. The showrunners actively encouraged this, and enjoyed a resulting cat-and-mouse game where writers tried to stay one step ahead of their fans as the conversation developed. This discussion revolved mostly around plot mechanics, and it later normalized a type of twist-obsessed meta-narrative with its own set of problems, but it did a good job at showing how people can anticipate details, fill in gaps and enrich stories entirely by themselves.
At a more metaphorical level, The Matrix recently graduated from late 90s cyberpunk classic to a fully modernized take on the sense of identity thanks to an updated reading of its story as a transgender allegory. This was an angle that had already been felt in the trans community for years, only to be eventually confirmed by the franchise directors as one of the original ideas driving the project in its inception. Needless to say, the Wachowskis are transgender themselves, so it’s no surprise that a story about characters inhabiting a fake reality who are later reborn as their true-self was inspired by their own internal journey. This endowed the Matrix films with an aura of honesty that elevated them beyond the spectacle of gravity-defying kung fu fights and slow-mo shootouts, a notion that was first picked up by those who most closely related to their implicit message. But what happens when a positive intent translates all wrong?
In the days leading up to its release, Kathryn Bigelow’s espionage thriller Zero Dark Thirty got mired in a tricky political debate regarding its depiction of torture. The film recounts the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden, from the earliest days of the war in Afghanistan to his execution during his home raid in Pakistan. Even though that last bit alone could have been a point of contention, American senators were more worried about the role that torture seemingly played in the story as a successful means to extract information by CIA agents. They claimed the movie gave the idea that bin Laden was located thanks to this, and therefore it promoted torture as a valid interrogation method. In reality, Zero Dark Thirty can be interpreted the opposite way, since its narrative happens to be divided between two periods: a long and unproductive initial stage during which torture is used to no effect, and second, more fruitful interval without torture that eventually does lead the characters to bin Laden.
The producers of Zero Dark Thirty could have pointed to that in order to distance themselves from the claims against their movie. They could have also reminded everyone that the film does finish with its protagonist crying alone, wondering whether everything she had pushed through had been worth it. In the end, a statement was issued in which Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal clarified that no scene taken in isolation could capture the whole story of the movie. This is a common stance when it comes to releases with strong political ramifications, although it also responds to the need to let the films speak for themselves. Suggesting that a story does not position itself one way or another over its subject, however, is something else entirely. And unfortunately, it happens much more frequently than it should.
While promoting his war film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, director Michael Bay claimed that there was “no political agenda” behind it. In his mind, the experience was more about the intricacies of what went down during an botched rescue operation, without taking sides. The movie depicts the 2012 Benghazi attack on two US government facilities in Libya, a real event, and features characterizations of real people involved in it. Considering the attack cost several lives, including that of the US Ambassador to Libya at the time, and that it was the focus of increased media attention because of persistent accusations of wrongdoing against the Obama administration, 13 Hours was pretty much guaranteed to turn into a hotbed for criticism. Many saw it as a barely concealed attempt to discredit Democrats in an election year. Bay insisted otherwise. The thing is, even if he genuinely believed his movie merely shone some light onto the practical details of a bunch of soldiers doing their job, setting morals aside, that’s just not not going to cut it for most. War stories have an implicit ideology that becomes apparent in their content, and they are one of the most common cases of complex messaging in art.
There’s a saying that all war films are pro-war. No matter the intention, setting or context, in the end their stories tend to glorify combat and promote a problematic set of values that put some ethereal sense of patriotic duty over the price of human life. Even at their most earnest and grisly, such as Saving Private Ryan, a common takeaway often is that good men found themselves stuck in a terrible situation where the best they could do was watch over their brothers in arms. The films can pay homage to the soldiers’ sacrifice and even frame their stories within a tragic context that reveals some of them as victims, but even doing so, they still run the risk of doubling as a recruiting pamphlet to the unassuming eye. If the filmmakers don’t wish to hit people with this idea, it can be a challenge. And not even setting your story in World War II with Nazis as the embodiment of evil will make traversing those waters any easier. This makes war stories one of the toughest genres to tackle, and definitely one where creators need to be fully aware of where they stand.
Back in 1995, no one could have accused writer Randall Wallace of not knowing where he stood during the making of Braveheart. Originally celebrated as a triumph of epic filmmaking that managed to beat Apollo 13, Babe and Sense and Sensibility at the Academy Awards for Best Picture, it seems like today people remember it more as some sort of clumsy misrepresentation of history. In a way, it’s understandable. Just to name a few inconsistencies, Scottish highlanders did not start wearing kilts until three centuries after the events of the movie, they stopped covering their faces in war paint about one thousand years earlier, William Wallace could not have seduced Princess Isabella of France because she was three years old at the time of their purported affair, and the Battle of Stirling Bridge took place on, well, a bridge. And yet, all of it was deliberate.
While an argument can definitely be made against Braveheart as historical fiction, perhaps the problem always laid in the use of the word historical per se. As it turns out, its filmmakers never really intended for the movie to be a faithful representation of history, opting instead to draw inspiration from the fictionalized 15th century poem “The Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace, Knight of Elderslie” by Blind Harry. When looked at from that point of view, Braveheart pretty much works as is, since it emotionally succeeds in every bit of story where it factually fails. It even hints at this purpose in a scene where Mel Gibson’s Wallace jokes about the tall tales men make up of him, and again during a montage that shows his legend spreading through Scotland. Although a historical figure, William Wallace fits the larger-than-life profile of romantic heroes, and it’s no wonder that an idealized retelling of his feats went on to inform films like Gladiator and The Lord of the Rings. In the end, Braveheart is more the expression of a sentiment than a biopic. But perhaps the grounded realism of its battles and cinematic depth of its Scottish vistas made all this harder to come across.
Although not a movie, maybe the most infamous case of an original vision turned completely upside down would be Pepe the Frog. Created by artist Matt Furie in 2005 as part of a comic called Boy’s Club, the character first jumped into social networking forums as an internet meme, and eventually was appropriated by the far-right movement as a symbol. Today, it’s largely seen as the unofficial mascot of right-wing extremism and white supremacy, much to Furie’s dismay. The recent documentary feature Feels Good Man chronicled his efforts to reclaim control over his creation, but as the film painfully points out, the minute something goes viral in the online jungle, it’s nearly impossible to reverse.
Pepe is an artist’s worst nightmare turned true. And even though it wasn’t exactly misinterpreted—more like removed from its context and rebranded instead—, it comes to show how easily creative works can take a life of their own once out in the world. On the positive side, most full-length narratives tend to find their right audience by simply being fairly transparent in their meaning. No one would mistake Dirty Harry for a petition to limit the use of police force, or take Life is Beautiful for anything but a heartfelt celebration of a parent’s love through the eyes of his young child. But how much responsibility do creators bear over those stories that go on to inspire unintended detrimental responses from their audience? How much are audiences to blame for those responses? Is there even a way to measure and control any of that? These are mostly rhetorical questions. Art is often cryptic by nature, and to take that quality away from it is to diminish its ability to engage with people. Some works may just be looking to touch them. Or maybe inform them. At the bare minimum, a debate may arise. And as long as there is a conversation, everything might have been worth it.
• Header art by Krysztof Domaradzki
