The Curtains Are Not Just Blue
In my first year of university, I took Introduction to Cinema Studies as an elective. I was cynical about everything the professor said, constantly thinking “there’s no way the director meant for that to be your interpretation.” One day, he analyzed a scene from All That Heaven Allows, pointing out that a character’s suit was black and white, and that the couch in the background was black and white too. He said that the film was saying this character was like a couch: plain and boring. I remember exhaustedly groaning in my seat. What a load of crap!
But this sort of analysis has stuck with me over the years. I’ve seen myself do this type of thing, disregarding whatever we might assume the director wanted to do or intended to be interpreted. At the end of the day, we can never really know what the author meant for sure. We can only know what we take from the text. So, if this is true, why not just go all out?
I’ve sometimes chosen to interpret a film as the opposite of what a director explicitly intended because that made me enjoy the movie more. For example, the film Underground by Emir Kusturica is an indictment of communism in Yugoslavia. Its characters are sleazy opportunists and they are as money-grubbing as any capitalist could be. The director has gone on record to say that if he were Russian, he’d vote for Putin. The film itself inadvertently shows us how money and greed are the principal corruptors of people. The communists exploit one another in the pursuit of wealth. To me, this is not an anti-communist statement, but one against Capital.
This is a particularly interesting phenomenon in the trans community. I have read very convincing analyses from trans people about how Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is about transness, or about how David Cronenberg's films are consistently about body dysmorphia. Marxists do this with children’s films too, claiming the Disney Channel movie Sky High is fascist propaganda and the Barbie movies are queer. Slavoj Zizek, a famous contemporary Marxist, names The Fountainhead as one of his five favorite films, saying it’s such ridiculous ultra-capitalist propaganda that he cannot help loving it. These might seem like ridiculous examples, but they are well-formulated, and they prove a point.
The author, director, painter, sculptor, or musician will not know about your interpretation. In most cases, you will not be able to confirm your interpretations are correct even if the author has written extensively on their own work. When it comes to analysis, we must not consider the author’s intent. I think it is valuable to consider the context in which the book was written, but this should not supersede the reader’s experience.
There’s an old viral meme about authors and teachers. The author writes, “The curtains were blue.” The teacher says, “This represents how the character is depressed.” The author meant: “The curtains were blue.” Think about this scenario. To me, this meme, which I’ve seen reposted a thousand times over, is actually a great argument for the death of the author. In this scenario, who has the more interesting interpretation? Who has put more thought and effort into the meaning of the text? It is the teacher, the reader, who has the most noteworthy experience.
Cover Photo by Nothing Ahead. Edited by Madison Case.
