A snotty comment you hear a lot from film snobs is: “American audiences need everything spelled out for them; they can’t handle subtlety. I like films that respect my intelligence; they don’t beat me over the head with things the way mainstream films do. But American audiences apparently can’t handle that.” You see this sort of thing a lot on the IMDB bulletin boards, in response to questions like “I don’t understand what was happening at the end of 2001.”
I sort of agree that being “beat over the head” with a plot point or a character trait can be a drag. But the implication of the comment is that the stupid audiences who want everything spelled out have an intellectual shortcoming, that they lack perceptiveness and imagination. I don’t think that’s right at all. When you see something ambiguous, it’s easy to come up with lots of guesses as to what it means – but when you’re watching a movie, you don’t want to have to worry that you’ve guessed wrong, because twenty minutes later you may find that everything is confusing and requires guessing, that you and the moviemakers have lost each other entirely. Which might be what they had in mind, but that’s just another guess, on your part. You want to be certain that you’re not losing your way. It’s not subtlety that upsets viewers, it’s the risk of getting it wrong. Where do the film snobs get their confidence? I would argue that they had it spelled out for them in exactly the way that they claim not to need.
People often praise art that allows for multiple interpretations, but most people can only enjoy interpretive freedom in a work of art if they feel confident that it is intentional. Everything in the world allows for multiple interpretations. The pleasure of watching a movie, or even of looking at an abstract painting, should be more specific than the pleasure of looking out your window and interpreting what you see. Not necessarily more pleasurable, but definitely more specific.
It is possible to intentionally hand audiences something ambiguous and let them interpret it as they choose – that can be good, responsible art – but they have to really understand that those are the terms before the experience can be valuable to them, because a lot of art doesn’t work that way. The end of 2001 wants us to think in grandly symbolic terms, dreamily, but the middle of 2001 requires us to follow the dialogue and understand the events on a literal level. Knowing the difference means being tipped off to the difference by the film itself. It has nothing to do with personal capacity for imagination or inference; it’s about knowing what’s expected of you.
Disdaining audiences who “need everything spelled out” is a mistake, because everyone “needs everything spelled out” to differentiate what they’re seeing from non-art. If things are not going to be spelled out, that fact needs to have been spelled out. Often, it’s not spelled out by the work itself, but simply by the standards of a genre or a culture. Or more commonly, you have the complex situation where a work does spell everything out, but through a system of standards that itself is not spelled out.
For example, it has several times happened to me that I am watching a mystery movie with a friend, and the friend asks me “what did that mean?” about something, and I answer confidently, “we’re not supposed to know yet.” How can I be sure? Because I was tipped off to the correctness of my confusion by cues in the movie. If the movie concerns the attempt to uncover hidden information, for example, and a snippet of confusing information is revealed without enough context for me to really make sense of it, I can be relatively certain that the context will be discovered further on, that my confusion is preparation for an eventual moment of revelation. Generally this sort of thing is accompanied a more direct spelling-out, like the protagonist saying “I don’t understand!” but even if it’s not, I can rest assured that I know what function it serves. I know because of my familiarity with similar stories and movies. Most movies depend on this sort of cultural familiarity to carry some of the expository burden.
Exposition is extremely time-consuming and difficult to do well. It is rare, for me, that the first two scenes in a character-based movie really work on my first viewing. I still feel like a stranger, and the idea that I’m supposed to be interested in some conversation or situation seems arbitrary. I sometimes feel a little embarrassed for a movie at this point, like, “you made a movie about these people and you expect me to laugh at these jokes?” By the middle of the movie, I’ve gotten accustomed to the characters, through sheer duration of time spent with these people, and on second viewing the work’s already been done. But that’s the work of exposition and my point is it’s hard to pull off.
So it’s natural for a movie to want to let norms and standard expectations do that work. This requires cultural fluency on the part of the viewer. And this is what the “you need everything spelled out!” people are really noting. The mainstream audience is only familiar with certain cultural languages, and is confused by movies that assume different kinds of expectations.
It’s probably true that American mainstream films make less use of indirect storytelling, but indirectness is just a kind of a language that is ultimately no less immediate to those who speak it. This all relates to my upcoming discussion of computer adventure games, in which the games have to tell you exactly what to do, but only indirectly, because telling you directly would make it seem un-game-like. As a fluent adventure-game-player, I find the indirect information to be exactly as clear as direct information, and yet it still manages to make me feel that some sort of game playing is happening. A bit like the completely deterministic card game “War,” which is just the slow working out of a solution that a computer could have instantly told us – but that wouldn’t have seemed game-like. Indirect punchlines make jokes funnier, again because we feel that something more is happening, in that moment of understanding. But it’s only the slightest hitch in our cognition. Apparently that hitch makes a big difference to our perception. So it makes viewers of “non-mainstream” indirect-storytelling films feel that they’re seeing something more intelligent, even though the intelligence needed to follow that hitch around the corner is negligible. My argument here has been that audiences who don’t want to follow it around the corner are limited not by intelligence but by fluency in the filmic language that reassures them that the corner is put there on purpose. I was originally going to say that the corner has no inherent significance, but I seem to have talked myself into the position where I must admit that it’s something. Gotta think about this more.
Anyway, I was going to say something to wrap up, about how “needing everything spelled out” is certainly not nearly as bad as “disliking subtitles.” But, you know, I also think it’s quite reasonable to dislike subtitles – I certainly would prefer to see a film in English to one in a language I don’t understand. More of the acting is accessible to me, and my experience of the drama is more immediate since it’s not mediated by written text. Of course, subtitles are a very very very small price to pay in order to be able to watch and understand a movie, and it’s quite remarkable, actually, how well we’re able to mentally integrate the subtitle-reading and the foreign-language-listening. My memory of a foreign film almost always tricks me into thinking I heard the lines directly from the actors’ mouths. Yes, it’s not necessary to remake movies in English to get rid of the language barrier, and it’s certainly stupid to refuse to see a movie just because it has subtitles. And dubbing is ultimately much more distracting, because it attempts to “trick” the audience rather than offer them help. But let’s not get carried away, snobs – it is reasonable to dislike subtitles. If you claim to like them, it’s only by association, and because they make you disproportionately proud of yourself. They’re a necessary minor inconvenience. Obviously!
However, I’m still not sure what people are talking about who don’t want to watch a wide-format movie on the small screen because of the “black bars.” I’m not quite willing to write those people off as idiots (though it’s tempting) because if I’m watching such a movie, I can’t even force myself to see the bars as bars, (what am I supposed to imagine is behind them?) so I don’t really know what those people are going through. It’s like someone saying that they can’t enjoy looking at things outdoors because the sky is distracting. I don’t know what it would be like to see the world that way. I know, I know, if you have a small TV, widescreen movies make the images smaller and harder to see – but that complaint would be “the picture is too small” not “I don’t like the black bars.”
Okay, now I’m done.