Anyone doing MovieInterpretation or MovieAnalysis? is inevitably confronted with: “Well, I asked the author, and the author said that their work contains no messages or meanings.”
The author often says, “This is purely for entertainment.”
I always bring up the example of Mary Poppins.
In the movie “Mary Poppins,” Mary Poppins says:
Of course, in reality, she has been doing exactly just that.
What motivates this effect?
Hypothesis:
Ignorance may sound crazy, but then consider that school kids learn to construct more-or-less proper English, without understanding how they do it, and people understand the complex signing intrinsic in selecting clothing, without understanding how they do it. Communication of intent happens automatically. Thus ignorance is plausible.
This is clearly a denial for the purpose of being low-key: “I don’t want to talk about these criticisms about atheism in my books. It’s too long an argument to have, and there are too many layers to the subject.”
Combined with the “Anti-Message Ethic.”
This is clearly a focus on the low-key. “Subversion attempts might be foiled.”
The Wachowsky Brothers are clearly not bona fida partners in the anti-message ethic: They sincerely believe in making a difference, and communicating new understandings, new ways of thinking.
This takes the cake. “No! Wall-E doesn’t have a message! Honest! It’s just this piece of speculative fiction: What if humanity one day, by some bizarre unexplainable suddenness, should become like this?” Yes, what if! “It’s just a movie! It’s entertainment! You’re not supposed da think about it! No message!”
Absurd.
And yet, it works, at least a little bit, to defend against mad mobs.
Supposing movies DO have messages, … …what does society do with the messages it doesn’t like? Denying messages and signals in culture and society may be a strategy to deflect censorship.
My own take is that “what produces feeling” is what pulls at social tensions, and thus seeking feeling is a good way (Ignorance hypothesis) to get messages worthy of analysis.
Compare RepoMan?’s “SeekTheIntensity?.” (“An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repoman spends his life getting into tense situations.”)
Lots of juicy ideas in there.
See also:
A Conversation With Steven Gould and Laura J. Mixon – “So you’re both developing a more overt social consciousness in your writing?”
Some works genuinely exist for the sole purpose of entertainment. Where possible messaging, signing, or meaning is found, it may be intentionally removed.
Even then, we can usually read out basic markers and indicators from the society: Humor patterns, invocations of historic events, dress semiotics, attitudes in relating, and so on …
It is my sincere and deep belief (I would say acceptance and observation,) that what Mark Jones (interpreting Buddhism) calls “CoArising” (the complete and total- whether we recognize it or not- co-arising of conscious thought and feeling,) is definitely at work in “Artistic Arrest.”
That is, while Artistic Arrest may not be political, it certainly always involves the cognitive. This is my assertion, though I know many will recoil to hear it.
Elucidating on this will be a task for another day; I need to go soon.