Episode 261: Death of the Author

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] In Bavaria we have a saying, Der Junge ist ja total bedient. It means, this is the most depressing f***ing kid I've ever met in my life. The Greatest Boss has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Who are you? I'm a very good man.

[00:00:52] Good? They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. May anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:21] Dave, we wanted a Celtics-Lakers finals. It would have been good. It would have been awesome. It would have been good for content too. But as of recording, we've played a total of seven games in the conference finals, and the Celtics and Lakers are a combined 0-7.

[00:01:36] What the hell? The question is what the hell. What the hell. You know, there's something that's very weird about sports, which is you can ride the ups and downs of your team, and that makes sense. Like you're like happy when they win and sad when they lose.

[00:01:55] But every once in a while you get just pure embarrassment. Like if it was your kid who did something really stupid. And that's how I feel about my team. Which is funny because I feel like they were just overmatched and there's nothing to be

[00:02:12] embarrassed about except that they didn't build quite a good enough team to beat Denver. But with us, that's the fucking... Oh my God. This is how powerful the Celtics' poor performance is. I'm a Laker fan, so traditionally a Celtic hater.

[00:02:29] And because of my relationship with you, I'm embarrassed. It's like two steps away and I still have embarrassment. It's been tough. And you know, like you say with some teams you ride the ups and downs.

[00:02:42] There's also some teams you just find them really frustrating to watch win or lose almost. Right. Even though they're very talented. And we like... I like them all individually a lot, you know? Right. Al Horford is just the salt of the earth.

[00:03:01] He's salt of the earth and can't hit a fucking three-pointer to save his life. For really the last two playoff series. You know, there is a point at which it becomes less fun when a win is accompanied by relief rather than joy. Yes. And that's...

[00:03:20] That is definitely where we're at. Although now we don't even get to the events. Yeah, now there's not even relief. There was part of me that was like, okay, just out of pride I want to win one.

[00:03:29] But don't you kind of just want to get it over with? Isn't there part of you that's just like, just lose. It'd just be painful to keep going. There are, yeah. There is definitely a part of me that's like that.

[00:03:41] But then even more embarrassing, there's the part of me that thinks, well, you know, they win tonight and then we go back to Boston where we actually have a losing record in the playoffs. But whatever. And let's say we win that.

[00:03:54] Now the pressure is on Miami for game six. And then like game seven is back in Boston. Anything can happen. So like I have and part of that is the Red Sox doing this to the Yankees for a team to come back from 0-3. And all of Americans.

[00:04:07] And I can't help still being slightly drawn to that possibility. I, like you, my friend, was feeling those embarrassing feelings last night as well until the very end.

[00:04:20] And then my mind starts doing like, for those who don't know about sports or are not American or whatever, this is best of seven. And it is just a fact that no team has ever come down from being down three games in basketball. In the playoffs.

[00:04:37] In the playoffs. Yeah. And in my head I'm like, okay, but if we win one, we're down 3-1. And people have come back from that. Exactly. So what are we talking about today? I was going to say this is not a sports podcast.

[00:04:54] In spite of the expert analysis we've been giving. Today we're talking about, I don't know how to even define the topic, but authorial intent. Like how much does the intention of an author or a group of artistic creators matter when you're interpreting a work of art?

[00:05:12] It's a topic that we've touched on a bunch of times, but never directly addressed. Definitely a topic where probably people would have bet a lot of money it was my idea to do this. And it's actually, you've been driving this. But I think it's really interesting.

[00:05:29] I think we talk a lot and I think we go into interpretations of films and there are certain assumptions that kind of guide how we do it. But we've never really fully examined them. Yeah.

[00:05:41] We've alluded to them, we've talked about it, but this will be a way to do that in more depth. But first. But first. So apparently I did not, did you know about this club? I swear I did not until you put it in the Slack.

[00:06:01] Yeah, I tweeted this out that the cringiest woke thing isn't cringier than this club for the cancelled. It's a New Yorker profile of this club. I'll just read the opening paragraph.

[00:06:14] Every month more than 200 people from the media, academia and other intellectual circles are invited to a private hangout in New York City which is known as the Gathering of Thought Criminals. That's like in capital letters. The Gathering of Thought Criminals. There are two rules. There are two rules.

[00:06:37] The first is that you have to be willing to break bread with people who have been socially ostracized or as the attendees would say quote unquote cancelled. Whether they've lost a job, lost friends or simply feel persecuted for holding unpopular opinions.

[00:06:53] Some people on the guest list are notorious, elite professors who have deviated from campus consensus or have broken university rules. And journalists who have made a name for themselves amid a public backlash or who have weathered it quietly. Others are relative nobodies.

[00:07:09] People who for one reason or another have become exasperated with what they see as rampant censorious thinking in our culture. So that's the first rule. The second rule of the Gatherings is that Pamela has to like you. Or as I think you put it.

[00:07:26] You have to be jumped in to the gang. And by jumped here I mean you have to have sex. Third rule of Thought Criminal Club is you have to talk about Thought Criminal Club. And you have to complain about rampant censorious thinking.

[00:07:41] By the way, your replies were pretty cringy on that tweet. There were people who were like defending this as not cringe I saw. I don't know. Like I don't know if we covered this with the interview. I don't know.

[00:07:55] Like I don't know if we covered this with cringe in our cringe conceptual analysis. But sometimes it's just you know it when you see it. Yeah. The gathering of thought criminals is just so self-important that look, you know, I'm not I'm not an East Coast elite.

[00:08:12] So I don't read the New Yorker. But it's the way it's written up is just like extra. So this Pamela Peresky, she organizes it. She's named it. And this piece is in some way I don't know. It's almost like a debutante ball. Pince Nera.

[00:08:33] Like this is her coming out to the world. And I just read one of the paragraphs here. One of the attendees brought homemade peach habaneros hot sauce for everyone and Peresky ordered a round of chicken tenders.

[00:08:45] She seemed to be in her element as people introduce themselves to me. She frequently interjected wine in hand eyeglasses perched on her silver brown hair. She's weirdly hot. Siskin had observed to me earlier. She's like the intellectual dark web's most eligible bachelorette.

[00:09:04] Peresky does not approve of this description, although she is single. She is single. She's adamant the thought criminal gatherings are purely social and not part of the IDW. Of which her stepmother is a member. Are we sure there's a distinction? The intellectual dark web would never admit 200 people.

[00:09:25] Well, they invite 200 people at the journalist Emma Green who wrote about it. Only a dozen people showed up. Right, because they heard it was being written about. I like how the people I saw were mostly white.

[00:09:42] Peresky says she doesn't really pay attention to the racial breakdown of the gatherings. Was that tongue in cheek? I literally couldn't figure out whether the author of this was doing thinly veiled criticism.

[00:09:57] I know. This is where we need an esoteric, yeah, we need to know the intentions of the author. Exactly. Because the point isn't just to mock this, we're going to actually submit our formal applications. But before we do, being described as weirdly hot seems insulting.

[00:10:20] What is the weird part? Is it weird because you wouldn't expect that she's hot? Or is it weird because her features when you look at them don't seem hot, but somehow the holistic take on it is? If I had to guess the meaning, it's that she's 56.

[00:10:42] You're like Don Lemon got fired for saying something like that. Well, this is going to be part of our application to the Thought Criminal Club. Alright, so that was the idea. The idea is that you and I were going to submit our formal application.

[00:10:58] Is there anything else about the article itself that you wanted to note before we get into our application? My really biggest question was, is this criticism of this? Because it seemed weird that The New Yorker was profiling it.

[00:11:15] I guess the quote unquote diversity of the members here by diversity, I mean, the reason they're invited, which ranges from somebody's kid lost in a swim meet to a trans athlete. How does she find these people?

[00:11:34] Kim Jones, whose daughter is a Yale swimmer who lost to the transgender athlete Leah Thomas in competition last year. Yeah, and she apparently is fairly adamant about this. And there's a guy who might be a rapist.

[00:11:48] To be fair, the guy that they're talking about who may or may not be a sexual criminal. There's apparently no solid evidence either way. But it is funny that the very last paragraph is Pesky, the organizer, clearly being a bit sensitive about this topic.

[00:12:07] So it says, a few days after the Olive Tree evening, Pesky texted me, quote, No one who comes to our gatherings is an actual criminal, she said. But don't even criminals deserve to be loved by someone?

[00:12:21] I read that last sentence, but I don't think I made it this far. This was part of his argument against the rape accusation. He doesn't he says he doesn't have penetrative sex with women. Yeah. Is that like solid? This is Walcott stuff, maybe. Mr. W. Mr. W.

[00:12:42] Deadwood reference for those who don't know. It gets dark. Yeah, I know. It really does. That's why I wasn't sure. Like, by the time you're at the end, I'm like, so wait, is this?

[00:12:55] This is who I imagine everybody is, is this guy who said like some actor and comedian who says he's had a hard time getting a talent manager because he's a white man. And instead has sought out alternative media ecosystems.

[00:13:10] He recently acted in a movie called Terror on the Prairie, a Western about a pioneer family that gets attacked by outlaws, co-produced by the conservative company The Daily Wire.

[00:13:20] This is these people are just mad they didn't get parts or they didn't get a deal or they didn't get, you know, the green light to do some project. And so I have to go to The Daily Wire now because I'm a white man.

[00:13:35] Right. And like, what are the alternative media outlets for his comedy? All right. So we have mocked this sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. How do we get in? Yeah. So the thought here was, I'm sure that we qualify somehow.

[00:13:57] And so let's let's put our heads together and come up with some reasons, some justified reasons to get an invitation to get the good housekeeping seal of approval from Pamela Peresky. Well, number one, I think just because it's fresh in my mind.

[00:14:17] Our last iTunes or Apple podcast review is one star misogynist all caps. In all caps. Yeah. Which I take it was referring to you. So that should be. I don't think so. I don't think so. In fact, quite the opposite.

[00:14:35] But, you know, I'll embrace it for the purposes of getting to invite to the Thought Criminals Club. It's elite. It's elite. I don't know where this will get me in, but I still think that Kanye West is one of the best producers ever.

[00:14:54] And he's right about the Jews. No, I don't think that actually will work. Okay, then I have a real one. You're not allowed to say anything bad about Israel. Here's one. This is foreshadowing. This is a little foreshadow. This is a very bad wizard's prophecy.

[00:15:18] I don't think diversity statements really help that much for diversity. That is wow. Like you're probably already getting a text right now. I feel like there are a ton of people who are just using chat GPT exclusively to write their diversity statements when they apply for jobs.

[00:15:43] I think if you totaled up the people in the United States and Canada who think that diversity statements do. Like that they're like a solution. Effective way of addressing diversity issues. It would be like less than a hundred.

[00:16:00] You'd have to be like, this is a secret ballot. Nobody can ever know. It's in that category of thing like land acknowledgements where nobody really goes to bat for it. Nobody really feels like it's worth making a big fuss against it either.

[00:16:21] But unlike some of these things with those two it's like I don't know. I have I know a lot of people who would otherwise believe things like that. Even they think the diversity statements are kind of bullshit.

[00:16:35] Yeah it's true. It's sort of just like, well what can it hurt? What's the I guess maybe it makes people think about it for a second when they type it into chat GPT.

[00:16:43] But actually not thinking it's effective versus being willing to just say that could get you to the pot criminals. I feel like I have something and I don't mean to exclude you but I am the stepson of Christina Hoffs.

[00:16:58] I didn't ask her. I meant to ask her before this like she might have gone to one of these things. This is a really good pick on your part because it really exonerates you from anything. You don't have to like you're not laying it out there.

[00:17:13] You're not saying anything controversial. You're just appealing to your familial relation. That's how it works. In the old days like you just had to be the son or daughter of somebody and that was all you needed.

[00:17:27] Now you need you know you need to be like Thai, Filipino and trans to just get an acting job. You want legacy admissions for the for the criminal. For the dinner club. Yeah. So beat that. Oh man. That one's a hard one to beat.

[00:17:49] I have some that I don't know if they're controversial enough but but I feel like maybe in some circles this is controversial. I believe that online petitions don't matter at all. That's not something that gets you canceled.

[00:18:06] No but this is a we're trying to build a well rounded application. So I feel like stuffing stuffing my CV. That's padding your CV. Exactly padding. That's the word. I feel like you're this is a little too anodyne to get you in.

[00:18:23] Says the guy who said oh my mom's off summer. Let's have some skin. You know you're going to have like I. You're right. It's not fair. But it's better than that. Get some skin. OK.

[00:18:38] I can't be like I don't like QR codes on menus like and they'll be like well he's Christina off summer is a kid. So I'm not sure if I'm going to get into that.

[00:18:49] I did everything I said and put I am a co-host of a podcast with a guy who's stepmom. And you've had or you could even just say I've given it on my podcast. Oh yeah. But I've given a talk at a I too. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's that.

[00:19:08] You might get in over me with that. I've never given a talk at a. What else do you know somebody who really wants to be a part of the conversation. I've never given a talk at a.

[00:19:17] What else you know somebody who really we know and like somebody who really does want to get invited to this. So maybe that can help us because actually like I would blow my brains out before going to one of these things.

[00:19:30] This is exactly the kind of thing that I can't stomach at all. I wouldn't blow my brains out. It's not the I can't I mean I'm no fan. It's not the idea of the club that makes me want to never go to this.

[00:19:41] It's the thought of who I would be talking to like the comedian who says that he can't get a job because he's white. That just seems boring. Yeah. And it's whiny. The whole thing is just whining.

[00:19:55] Just to say like they've become exasperated with the rampant censorious thinking like just shut the fuck up. Nobody's. The irony of you telling them to shut the fuck up while saying that nobody's censoring. I mean it's true.

[00:20:09] And there is a certain irony in getting really annoyed at them in the same way they get annoyed at overly woke people. Yes. I get it. There's accusations levels there's levels and levels of accusation. Yeah. OK. I have a serious question.

[00:20:28] If you like had a club like this and somebody said hey I'm a reporter from The New Yorker like I'd like to write you up like would you say yes.

[00:20:36] Yes. Because presumably I would be proud of what I was doing and think it was cool even if it's not right like I would think it was right.

[00:20:45] So yeah like if you know like the New York Times said hey we you know we've heard about your podcast that's kind of blowing up shouldn't you guys say you want to get mind if we do a profile of you and then they do a profile and it's really cringy.

[00:21:01] That's you know like these two older academics. Yeah. I see you trying to say why it's OK you can call me white adjacent. That's that's the label that I'm going to. Yeah. It's like we would still think it was cool.

[00:21:15] You know that's true. And maybe at the receipt of the first draft we would nervously text to the authors to try to make it less cringy.

[00:21:22] I do feel like I have people in my life who if it was really embarrassing would tell me and I'm not sure if Pamela Peresky has that. No. Yeah. She's weirdly hot. All right. Have you exhausted your reasons?

[00:21:43] I've said this before but I think it's funny when Trump calls Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas. I thought that I thought that one about you that you could claim that you think Trump is funny. Like almost to the point where maybe it would be. Don't say it. There we go.

[00:22:03] Hold on I'm getting a call right now. Chelsea New York City. All right let's come back to discuss the meaning of texts. Today's episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Let me ask you a question.

[00:22:21] How much time do you spend on yourself in a given week and how much time do you spend on other people and how do you balance those two things. It's easy to get caught up in what everyone else needs.

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[00:22:45] Right. Here's the thing though when we spend all of our time giving it can leave us feeling a little bit empty. Feeling stretched way too thin and burnt out. Arguably I think this is what in the Murakami story is happening in part with the protagonist.

[00:23:02] Therapy can give you the tools to find more balance in your life so you can keep supporting others without leaving yourself behind. Therapy has helped so many people that I know learn positive coping skills how to set boundaries. Therapy empowers people to be the best version of themselves.

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[00:23:38] Find more balance with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash VBW to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H-E-L-P dot com slash VBW. Thanks to BetterHelp as always for sponsoring this episode. Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:24:57] This is the time of the show where we love to express our gratitude not to the Boston Celtics who recording this unlike the opening segment right after game seven.

[00:25:10] Just a disgraceful performance to not show up to have a chance to come back from 3-0 and then not show up at all. Just lay a big giant rotten stinky egg.

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[00:28:24] And then we also release the audio form to everybody at the bonus level. So those have been a lot of fun. We really enjoy those questions. Although on the last one, someone almost broke up the podcast. That's all I'm going to say. Thank you so much everybody.

[00:28:39] It's because of you and not because of the Celtics that I feel happy and in a good mood. Well, that would be a stretch. In a somewhat good mood today. Thanks everybody. Now let's get back to the episode. Okay, so let's move on to our main topic.

[00:28:57] As Tamler, you said at the beginning on this podcast, pretty much from the beginning we've talked about movies and we've moved on to short stories and books. And in many of those discussions we've found ourselves talking about in a sort of meta sense,

[00:29:10] whether or not the way we're analyzing the work of art was correct and what it would mean that it's correct. And I think most of the time we've both endorsed the notion that there's no easy answer.

[00:29:25] Especially when it comes to the question of the intentions of the author or the director, whatever the writer is. So what a director or an author says the meaning is, would be just one interpretation among many.

[00:29:36] And I think one of the most salient versions of this that I remember in recent episodes was when we discussed Kubrick's 2001 and we got some responses from people saying, like, just read the book, right? Like that you would have the whole answer right there.

[00:29:52] So at least for me, I've always wanted to try to have a discussion that focused centrally on this specific question, like how much of interpretation in art boils down to knowing the intentions of the artist.

[00:30:08] And it turns out that there's just actually a lot, a lot of scholarship on the topic. And it's something that we're probably just going to barely touch the surface of. But it was set off for me really by thinking about, of all things,

[00:30:23] a video essay by a YouTuber named Thomas Flight who has an essay that we'll link to about his interpretation of Scorsese's film, The Irishman, and a particular shot in that film that he believed was a direct reference to Goodfellas. And then it turns out Scorsese denies it.

[00:30:42] So that's kind of what got me to want to think about it. I shared it with you. And so we read a few articles that we'll talk about, but I wanted to lay just the broadest of groundwork for the various views

[00:30:55] that people have expressed, like in the philosophy of aesthetics and in literary criticism. So as you might expect, there's one class of thinking that says, it's called intentionalism, that just says there is a one-to-one relationship between the meaning of a text

[00:31:10] and what the author intends that meaning to be. So it's like settling a bet. You want to know what the meaning of this was? Like just ask the person who wrote it, the person who directed it, or whatever.

[00:31:20] And then on the other side, you have like a class of views that could be referred to as anti-intentionalism. And this is, the most extreme of these is the view that actually the intentions of the artist matter not at all.

[00:31:36] That there's varieties of this, but one view is that once the artwork is produced, it's out in the world and it belongs to everybody, and there is no reason to deny it. There is no reason to appeal to the intentions of the author.

[00:31:50] This is sometimes referred to as the death of the author, which is the name of an essay that we'll talk about. And so some people have referred to thinking that intentions matter or are central to analysis as the intentional fallacy. So this is from a philosopher, Beardsley,

[00:32:09] who wrote an article called Intentional Fallacy. He says, judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of the artifice, or a poem can be only through its meaning.

[00:32:22] Yet it is, it simply is, in a sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant. So just like a machine, it's just out there. Either it works or it doesn't, and a piece of art should be like that.

[00:32:35] And the thought is that the author really, some people have argued, making art so author-centric is a mistake. So those are the two extremes, and there's a bunch of middle ground. But maybe that's a good place to start to talk about this.

[00:32:51] Yeah, and I want to tie it maybe to some examples that might be familiar to listeners and to us. So one example I thought we could focus on is the Juilliard scene in Tar. And I think we all kind of came to the interpretation

[00:33:10] that that couldn't be taken literally at face value. This is clearly being filtered through kind of an older person's fears and anxieties about Gen Z and identity politics. And I really do think that's like, I don't find it credible to think,

[00:33:29] to just take it as a clumsy way of presenting, you know, a scene at Juilliard or something like that. But what if Todd Field came out and he was interviewed about that and asked about it, and he's like, no, I'm telling you, these kids these days, you know,

[00:33:45] and I was just trying to represent that. So essentially just laying bare that that's actually what, like, he did mean it to be taken at face value. On the one hand, you don't want to say that just settles the question. But on the other hand,

[00:33:59] I'm not tempted to say it's irrelevant either. And so I think this is where it becomes very complicated and it's hard to go full on in one camp or the other. Yeah, so there are these mild, like these more moderate forms of intentionalism that I gravitate to.

[00:34:19] But it is hard to flesh out some of these. But, you know, I'll give you, so there's a good quote from one of the articles that we read, which your example sort of gets to, which is like, why is this important? So the author says,

[00:34:34] conclusions about meanings are often relevant to judgments concerning the artist's achievement. Someone who tries to write a straightforward, unambiguous story, but ends up writing something that everyone reads as involving a complex rhetoric of unreliable narration may have written something fascinating to read,

[00:34:48] but this person's work should not be prized as the artistic achievement of devising an unreliable narration. We want an interpretive theory that is in tune to the difference between glorious serendipity and unfortunate failures, as well as the differences between the skillful realization of valuable and difficult aims

[00:35:06] and the routine realization of lowly or mediocre goals. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. Yeah, it made me think of things like The Room, right? Like the notoriously terrible movie, The Room, that has a cult following and that, what's his name, the director? Tommy Wiseau.

[00:35:26] Tommy Wiseau has, releasing it and having all of this attention, especially with the artist movie that was done about it, has tried to claim that all along he meant it as a form of parody. When that's a clear case where I'm like, no, you can't, like, no,

[00:35:44] the intention that you had when you did it actually matters to me. Like whether or not society has analyzed it as some sort of statement about whatever. You know, I had that in my notes too, I think because of the Noel Coward quote,

[00:35:59] Ed Wood would have been a better director if he said that his films were parodies or if he thought about, and I don't know, maybe that's true, but I don't know if the movies would be better or worse because of that. And same with The Room.

[00:36:15] Like, I think people who, it's not my thing, like I just, I did watch parts of it when the James Franco movie about it came out and I was just like, yeah, okay. Really incompetently performed with a lot of confidence and I get why people enjoy that,

[00:36:32] but it's not exactly for me. I don't, like, whether he meant it to be that way or not is kind of irrelevant, I feel like in terms of my aesthetic appreciation for it anyway. But I don't know. Do you disagree with that?

[00:36:49] I mean, that's such a clear cut case of incompetence. And I think the best example is the one that you gave about Tar, where if he had written this in a sort of heavy-handed, like kids these days way and we knew that, I wouldn't want to praise him

[00:37:07] for that subtleness that we ended up interpreting. Right, right. Yeah. And so maybe this gets to like a kind of fundamental question when, you know, having just done a quick dive into this literature, like, what is it about the meaning of the work?

[00:37:25] I feel like it's not totally clear what that is supposed to signify. Does that even make sense? Like, to talk about the meaning of a work? Because in talking about Tar or Wiseau, it's like you're not talking about the meaning of it exactly,

[00:37:44] but you wouldn't want to praise the director for doing something more subtle and nuanced because that seems to me different than the meaning of what he was trying to do. But that just, but not because I have a theory of what the meaning of a work is

[00:38:03] as much as, like, I'm not sure if that's what we're interested in, the meaning when we try to interpret texts. The way that we've been using the meaning is this broader interpretation of like the goals of the entire work of art. But not the goals,

[00:38:23] because the goals make it sound like there's an intender. Or like just the broad, like just let's say the very broad interpretation of the works. Like I just mean to contrast it with some clear instances where you can get into some of this debate about intentionalism or not.

[00:38:43] When you say, for instance, like the oranges in the Godfather symbolize death. That meaning, the direct symbolic value of an orange. You might say, well, does Coppola say that they symbolize death? And question settled. Or you could say, as some people have said, yes, intentions matter,

[00:39:09] but Coppola doesn't even quite know his intentions because you adopt some sort of Freudian view of what's going on. And so like Coppola might not be privy to his own intentions here. Or you might just say, no, he's just saying oranges because there were orange trees in the

[00:39:24] sets that he was filming. And it is our culture that has that has taken this to be a meaningful symbol. So so meaning in this very local sense, I think, makes this. So then the question is, does that word capture something about the interpretive

[00:39:45] process? So if you're talking about the oranges in the Godfather, he really didn't. You know, as far as he can tell, you give him sodium pentothal. He's like, no, I mean, he would have oranges. I always thought, you know, I like oranges.

[00:40:00] So I had I guess I wrote it that he picked up the oranges before he got shot. That's like, OK, does that mean that we can't we can no longer after all this time look at the oranges in that way? No, I don't think so.

[00:40:14] You know, because for one thing, like you said, who knows, maybe there is something that he's doing at a more archetypical kind of subconscious level. Number one. Number two, as they say in this Irishman video that you alluded to, maybe it was someone on the set that

[00:40:29] just decided to put oranges and their vision as part of the collaborative process of what that work of art is. And number three, it's and I think this is the big thing. And I think of all the kinds of theories that I skim through today.

[00:40:45] There's a reader response kind of account where it also matters how we within the culture compared to other works of art in that, like how that comes across also matters. All these things matter. I think the way where maybe some of these approaches go wrong

[00:41:03] is to try to exclude one of these categories of things from something called the all things considered meaning of the work. It just seems like it's all kind of relevant. How much it's relevant, how much you take it into account will depend on the on the particular

[00:41:23] work in question. But you wouldn't want a theory that just says, no, this is actually the meaning and all this other stuff is irrelevant. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's why I like I like you am attracted to this sort of moderate level of intentionalism

[00:41:38] like like Thomas Flight in that video essay says, if you wanted to say that the parasite, that parasite was a type of defense of capitalism, like I just think you're wrong. Right. Like there's no celebration of a celebration of capitalism. Then they just think you're wrong. But

[00:41:58] there why they're wrong is that's the question. Yeah. And so with like it's not just because he didn't mean it that way. Well, it's weird because because he didn't mean it that way. He didn't create a film in which that is obvious. Right. So some people have argued

[00:42:12] it's a silly debate because let's if the intentions are what create the meaning that of the work, then then all you need is the work because presumably the intentions are there. And to which people have said, well, what if he's an incompetent communicator of his intentions?

[00:42:30] Which leads me to this. I don't know if you saw this as I read a blog post where somebody argued that John Wu's movie Face Off is actually while John Wu meant it as a serious like like film. Yeah. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage's performance as like actually

[00:42:54] good actors made it into a completely different film. So when you kind of yeah. And two two artists who are two actors who are so good at camp as a style of acting made it into something that John Wu was doing. Made it into something that John

[00:43:11] Wu never meant it to be. Right. And this is why the case of film is actually like very interesting to me because this whole debate has usually focused on a singular author where you could just say, you know, what did Edgar Allen Poe?

[00:43:27] Did he really think that that this symbolized that? Like, do we have any letters that he wrote? And you could you might be tempted to look at that in a work of art like a movie. You have such a collection of intentions. You have the director, you

[00:43:44] have the actors, you have the cinematographers, you have the editors who actually like make these critical judgments that that might completely change the way that a work of art is interpreted. And I do think that our interpretation like not to get hung up on meaning, but just say

[00:44:01] whatever you interpret like even at a at a concrete level interpret what's going on. You can't help but try to figure out what the person was trying to say. Like it's almost just like a just a natural human response to try to figure out at first pass

[00:44:19] like, so why did it? Why did she do that? Right. Like I don't I'm not sure if I agree with you. Well, I'm not making a normative claim. I'm making like I'm saying like the psychology of human beings is such that when you're trying

[00:44:33] to interpret something, I feel like your gut is always going to be like, why? Like what did they mean? What's like? It's not like a piece of nature. Right. This is we know that somebody intended to create this work of art. So it seems like a very like

[00:44:46] gut level reaction to say, why did they create this piece of art? But I think it depends on the work, the type of work, what it is. I don't think we necessarily are desperate to do that about a poem or like a painting or

[00:45:03] you don't think we want to know immediately the intentions of a poet when he when they write a poem. When I'm interested, if I hear something that might put it in some kind of context. But my first instinct isn't to say like, what did they mean?

[00:45:18] What would they what were they trying to do? I don't know if this is that different, but I'm often trying to figure out, like, what is the work doing and why am I responding to it this way? But that doesn't automatically go to the intentions of the author.

[00:45:32] Sometimes it does. I feel like with Borges, I, you know, there are certain things where we want to know what he means. But there are certain other things like we're talking about Garden of Forking Paths and whether that's a fever dream or whether it's, you know,

[00:45:49] a recollection or a more literal telling of what's happening. I wasn't desperate. I don't feel like the first thing we were trying to figure out in our discussion is, well, what did Borges think? Did he think this was a fever dream or did he, you know, like it's

[00:46:03] like what is the work trying to tell us more than what is what did the author mean when he was doing it? Yeah. I mean, I I get what you're saying. I just think that that you're taking for granted that like you're going to that next step.

[00:46:15] But like what it means that somebody created a work is that they created it. And so we often move right past that step. Right. Where we say we'll often say, well, whether or not Borges himself intended this, like this means this

[00:46:29] to me or I think that this can be interpreted that. But all work has a creator. So I like just saying I'm interested in what the work says, I think is just semantically equivalent to saying what is the what is the author say? I disagree because I think

[00:46:50] and this gets to some of the criticisms of the intentionalists like there are certain there are certain parts of a work where I don't care like what personal reason the author had for for doing it. You know, you know, maybe it's something that happened in their

[00:47:03] childhood or something like that, that they're recreating and that's what led them to put that thing in. It's like, OK, maybe that's interesting. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. But it's not certainly not the central thing I'm trying to figure out. I mean, you're straw manning me like

[00:47:22] my only claim here at the very beginning was that it is a very natural thing to ask like oneself when presented with something, any artifact like what did the person who made it mean? Not that like you can't immediately move past that, but like

[00:47:34] that it is one of the questions that arises when you're watching is like you like it seems weird that you're pushing back on that. Well, we had to we have to rewind to the tape, but I thought you were making a stronger claim than just

[00:47:48] it's one of the things that you ask yourself in like in like when you see an animate thing like walking around, you immediately think what's it trying to do? Or when someone utters a statement like you're trying to figure out like what is the what is the

[00:48:06] person's intention in saying this thing? Like that's all I mean. Right. Where where it's just too hard to like we even impute intentionality on things that that like are created generated by computers. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm saying, it's just like we're very loose with this.

[00:48:23] I think that's why the anti intentionalist stance is the counterintuitive one for so many people. Like, I think it takes some work to remove yourself from from this view. Like I think that the person just starting out trying to figure out how to digest art is often asking,

[00:48:42] oh, what do they mean? Right. Okay. Yeah. They're often asking that, but I don't take it as determinative of meaning, if I can even make sense of that. And I think that sometimes it's going to be a lot more interesting than others. And sometimes it'll be a lot

[00:49:01] more. I don't know. It'll influence my own way of understanding the text. And other times it won't be completely irrelevant, but it won't be that's it might not be that significant either. That's all. I mean, maybe we don't disagree. Yeah. That's what I would conclude. Right. But so

[00:49:22] I take it that the strongest anti-intentionalist views that say once the author releases it into the world, it is just as valid. Like, for instance, like a strong reader response view. It's your personal history, like your cultural upbringing, your idiosyncratic desires and preferences

[00:49:46] when you interpret this, like if you think Starship Troopers is actually a patriotic take on something like, you know, you think this is like a real feel good patriotism movie. And the director says, no, this was satire. Right. You know, he doesn't. That's what's funny. He really does.

[00:50:07] He does not flat out. I love that's actually what makes it good. That's what makes it good. Like it is. That's why. So here's one way of saying what I was trying to say about this. The psychological primacy, like quote unquote, is that when an artist actually

[00:50:25] speaks out about their work of art, I feel like it fucks it up because so many people will naturally just like, oh, that's what it is that right. Like they'll feel like they've been like, like I was saying at the beginning, like it's bet settling.

[00:50:40] Yeah. And it will. I do think that part of the fun of appreciating art, talking about it, like a lot of the stuff that we've done on this podcast and I like to try to do more and more teaching is it's kind of a creative process to try

[00:50:55] to understand it and to come up with an interpretation and come up with fruitful ways of exploring it. And then, yeah, if a artist will come out and just say, no, that's stupid. Actually, what I meant was this. And it's very straightforward.

[00:51:09] Yeah. It kind of again, it's not that you can ignore it, but it does take away from the richness of the aesthetic experience. I think when that happens. And can I give an example? And I want to know what you think about this. So take Ecclesiastes

[00:51:28] text that we have discussed. And I also just wonder in general whether biblical texts and mythic texts are in their own category when it comes to something like this. But I don't think either of us is going to be able to understand it. And I think either of

[00:51:42] us as we're talking about that work are just like, what did they mean by this? As much as it's not that we don't want to know. But if there was some explanation about, well, you know, it's the king at this time trying to consolidate control over some region

[00:52:03] like that's not what we want. No, we would like we are looking at that text as a it has no author as a lot of these mythic texts like we don't know anything about how it was written or what happened.

[00:52:15] I don't know. Like, I feel like that's a good example of a kind of text where you just approach as text. And even though you could ask yourself stuff as biblical scholars do, they try to really come up with some historical fact that can account for

[00:52:31] some of these beautiful passages. But then I always find that to just be almost a distraction at that point from interpretation and appreciation of the... Right. So there's like analyses of the Book of Revelation and all it's like crazy cookie symbols

[00:52:47] that are like, actually this is really tied to the politics of the day. Like this was like a very local satire or not satire but a criticism of Rome at the time. And sure, that takes away from it. But I think that I'm not even saying that

[00:53:03] like I'm trying to make a much more basic claim, which is like for example to use Ecclesiastes when like at the end it says oh and the king said like you know, love God with all your heart and that's the point. Follow the laws. Yeah.

[00:53:19] He's always judging. I immediately said that's not what that person meant and that's the kind of meaning that I'm talking about. Like a literal like the person who wrote that was trying to communicate something that I think is deep and beautiful. And sure

[00:53:35] the text is like, I don't need to be thinking of the author while I'm reading it. But immediately when you get to that end I'm like well that's not what the author was trying to say. And that was probably tacked on. Yeah. Which is

[00:53:49] or at least that's one way of thinking about it. And yeah so and it matters, right? If you somehow we were to learn no no no that was always throughout the writing of it thought of to be the end. That's what the author was building towards.

[00:54:09] Yeah. You know. Then he would be like it was poorly executed, right? Alright. I would feel sad. I would feel like the work is maybe a little diminished even though which means I'm not a hypothetical whatever, intentionalist. In other words I don't have to create my fictional person.

[00:54:29] But I the one thing in these more moderate views, I do think it matters whether learning about the author's intent is going to be more fruitful in terms of your appreciation and understanding of the text or if it's not. Like that is and so me saying that

[00:54:53] makes me think I think there's something that the real thing that we're after is a fruitful interpretation that allows us to appreciate the text in more depth and often maybe certainly sometimes the author's intent is a big part of that but sometimes it isn't. Sometimes

[00:55:13] we have no sense of the author's intent and sometimes it might even actually detract from a more fruitful interpretation of the text to know that. And then if that happens I'm thinking well I can't unhear that the author said it but I'm not going to let that

[00:55:33] govern what I take to be the meaning of the text. That's where I absolutely agree and in fact I have as radical a view as I say I have in the sense that there are often I think works of art that

[00:55:53] I'm trying to think of a good example like this isn't a real example but the Thundercats cartoon from the 80s right you could say well look if you look at all these characters these were all like symbolizing something like pretty crazy about society in the 80s and

[00:56:13] it actually doesn't matter to me at all whether like the authors might have had like a real simple like let's make a kids cartoon where this guy is the insecure one and this guy is the leader and this one is like the asshole

[00:56:27] and that was it. And so like the intentions of the author are super straightforward and kind of simplistic and then I read this complex stuff into it I don't think I'm making an error at all I think and it's not even because

[00:56:39] I think that deep inside the authors was this complexity and it came out in some like sort of Freudian way or just because they were immersed in the culture and they couldn't help but have this meaning I actually mean that like to answer directly what you said

[00:56:57] like I almost never would want to know what the author intended right and I think we but- Because it's not fruitful Yeah right and if it's going to detract from appreciation of the art and analysis of the art then I think it's

[00:57:15] you're worse off knowing the intentions and I think that's just often the case and we've talked about songs on this podcast a few times where there is no way that I want to know for most songs who the person was thinking of or like

[00:57:31] what the situation was they're thinking because then it's lost its universality and my personal meaning you know. Yeah exactly. That indicates I think that there's more abstract kinds of art and I think movies are often in this category songs definitely it's not

[00:57:49] a hard and fast rule but typically authors intentions there mean less or could actually be a disadvantage and then there are certain other things maybe philosophy maybe certain kinds of novels anyway where it would actually help to understand the context that they're writing in and

[00:58:11] and I really do think it depends and I think they all just go wrong in trying to come up with some hard and fast general rule of interpretation where I don't think that's how this works. Yeah I agree it can't possibly be that because there are

[00:58:31] some cases like the straightforward case of just speech acts like you and I talking to each other right now like it really matters that I know what you wanted to say even if your words are slurred or if you have a malapropism or whatever like I'm

[00:58:47] like well did Tamler mean to say that You think my words are slurred? Only sometimes. And then you get to these like even within the same genre like a documentary film could either be one in which I really want to know like what was the point

[00:59:07] of what argument is the author trying to make and there are some like exit through the gift shop where I'm like I revel in the mystery of what they really meant. We could do exit through the gift shop. Here's a question that I have for you

[00:59:23] if you know the well of course you know the two roads diverged in a wood poem the road the path less traveled? What's the name of the Robert Frost book? The Road Less Traveled. So Frost himself was annoyed because people interpret he said

[00:59:41] that most people took it as some sort of like some proclamation of individualism like I'm acting against the crowd when in reality he meant to only like talk about the great regret of having to choose between two roads or whatever. So you could say

[00:59:59] that people who think of this as some expression of individualism are wrong because Robert Frost told us that's not what he meant. I think the more fruitful thing and I think what Frost was really saying is no but if you read the

[01:00:13] poem closely you'll see that that can't be the interpretation. Exactly. Exactly. That's what I was trying to say when we were having our disagreement at the first you know. Yeah. So yeah there might be just a small distinction between like me having just meant

[01:00:29] his intentions have been infused in the poem like if he did it well like we should not need to query him ever. Right. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you once again by my favorite virtual private network VPN that is NordVPN a virtual private network

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[01:02:41] guarantee by using that promo code. Our thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards Let me try to steel man the other side here The strong intentionalists? Yeah, the strong intentionalists so I was thinking of Strauss and Straussianism and esoteric readings

[01:03:03] and stuff like that as a kind of boogeyman here of the you know, anti-intentionalists it's like maybe in some ways paradigmatic. Like Strauss from what I understand they would go to certain texts like Plato's Dialogues and Descartes and they would kind of decode it. They would find hidden

[01:03:25] meanings, esoteric readings that were guided by certain principles like they always thought it was how authors were able to express themselves under conditions of political persecution and that these texts were like all these little symbols and little ways that they were just sending out for the world

[01:03:49] and for all time, people who were smart enough to be able to understand those things and it's in some ways in that sense a fairly reductive and I think implausible approach. But man this is the thing. That kind of passion of interpretation and the attention

[01:04:09] they pay to text and the thing, even though I don't agree with this view of literature at all I will read some of their analyses of a Plato dialogue or you know like Rousseau or some novel and it's like fucking interesting like I don't agree with it

[01:04:29] I think the political persecution part is borderline silly but just taking that attitude of a highly theoretical approach to a text does end up, even if it's fundamentally misguided bringing out a kind of richness that you might not get if you didn't come at it that systematically

[01:04:51] and similarly about some of the death of the author post-structuralist Derrida, you know yeah maybe you disagree with them at the fundamental philosophical level but they come up with some good shit about the text sometimes and that's probably a result of just their highly theoretical ambitions approaching it

[01:05:13] So is see I thought you were going to say, conclude with your example that isn't this like almost just like a clear case in which it's gone too far but you're saying no they actually find things that are actually valuable because they have this misguided approach that

[01:05:33] is overly theoretical but that bears fruits as well You know I guess it depends on like what your goal is in doing this stuff because what you were saying, like I don't know anything about that Straussian school but psychoanalytic literary criticism is just that as well

[01:05:51] where it is I think almost certainly mostly wrong but nonetheless pretty fucking interesting I mean imagine that the artist was, I think I have a quote about this very thing, okay, it's not quite this but it's a quote that gets at some of this

[01:06:09] It says, take some literary text or artistic structure that is well known and that is generally recognized as having valuable and complex meanings and imagine that we were to discover that the artist in question produced the work while acting on only some very limited semantic intentions

[01:06:21] Does not moderate intentionalism then have the crippling consequence of requiring us to limit our understanding of the works original artistic meanings to the ones intended by the artist And I think that's true, like I think that's sort of what I was saying about Thundercats where, but this is

[01:06:37] like taking it a step further where you approach texts with a frame, a Marxist or psychoanalytic or whatever frame you're approaching it and you're squeezing out meaning in a way that could most definitely be, like the author themselves might be like, what are you talking about but there

[01:06:57] is value to that and I think it just depends on what your analysis is trying to do, like what are you trying to, like I think that Freudian readings of Shakespearean plays are like super interesting, I don't think

[01:07:09] Shakespeare had any of that in mind and I don't even buy the psychology that Freud was saying caused Shakespeare to write it but like, you're just like that's fucking cool It's almost like their obsession with this, their theoretical approach just gets them to do close close readings that

[01:07:27] just by virtue of them being close readings So that gets me to where I was, I thought you were going to take it but where I want to take it now, which is surely they're taking it too far and I think we agree

[01:07:45] that there are cases in which people's even really, really worked out close readings of things are batshit and I take it that that's what for instance Room 237 is all about, where it's like, well like clearly- Except the one about the native

[01:08:03] Except for the one, yeah, or the moon landing Yeah, that's right Right. I mean it's a great example though also of they found that they uncovered some cool shit as they're doing that, you know? Right. It's both But there has to be

[01:08:17] like, and this is why I think really it's what work of art are you analyzing what is your goal in analyzing it that all matters but I think there is some constraint like people in Room 237 aren't making up details about the Shining they are actually pointing them out

[01:08:39] but I don't want a theory that doesn't allow me to say that there's little to no value in what they're saying because it's not grounded in I guess maybe what I'm saying is it's not even grounded within the text That's the thing. I think there are

[01:08:59] better and worse interpretations so like even if you just consider the author's intentions to be one factor among many and you also think the reader's subjective experience of the text matters also, that doesn't mean that all readings are the same you know, where the Room 237

[01:09:17] ones go a little is when it's just not a plausible it's not even like, it's just not a plausible understanding of Kubrick's intentions certainly, but most importantly of the text itself They get a little into this in that movie actually. I remember one of the people

[01:09:33] saying maybe Kubrick didn't mean this consciously but I think you know, so he I think that's also true of any artist that they're not always aware of what it is that they're doing and responding to and their work are just reflections of the world

[01:09:53] in ways that they sometimes understand and sometimes don't. And there are just all kinds of interesting cases for artists too where I guess depending on the domain where you have happy accidents that were unintended but then the artist kind of runs with it where

[01:10:15] you can't have, like there are some of these theories the strictest ones that say at the time of its creation what the artist was thinking at the moment of its creation is the only thing that matters and there you're just not allowing for some cool shit that

[01:10:29] happens by accident to end up meaning something. I think any artist who's good is not going to be have everything fully consciously intended of value in their work Well like we were just talking about Twin Peaks in our AUA, right? Like the

[01:10:51] person who, like I don't even know why I'm trying to protect from spoilers for Twin Peaks but like the person in the mirror that just happened to be caught in the mirror. Oh Bob. Yeah. Bob was just a set dresser that Lynch saw but immediately incorporated it.

[01:11:09] You know, Twin Peaks is an interesting example because there's a very famous four and a half hour video where he, to Twin Peaks, unlocks Twin Peaks the Return and all of Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, all of that. It's by this guy Twin Perfect

[01:11:25] I think his name is, a YouTuber I watched parts of it He is a little bit insufferable like very kind of full of himself the way he presents it It was hugely controversial in the Twin Peaks and Lynch kind of commentary community. I think some people

[01:11:43] thought he figured it out this is what Twin Peaks is and other people were so offended A. by the idea that you could even do something like Twin Peaks and B. just this guy is kind of insufferable I figured it out, like this is it

[01:12:01] let's go home now, it's done the puzzle has been solved I did this, I completed the Sudoku and what's interesting about that case was even what I saw and I wasn't a fan but I could tell this guy has assembled a comprehensive case that gets

[01:12:21] at some really interesting shit and even some shit where it's like well if he doesn't mean this, how do you explain this aspect of it you know but you just also think fundamentally that's not how Lynch works that there is some key that can crack the code

[01:12:39] because Lynch of all artists is clearly somebody who goes with intuition but it doesn't mean that he doesn't mean anything it just means that it's never going to be that cut and dry and paint by numbers but damn did that guy have some shit in there

[01:12:57] that was pretty impressive and so it's interesting when you do that and it feels like something that's positive a positive way of interpreting it when it's negative and sometimes it's not just because the interpretation is invalid when you go evidence by evidence, piece by piece

[01:13:21] but it's more about just the general attitude or the and also just whether that fits the artist you know yeah and like respecting the text who respects the text that much I'm totally on board with it yeah it's interesting, I wasn't thinking of the

[01:13:41] Twin Perfect guy as necessarily respecting the text played close attention to it came up with some really good points but I think maybe some of the disagreement about this guy was whether he showed sufficient respect to the spirit of what Lynch and Frost are trying to do

[01:13:59] I think I might have mentioned this particular video that I saw not too long ago, I was on a No Country for Old Men kick and so I watched it and I was watching a bunch of analysis videos and there is this YouTuber called What Is Anti-Logic

[01:14:15] who makes a bunch of these videos interpreting movies in ways that nobody else does and he grants that like they might not be right but his video on No Country for Old Men is trying to mount the argument that Anton Luger isn't real and the analysis

[01:14:35] of it is so good to me, like it adds value to the story and makes me think about the story so much that it's, the fact that not everything fits with that is sort of beside the point to me, like he has squeezed more

[01:14:53] joy out of the work of art for me and that's what I think that's sort of like what I am led to conclude, like when we write our book about the Very Bad Wizard's Guide to the Good Life that's like a firm

[01:15:05] principle that I would want in there, that like the way that you approach a work of art really, really matters and like squeezing all of it, the meaning and joy out of the art even if it means that you might get something wrong or you might be

[01:15:23] overanalyzing or somebody might accuse you of not knowing what the director meant or whatever, it doesn't matter so much Yeah, and the Coens are great examples, you ask them anything about their movies and they'll be like, nah just, yeah a tornado at the end whatever, like yeah

[01:15:41] that's a part of the country where we get some whirlwinds sometimes you know they never will betray any kind of hidden meaning and yet their movies are so full of unbelievably like precise connections I would do No Country for Old Men tomorrow if you wanted to

[01:16:03] I'll do that It's, and I think that the artist showing that kind of restraint is doing such a good service to the community to the audience basically I asked my daughter if you could give Lynch a pill and say like, and he has to answer truthfully

[01:16:29] how do you interpret the end of Twin Peaks would you want to do it? She's like yeah, yes, fuck yes like I want to know, and I'm not saying it means that that's the answer but I want to know Yeah, probably less I think than she does

[01:16:47] but sure, yeah I wouldn't delete the file because he sent it to me It's, I'm thinking of magic tricks that you learn the secret to and how there is always not always, but there's often especially for people who aren't really into magic like there's just this immediate disappointment

[01:17:07] and I would worry that I would give myself immediate disappointment because there is this limbo where multiple interpretations exist and that brings me pleasure and so I don't want all of the quantum realities to collapse into the one true one But maybe we could

[01:17:31] conclude on this, I think like if what I believe is true they wouldn't collapse into one we would just have one other piece of information I think that's definitely true about Twin Peaks And this gets to my point about the psychology of it, which is

[01:17:47] I would have to just tell myself to undo what I heard David Lynch say because it would hit me a little bit Yeah, yeah Definitely, but man would it be fun to just, okay let me try to go back and re-watch now with this in mind

[01:18:03] which is another good thing about these interpretations, gives you kind of a lens to go back and see how well it works or not We had a few people say that our discussion, even Paul himself, our discussion of TAR actually made the movie better for them

[01:18:21] We don't have to be right about it for that to happen but we also don't have to get the answer from the director That was very gratifying for me because I think that is the mark of good criticism is when you

[01:18:37] appreciate something in a way you didn't appreciate before. That's the mark of good criticism. So we're not critics but we sometimes play one on the podcast Do you think it can work in the opposite direction that movies that somebody enjoys, or you could ruin with your criticism?

[01:18:55] I think that's what people were worried about with the Twin Perfect thing. I don't know I find them annoying but that doesn't, like if I'll read a really stupid way of trying to understand a work that I really like it doesn't detract from the work for me

[01:19:13] You have actually ruined many Marvel movies for me with your attitude A pissy attitude Sometimes a pissy attitude is the best critical approach. But I do think that I'm pretty extreme in my views It's the most postmodern that I get. Yeah, totally 100% Art is just different

[01:19:39] I feel like and God bless it for being different because it's hard to it's a dreary world where you just have to worry about reading academic papers where you really are all just 100% focused on what people meant and whether the words match what they meant or here

[01:20:06] turn that part of your mind off and this other part of your mind just expands Yeah, when that requires imagination and yeah, I think that's why we gravitated towards a lot of that I by the way think that any artist who gives an explanation for their art is

[01:20:24] not only doing a disservice but I think that they tend to be the dumber ones Yeah, I agree Why would you do that? And like the arrogance of it There's an interesting case where I'll let you go watch Celtics but in the original Star Wars, Han Solo

[01:20:44] is meeting this alien bounty hunter and they have a shootout and in the original it kind of looks like Han shot him in cold blood and that really added to the character of Han because he was this renegade and when George Lucas redid the effects

[01:21:04] he made it so that Greedo the bounty hunter shot first and Han shot in self-defense and like the community was outraged Han shot first was like their mantra and that's a case where I don't care what George Lucas thinks Han did It's disrespecting the character

[01:21:22] that we all know He had no right to do that That's how it is Alright Alright, well this was fun I hope it was somewhat instructive I have to go and take my medicine The tough pill Join us next time on Very Bad Wizard