The subtext, quickly defined, is those ideas or elements underlying the movie, as well as their relations.
Those elements can simply be structural. A perfect example of this is 8 1/2, a movie Fellini made while not knowing what movie to make, about a director, who does not know what movie to make, making a movie about a director who does not know what movie to make, and all these movies are one and the same (the movie we are watching). The subtext here is very twisty and complex, although there are very few actual ideas being expressed.
The elements can also be ideological, such as in, say, American Beauty (which is about such things as the facets of beauty and independent thinking), or Rashomon (which is about the influence of culture and ego on our speech, and human nature as generally hopeless).
Now, having defined subtext, I must now deconstruct that definition. Any piece of art - including a movie - is a re-creation of an artist's value-judgments (that is to say, how he sees the world, how he judges importances and ideas).
But we also have our own value-judgments. The scriptwriter may be a Marxist, and the director may be a Fundamentalist Christian, but if you're atheist and libertarian (like I am), you are likely to interpret the movie very, very differently. You may not sympathize with the characters, or you may interpret the story differently, but something will change.
Because there is no necessary connection between our value-judgments, the subtext as the author made it and the subtext as the viewer sees it are two completely different things. I suppose I could call them "original subtext" and "viewer subtext", for the sake of designation.
To give you a concrete example, I can tell you about the movie Cube. Me and one of my friends think it's genius. It shows authoritarianism as a destructive influence, it shows science (mathematics) as a tool of man's survival, favours human compassion, etc. Great movie ! But the director, if you listen to the DVD commentary, states that he had absolutely no subtext (or little subtext) in mind while making or writing it. He was just making a movie about people trapped in a cube.
Does that mean we're wrong ? Not necessarily. As I said, both are completely different things. We can be wrong in our interpretation itself, but not because the author did not plan such and such.
It's a simple question of personal usefulness, I think. Of course, it's always important not to fall in the opposite trap - imbuing every single thing with meaning when no such meaning could ever even be implied, or trying to fit every single thing in some kind of grand theory, even when it doesn't fit (like the people who try to associate every damn movie "hero" with Jesus).
So I do think one's viewer subtext can be wrong, in the sense that it is not useful. This may seem as an overly pragmatic idea, but to understand why it must be so, you can make an analogy with a tool. Art is, after all, a tool. A hammer is useful to me if I want to drive a nail, regardless of the usefulness the maker of the hammer had in mind. For all I know, he makes hammers for artistic goals, but that is not what concerns me. See what I mean ?
|
|