In praise of confusing films
When directors like Christopher Nolan challenge viewers with complex plots and convoluted twists, they make us better moviegoers
Film Features Meshes Of The Afternoon
Summertime means tentpole movies galore, with cineplexes dominated by high-octane action flicks and superhero fare. But there are always some wildcard films and directors that like to mix things up and keep audiences on their toes through complicated plots that require a little work on the viewer’s part. (We’re looking at you Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and Oppenheimer.)
And that’s a good thing.
There’s nothing wrong with escapism, of course. But some filmmakers like to take labyrinthine leaps to make us think. These artists trust in our intelligence and our ability to sort things out, to dig into the themes, to dissect the symbolism, to be open to new ideas, and to think for ourselves. They don’t believe we need to be spoon-fed answers to the questions raised by their work., and sometimes that means invoking a fresh perspective on a familiar subject. It can be rewarding to have your expectations usurped and conventional wisdom challenged, giving you something to debate afterward.
In an era dominated by tweetstorms, Instagram reels, and other social media bombardment, people have become adept at juggling multiple threads and processing information more quickly. So there’s a joy to be found in taking a difficult movie—with more subplots and supporting characters—and trying to solve its puzzles.
How much plot can the audience handle?
Directors Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky love playing with audience expectations and pushing the envelope. Nolan in particular imbues big-budget movies like Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet with an intelligence and sophistication that is often missing from many other tentpoles. That’s not to say that people who make blockbuster fare aren’t smart, but many simply assume their audience can only handle so much. But one can go back and re-watch Interstellar or Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream and find new things to appreciate about them with each viewing.
Aronofsky purposefully left much of The Fountain—a film with three interwoven storylines—open to interpretation, although he has also stated that it’s like a Rubik’s Cube where there are multiple ways to solve it but only one solution in the end. By contrast, surrealist filmmaker David Lynch is known for disrupting traditional narrative ideas and creating his own paradigm in which characters and audience members frequently question what is being experienced. The characters and audience essentially become one.
There are also films that, in contrast to the titles above, are seemingly simple yet have multiple ideas churning beneath the surface. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) seems to be about an alien monolith influencing the course of human history. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) seems to be about a photographer who lives a uselessly anarchic life. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) follows a tour guide leading people into a contaminated no man’s land to a room that will seemingly grant wishes. All of these movies look to have very straightforward plots (although Blow-Up feels plotless at first), but the deeper you go into them, the more complex they become and the more you realize you don’t fully know what’s going on. You can respond by either checking out of the movie completely or reaping the rewards of spending hours debating them.
Movies change as viewers change
This writer saw 2001 for the first time when he was only eight years old, initially stunned by the imagery, music, and sound design. But successive viewings across multiple decades and with increasing maturity have led me to keep marveling at not only how well it is made, but how it views intelligence and evolution from different perspectives. The idea of whether human and artificial intelligence can fluidly co-exist takes on much deeper resonance now.
Today, there is a temptation for many viewers to search on Google or YouTube for the “explanation” of a movie ending. But that’s assuming that interpretation is correct. And sometimes endings, like Inception and its famous spinning top, do not provide the closure that people crave. Being confronted with a piece of art that makes us work has its merits, and when the screen goes dark and the lights come up, it allows ideas to linger in our brains long after the final frames have flickered away. You don’t need all the answers laid out. The joy in such films is that they can vary based on personal interpretation, while some fans can find common ideas to plug into.
For many people, such efforts are intellectually exciting. A time-bending movie like Donnie Darko (2001) and dystopian sci-fi fare like Brazil (1986) and Snowpiercer (2013) take us into worlds that were disturbing and confusing upon their release, yet now resonate more strongly with modern times.
The promise of a perplexing premise
Stimulating an audience with a perplexing premise is nothing new in cinema. Surreal short films like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied’s Meshes Of The Afternoon (1943) pushed boundaries in their day, while the seemingly more conventional 1946 film noir classic The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks from Raymond Chandler’s baffling novel, had plot twists come so fast and furious that even today you need a pencil and paper to map out what’s going on. Four years later, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon dissected the concepts of memory, honesty, and truth in exploring conflicting viewpoints of a samurai’s murder.
One could argue that Inception and The Matrix feel like art films masquerading as sci-fi shoot ’em ups. Sure, you can enjoy characters firing guns and blowing stuff up, but the stories themselves are rooted in deeper philosophical questions that lured in viewers who don’t generally enjoy such genre fare. And people still talk about those films, dissecting their plots and wondering what it all means. And guess what? Both movies have made boatloads of cash and have long endured on home video and streaming services. That’s a win-win for everybody. And as long as viewers remain open to the joys of having to dissect, consider, and deconstruct a difficult film, those wins will continue—for the studios and, more importantly, for us.
89 Comments
This is why I appreciate Christopher Nolan’s movies so much, even when they’re deeply flawed in some way. People can call him pretentious all they want for making confusing blockbusters, but three years later Tenet still occupies a comfy seat in my mind, while Liam Neeson keeps pumping out movies that can be forgotten faster than it takes to watch one of them.
I mean, no one was comparing Tenet with Taken. Seems an odd comparison to make.
Who said anything about Taken?There are definitely franchises and blockbusters that I wanted to compare more directly to Tenet, but I didn’t feel like getting dragged into arguments about the merits of this or that movie. I thought we could all agree Liam Neeson makes extremely generic action movies that people must be watching since they keep getting made.
That wasn’t really a comparison of two particular movies, just a statement on ambitious vs generic moviemaking.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. That movie where Liam Neeson rescued his kidnapped daughter from her kidnapped mother who was being eaten by wolves on that train was top notch, I tell you.(Actually The Grey wasn’t so bad, really.)
Looks like someone wanted to brag about all the confusing movies they’ve seen.
I guess I never really thought 2001 was that confusing. We see that the monolith evolved hominids into proto-humans (who predictably use their new intellect for violence). At the end it has transformed Bowman into the “next step” of evolution (even if as a biologist I protest the idea that evolution is progressive and that “next steps” exist; I love Vonnegut’s Galapagos for showing that humanity might well lose intelligence if the world changes). Okay, the idea that Bowman becomes a giant baby is a bit weird, but I think that was supposed to be metaphorical in that he was the start of a new species.
Arthur C. Clarke made it way more straightforward in the novelization (this is not a misstatement – the book version of 2001 was written in collaboration with Kubrick while the screenplay was in development; both the movie and the book were based on Clarke’s short story The Sentinel). Kubrick, of course, being Kubrick deliberately chose to leave out all of the subtext and explanations and let the visuals do all the talking.I would guess that someone in Hollywood doing a remake would have Bowman’s inner monologue done in voiceover.
As I recall, 2001 is one of the first big steps for science fiction into existential questions about humanity’s existence in the cosmos…so I leaving Bowman’s monologue out also enhances the point. It’s about asking unanswerable questions and inviting the audience to bring their own interpretation.
As I recall the novel and the film are not necessarily the exact same story, but 2010 is more straightforwardly related to the book. I.e., the things that are in the 2001 book (no matter how close) are not necessarily in the movie, they are their own things. My god, it’s full of stars!
Clarke has a good explainer in his forewords to the 20XX series of books about the process. He and Kubrick basically messengered each other drafts and concepts during the making of 2001 (Clarke was living in Sri Lanka) and changes got made in the film (i.e. switching the final encounter with the Monolith to Jupiter space instead of Saturn) to the point where the film and novelization ended up diverging significantly on a couple of key points (e.g. Bowman says nothing in the film when he enters the wormhole).2010 was written as a standalone novel, but the movie version made some narrative changes for length and tone, so in 2061 Clarke mentions that he had to adjust his book universe accordingly. By the time he wrote 3001, Clarke basically admitted that none of the four books existed in exactly the same timeline/universe (implying the multiverse before comic book movies made them a pop culture thing!) and that, at that point, he was beyond caring whether he was 100% adherent to his own canon.
I would strongly recommend any fan of science fiction read “The Sentinel.” It’s a brilliant short story that contains of the greatest sentences I’ve ever read.
Just want to add this fun fact: Kubrick originally wanted to do a film version of Childhood’s End but someone swooped in and bought the rights before him, so Clarke suggested they expand on “The Sentinel” instead. 2001 ended up being regarded as one of (if not thee) greatest SF film ever made and CE languished in development hell for half a century before being made into a forgotten (but I’ve read actually not bad) miniseries a couple of years back.
Infamously, that’s exactly what fucked over the initial release of Blade Runner: a shitty monologue they made Ford record after the wrap and they dubbed over.Ford, to his grumpy, stoner-ass bush pilot credit, sounds bored as fuck.
Today’s Hollywood execs: “See? It worked for Blade Runner!”
I don’t like 2001 A Space Odyssey. And I don’t believe it’s some vaunted masterpiece. It’s boring as all heck and obvious.
I haven’t seen Oppenheimer, but does it really have a “confusing” plot? It’s a biopic of a real public figure, the audience already comes in knowing about the thing he’s best known for.
but does it really have a “confusing” plot?
Considering Nolan made it a ‘will they won’t they’ love story between a man and his kiloton destruction device, yeah, I’d say it’s ‘confusing’.;)
What will-they-won’t-they?
It’s a Christopher Nolan movie. He made a movie about rescuing soldiers from a beach by shooting three different timelines moving with different speeds.
Cillian Murphy (along with the rest of the cast) plays a fictional character in that one, so when you meet him at two different times behaving differently, it is actually confusing.
Man, I didn’t even get that far in Dunkirk. For a movie about the goddamn BEF evacuation of France during the Fall of France, he made it incredibly fucking dull. It was made with all the compassion and humanity and interest of a Unix For Beginners textbook. I’ve seen technical films on soldering with more drama, and that wasn’t as dry as the Atacama desert during a drought.
See, here’s the thing. J. Rob isn’t J. Rob in Oppenheimer. Well, he is J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he’s really isn’t, or rather he’s not our J. Robert Oppenheimer. He’s the J. Rob from the future, which is really the past. He was sent back in time to ensure the nuclear bomb doesn’t get developed, but, unfortunately, after Florence Pugh rides his dick raw he realises he’ll never have a bang as big as that one, not unless he develops the nuclear bomb, so he develops the nuclear bomb. Or, more to the point, he doesn’t. But it turns out that our J. Rob, from our timeline, is still around (there’s some subtle cues that may or may not be cues in the film to let you know when you’re watching Future-Past J. Rob vs. Our J. Rob – check reddit for the 10,000 word, five-comment-long explanation), and at Los Alamos, and when he finds out that F-P J. Rob got a massive bang from FloPu he gets jealous and is driven to complete the bomb, which he does. Turns out that the bomb actually rips a hole in the space-time continuum, which is what allowed Future-Past J. Rob to travel back in time at the exact moment of detonation in order to prevent the development of the very bomb that would allow him to travel back in time to prevent the development of the very bomb that would allow him to travel back in time to prevent the development of the bomb. Now, because time is linear (the sixteen-minute monologue/exposition dump from Einstein at the beginning of the film made that clear) and cannot be bent, of course, Future-Past J. Rob who came back to the 1940s from the future actually came forward in time from the past, so the future is really the past. An infinitesimal amount of time after the detonation of Trinity at the end of the movie – just after Future-Past J. Rob came back during the detonation meant the two J. Robs both fused together so there’s not actually two J. Robs walking around Los Alamos, the most secure and locked-down place on earth, with no one noticing. So yeah, you know how you spent the last two hours thinking that there were two J. Robs in this movie and that they were at odds with one another viz-a-viz their goals? There was actually one, and I bet you feel like an idiot for thinking that, even though there’s every reason to not not-think that, and so in order to not look like the idiot you feel you’re now obligated to go around saying, very loudly, “OH, YEAH, I TOTALLY GOT THAT THE FIRST TIME, DID YOU NOT? GOSH, I AM SO SMART. AHAHA I LEAD A RICH AND FULFILLING LIFE.”Oh, and Pugh’s character is dead the whole time. All those sex scenes were really just J. Rob jerking off in your face, and also J. Rob is the director’s surrogate in this film.
That’s what I was thinking. It would be like saying “Titanic” had a confusing plot.
[wreckage of the Titanic slowly settles to the ocean floor]SFX: Record ScratchTitanic: I bet you’re wondering how I got here…
The only worse approach would be to have an alarm clock go off and the Titanic rolls out of bed and goes, “Where the hell am I?”
You are kidding about Dead Reckoning being confusing, right? The plot is only there to string together the action sequences, it is barely there, and they explain it roughly 17 times. Even the “twists” are eye-rollingly obvious. The only way it is deep is if you consider it as a parody of other computer controlled predestination tales with better plots like Foundation (the novels) or Person of Interest.Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great action movie. But if the plot has you confused, you were probably really stoned when you saw it.
This smacks of being handed a brief by the films PR company that asked for AVC to equate DR to more complex films, possibly in exchange for, I dunno, a five-minute zoom interview with Simon Pegg’s barber at some unspecified point in the future.
that reminds me of Star Trek: Beyond. The movie had no plot and then in five seconds Idris Elba says something that theoretically gives the movie a plot and the characters motivation…except not really, it was just garbage. Which is fine, just don’t say it was “complex”
Yeah. It’s really simple. There’s a rogue AI that is wreaking havoc with the world’s computers. It can theoretically be stopped or controlled with a key. A bunch of rival factions are all trying to get the key. One of the factions includes a guy who seems to be intentionally working for the AI. That’s pretty much it. There are questions of whether Ethan and his team are being manipulated by the AI into doing what it wants without their knowledge, but those questions are quickly brushed aside. Everything is explained repeatedly in long blocks of painstaking exposition.
Also, control of it will make you God so everyone wants to control it but obviously it can’t be controlled and only Ethan Hunt seems to get that.I mean, there is one scene where the National Security Advisor explains that to Gabriel (about the 13th time someone does that), then the bad guy says “so you are saying…” and reads it all right back to him immediately after. It’s great technique for a doctor to use with a patient, but in a movie it is the highest level of “as you know Bob…” exposition boringness. Just get to the next stunt!
Yep. That’s my main complaint about the movie. I really enjoyed it for the most part, but the constant exposition of stuff I already understood perfectly well made the three hour runtime really noticeable.
And while we are on the topic…Did anybody not instantly figure out that the short, non-descript guy who walks into the meeting of all the covert operations heads and gets way to much screen time wasn’t Ethan Hunt?Did anybody not instantly figure out that The Entity* wasn’t at the big party in Venice? They put the blue “Eye of Sauron” pattern on the video screens before anybody at that party even has dialogue.How come nobody noticed that The White Widow’s eyes changed color? Vanessa Kirby has blue eyes and Hayley Atwell did not wear contacts to cover her brown eyes. These people are supposed to be observant of tiny details.Was anybody surprised that The Entity was created by CIA malware?*”The Entity” feels like a placeholder name that nobody ever bothered to change. I would have preferred it if they had called it MABLE or something and pretended it was an acronym. Or just called it “Rudiger” or something.
How come nobody noticed that The White Widow’s eyes changed color?Kittridge, a guy who has decades of experience with the IMF, should have immediately caught on when she said “I” instead of “her” and went through this whole thing about how important it was to protect Grace. Very silly.This is relatively minor, but it also bugged me that the train was an old timey steam engine powered by one guy throwing coal in with a shovel and one extra shovelfull was all it took to ensure that the train would never run out and drive on forever.
How come nobody noticed that The White Widow’s eyes changed color?Including her brother. Yeah, the guy who was with her the whole time? That’s her brother. And there’s moments where they’re standing face to face, like four inches apart, and making eye contact. And he never notices that his sister’s eye color has changed from blue to brown. Like, they couldn’t have had two seconds where she puts in fake contacts?
The only explanation I can come up with is that the director felt he needed to hold the audience’s hand or we would be confused and not realize it was Grace in disguise. I guess it wasn’t enough that she wears different clothes, they showed the plan ahead of time, and they show Grace overpowering her and replacing her.
You have to turn your brain off during MI movies. Every time I try to follow their stupid plots, I give up when the 4th person takes their mask off. People talking in those movies serves no purpose other than to say “how do we get to the next stunt sequence”
It’s amazing how we’ve reached this point where the first MI is considered mediocre, but somehow…the last three or so are considered high watermarks of cinematic excellence.The first one had fantastic Brian De Palma direction and Stephen Burum cinematography.The last few are just an excuse for vague stunt sequences, with plots only there to justify Tom Cruise’s use of extreme sports to distract himself from the thoughts of wanting to suck on huge, veiny penises. I’ve watched some of the last couple, and I honestly could not tell them apart. There was the one with the record player? And the guy from The Man From UNCLE who doesn’t want to eat people? And PSH, may he rest in peace?
Don’t be homophobic. Cruise can want huge penises in his mouth if he wants. This isn’t fucking Family Guy.Make fun of him for his massive ego and his insane crackpot cult of religion, there’s plenty enough else to go on without falsely conflating that he’s gay.
Where did I say it was wrong for him to want huge penises? The joke was that HE thinks its wrong to want huge penises, hence the stunts.And the reason he thinks it’s wrong is because of that crackpot religion.
Yeah, I thought Dead Reckoning was great, but confusing isn’t a word I would use to describe it. I think the impressive think about the latter MI films is their ability to create and sustain tension.
This is a fascinating subject. I wonder if this tension has always been there. Completely serious questions: Do you think we sat around the cave debating whether Ugg’s fertility charms were pretentious and art-damaged? I’m kind of betting we did.
Ugg’s fertility charms are knock off trash.Buy Odug’s All Purpose Fertility and Protection Charms!
Odug’s: Because all other charms will kill you!
Buy Ugg boots…I killed Ugg, skinned him, and made him into boots! Limited supply!
Ugg better as boots than as charm maker! I not just actor, I customer!
(australopithecus Tom Bradyus, primal spokesman)
This cave painting have too much blatant product placement. Me understand Zarg the Image Maker need pay cave bills, but new cave paintings lack artistic integrity.
Me understand him not use fire except that him get free fire for cave painting appearance
Not just better movie goers, but better people. With fewer and fewer American adults reading for pleasure, we need anything that actually makes us think, or might challenge our dogma or help us to empathize with others.
“Confusing” is fine, but not if it’s meant to cover up a story that’s fundamentally not worth a shit.
yeah well, I think it is a totally fair way to cover up the story. Not going to get into this discourse – most of the directors mentioned are just flashy.
Or that they can’t figure out a satisfactory ending for, so they punt it to “let the audience decide”. Which is what I think these films are often really after.
Amateurs!
Are we talking “complex” or “confusing” because they are not the same thing. What’s more, it became a mini-culture war thing to say that you found “Inception” too confusing or didn’t understand it, people would brag about it the way they brag about not liking crepes or art, to be anti-snob snobs. The thing is, if you asked them about the movie, they all understood the entire thing. Either it would boil down to “was he in a dream or not” which not answering that was clearly the point or it was basically “a lot happened but I understood all of it” in which case great job why are you complaining? The real annoying one is when somebody asks you to explain exactly what is going on and what everything means in a David Lynch movie. I don’t know, shut the fuck up and watch it.
One of things that bothers me about Christopher Nolan discourse – and this comes from someone who really likes Christopher Nolan – is the idea that he’s a complex director in the vein of Lynch. Christopher Nolan is quite possibly the most literal big budget director we’ve ever had. His movies are at their best impressive and well-constructed crossword puzzles but his movies leave zero room for ambiguity and the puzzles always, always have an answer. He is absolutely not a Lynch, or a Kubrick, or any director who’s comfortable with ambiguity. He’s in fact insanely uncomfortable with ambiguity.In the Prestige, we get an incredibly literal, if fantastical, explanation for everything. In Interstellar, Nolan literalizes what might happen if one were to go into a black hole and experience the world in 4 dimensions, making it a big puzzle box McConaughey has to master – one can only imagine what Lynch or Kubrick might have done with that. In Inception, the ending with the spinning top seems ambiguous, but isn’t: the movie has shown that the top isn’t Leo’s totem, his wedding ring is, and he never wears it in the real world, so the ending is 100 % real. In The Dark Knight Rises, the movie doesn’t settle on Michael Caine smiling, but shows a literal happy ending and the next successor to Batman literally rising. In Memento, which is one of my favorite movies, short-term memory loss is literally just made into a filmmaking/noir device. Nolan’s puzzles might be complicated, or in same cases convoluted, but this is just not a particularly complex filmmaker, and certainly is not one who can handle ambiguity the way these other directors can.
Very well stated.
Eh, while he may not leave a lot of room for ambiguity – films like inception and tenet are plenty complex by movie standards. Tenet in fact was intentionally ambiguous as an play on the theme of faith. He constructs everything quite intentionally and soundly but he does allow ambiguity to exist for the viewer when it serves his point. The Prestige brings up philosophical questions that don’t have clear answers for all viewers – so he likes to have things to have multiple interpretations – he’s just not throwing out things to bewilder people without a clear reason.
I think several, if not most, Lynch movies actually have a definitive explanation, as confusing as they might seem at first. If you’ve got a copy of the original Mulholland Dr. DVD release, this is made abundantly clear by the 10 clues to unlocking the film provided by Lynch himself that accompanies the disc.They’re not that hard to figure out if you watch them enough times. This is not strictly true for all of his work.
Christopher Nolan? Try watching Holy Motors some time.
Distinction between “confusing” and “complex” or “ambiguous” please.I’ve seen plenty of confusing films. Anyone making it to the end of “The Apple” without knowing the ending beforehand is going to be confused. I promise.I’d also add that sometimes that “confusion” in the negative sense is not necessarily a bad thing either. I enjoyed Donnie Darko and how much it left up to the viewer, and read interviews with the director where he talked about how much he’d had to leave out for the various documented reasons etc….And then I saw “Southland Tales”. Sometimes, it’s best when you aren’t given the room to explain yourself.
Southland Tales or just the directors cut of Donnie Darko
Cruel, but fair.
Yes to all of this.
The Director’s Cut of Donnie Darko is a major step down, and both Kelly’s succeeding films made it clear that his brief career was a fluke.
It seems like there are at least four different definitions of confusing in regards to movies.1.) The movie is incompetently made on a fundamental level, and the director is failing to convey information or making sense of events that were supposed to be clear. Jokes and the odd plot hole aside, this doesn’t really happen in major studio releases anymore. Too much money goes into them to release something that even the lowest common denominator can’t understand or appreciate.2.) The movie’s plot is explicitly explained, but it’s using a premise that is different enough from other movies that if you miss the wrong five minutes or are on your phone while you watch it, you could conceivably miss enough information that the rest of the plot will be hard to follow. This is where a lot of the Nolan movies live. Inception or Memento are all laid out as long as you’re watching closely, but if you’re missing the set-up or transitions between states, things can go off the rails pretty fast (as opposed to, say, most romantic comedies or revenge thrillers, where you can skip 10-90% of the plot and still basically understand what’s going on).3.) The movie’s plot is so complicated or asks the viewer to infer so much of it that there’s little chance a normal person is going to fully understand what’s happening on the first run through. They don’t make a lot of these and they’re usually bad, but something like Primer would be an example of a film that does this and arguably pulls it off or is at least deliberately using the viewer’s confusion to make its point.
4.) The movie has abandoned traditional narrative rules of cause and effect and is instead using symbolism, abstract imagery, or dream logic to tell a “story.” This is what Meshes of the Afternoon, The Color of Pomegranates, the end of 2001, and Lynch’s most famous movies are doing.
2-4 are stylistic choices that aren’t inherently good or bad, but none of them are really the same thing.
Do the BIM! I always felt sad for Vladek Sheybal (who played Mr. Boogalow in The Apple). He was a guy who lucked out on having famous friends (he was a friend of Sean Connery and Michael Caine when they were all starving stage actors) and never seemed to benefit much from this association (although Connery got him the role of Kronsteen in From Russia with Love)
Also, isn’t Brazil a reverse Donnie Darko? The director’s cut is pretty clear cut but the studio didn’t like the downer ending, so they mandated something more ambiguous. While both versions got good reviews, the more straightforward director’s cut is generally regarded as the better film.
What kind of an 8 year old enjoys a full screening of 2001? You’d have to think 99.9% of 8 year olds on the planet would find it excruciatingly boring.
I was 10, I think, when my parents took me to see a re-release. My dad and older brothers were sci fi nerds so I was as ‘primed’ as I could have been, although I knew nothing of the story going in. I followed the first two parts well enough. Everything after HAL’s ‘death’ went right over my head. I can’t say I liked it, I still don’t know if I do, but it was and is a unique experience.
Nope. I was 12 when 2001 was first broadcast in TV. Loved every second even though I knew a lot of it was over my head. Made me want to understand more. I knew I still had a lot to learn about things and was intrigued by the challenge. I don’t think I was an outlier.
My partner and I don’t have the same tastes. I like nerdy stuff (obviously I spend alot of time here) and she finds the stuff I love ( Lynch, Wes Anderson, etc) boring . I took her to a screening of 2001 and warning her it might be boring and lo and behold she ended up loving the film, now anytime we see a movie that deals with AI she will make HAL jokes ( for MI: Dead Reckoning, she kept referring to the Entity as HAL)..I guess 2001 is a film you can’t underestimate for viewers you think will find it boring.
When I was 8, I saw ‘Yellow Submarine’ in the theater. I thought it was a kids cartoon, and maybe the parents thought so too. Little did we know the deeper meaning in the blue Meanies. All summer I kept telling everyone ‘I’ve got a hole in me pocket’.
I was probably that age, at least (maybe even younger), when my dad first showed it to me and I have loved that movie ever since.Don’t discount the intelligence of an eight year old.
Confusing: Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!
Complex: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive Wait, or is it the other way around?
My issue with Nolan is not so much that his plots are convoluted and/or confusing, it’s that the characters in his later films are not well-developed. I’ve loved films where I didn’t quite grok the narrative but still had a great time because the characters were engaging and delivered emotionally affecting performances. Nolan tries to do that, but the writing and directing isn’t there. I loved the concept in Inception. The laws and the layers of the dream world were terrifically told and visually stunning, but I felt nothing for DiCaprio’s character because the tragedy of his wife’s death wasn’t sold to me in a way that made me buy into his despair and desperation. The film tells me how I should feel, but again, the writing and direction isn’t there.This inability or unwillingness on Nolan’s part to write characters with whom we can empathize reaches its apex in Tenet, where the main character is literally only named Protagonist. It seems everyone is there solely to provide exposition, yet their conversations are incomprehensible because Nolan seems more interested in deafening the audience instead of informing them.Nolan is very talented at constructing complex mechanisms, but the machine has no soul.The Fountain is one of my favorite films, and that story is NOT confusing. The three stories are connected very clearly in the film. If you don’t get it, I really don’t know what to say.Having Donnie Darko mentioned is pretty funny to me because the main reason that film is regarded so highly is because the initial theatrical version is better than the later Director’s Cut, which eliminates the ambiguity and makes the film overtly science fiction. As such, it doesn’t work nearly as well because the mystery evaporates when you overexplain everything. Kelly’s brief career was a fluke.The Big Sleep is another ironic mention because IIRC, during production, Howard Hawks called up Raymond Chandler to clear up some questions about certain details in the story, and even Chandler couldn’t provide answers because he didn’t even understand his own novel! I’ve watched this film several times over the years and I still don’t have the foggiest notion of what’s going on, but Bogart and Bacall? I’m in!The Matrix was certainly artfully done, but I’d have to repress laughter in response to anyone calling it an art film. It’s SO overtly sci-fi action from the opening scene, but people do have a tendency to inject more meaning into something that they love which just isn’t there. Lots of failed relationships result from such fervent adoration, which is why it’s good to love films, but don’t LOVE films!
With The Big Sleep, reading Chandler’s novel cleared up the movie version for me. The novel has two cases, one for each sister. The movie version censors and cuts down the first case, Carmen’s, making all of its scenes seem weirdly pointless.I can even explain how Chandler made the plot hole involving the driver’s death. Chandler wrote the two cases in order. In Carmen’s case, the driver is killed and there is strong evidence that it was murder — Marlowe concludes that the driver killed Geiger and then got killed by another character. In the second case, Chandler decided to end it by tying it back to the first case, and having it turn out that Carmen was the one who killed Geiger. Chandler forgot that this failed to explain the driver’s death, creating the plot hole.
I think unconventional storytelling is often mislabeled as confusing. I saw ”2001” when I was an 8-year-old and pretty much got the gist of it (in fact, even then I thought way too much of the dialogue was too expository).Likewise, neither “Brazil” or “Blow-up” are head-scratchers. I’d define confusing more as the result of unfocused or just plain sloppy filmmaking but even then when a movie is as messily plotted as “The Big Sleep” it gets a pass if it’s that damned entertaining. Even “Eraserhead” (a film that should have gotten a mention here) makes sense on an intuitive level if you leave yourself open to the experience.I do appreciate the spirit of the article though at a time when movies have gotten mind numbingly prosaic. A little mystery and ambiguity can be a good thing and leave room in one’s skull for a film to really grow on you.
I sometimes mix up confusing with ‘so boring that I stopped paying attention’.
Referencing a few famous American and British directors, then paying lip service to the most obvious couple of older foreign language films doesn’t tell me you’ve really gone deep into challenging cinematic experiences. Which is fine, and this would be a decent undergrad paper for a Film Studies class…but why is it being published it what used to be a legitimately engaging pop culture site? See. More. Movies.
Brazil is a strange one for me. I’ve seen it many times over the decades, but I always forget it. I forget the plot. The characters. Just images appear in my head. None of them fit together. It’s the only film that does that to me.
Nolan movies aren’t confusing. They are just bad.
OW! FUCK! Who left this scorching hot take here?! These things are fucking dangerous!
The Matrix is a fantastic movie; I’d argue one of the best Science Fiction movies of all time. That said, the “the deeper philosophical questions” it asks are no deeper than those asked by stoned college freshmen after their first week of Philosophy for non-majors “What if this is all, like, an illusion, man…?”
Snowpiercer is hardly confusing. Same goes for Brazil. Unconventional, dystopian, or downbeat don’t necessarily = confusing do they. This article is a good start but ultimately a disappointing piece.
Neither the article, nor anyone in the comments, is going to mention Primer? Kinda shocked. Love that film, and even after multiple viewings I need an inforgraphic to explain what’s happening.
It can be rewarding to have your expectations usurped and conventional wisdom challenged, giving you something to debate afterward.I agree with this as written, but there’s a huge difference between confusion at the most basic level (e.g. “what’s happening on screen?” “who is this?” “why are they doing what they’re doing?”) versus complex morality or thematic material.For that matter, there’s a big difference between such confusion and mystery: in a mystery, you must understand exactly who people are and what’s going on in order to appreciate those aspects you do not understand.Some excellent movies and sequences have deliberate moments of confusion to provoke thought (I’m thinking here of Blade Runner, for instance), some are puzzle boxes (Memento), some are abstract (Mullholland Drive), but there are many, many more films that are flat-out confusing to no good effect.
There’s a big difference between a puzzle film like Lynch or Nolan or Aronofsky makes and a truly mysterious film that stays mysterious like Stalker – one is slightly more intelligent entertainment, the other is art
“The only reason problem-solving, goal-driven, jigsaw-puzzle pictures are so popular is because they are so infantile. It takes no knowledge of life, no sensitivity to emotions, to understand them. Film teachers love films like The Godfather, 2001, Blade Runner, or Pulp Fiction because they can be explained to a Freshman film class with ten catch phrases in fifty minutes. They require no understanding of people, no cultural awareness or historical knowledge. Make a film which you have to know something about life–about the difference between men and women, about what it is to be a parent or a child, about our states of emotional confusion–to appreciate. Make a film that you couldn’t have understood when you were in high school or college. Make a film a professor can’t reduce to metaphors and symbols.The problem is the lessons in these movies are too cheap. They don’t threaten any of our old ways of knowing. They are weightless emotional experiences. Their game playing defies gravity. There is nothing serious at stake. The emotions are superficial. As when we come out of the haunted house in a carnival, we blink into the light unchanged by the experience, forgetting it almost immediately. Real knowledge is not free; it must be paid for by giving up old understandings dear to us. And that always hurts, at least a little. As it said in my high school locker room: no pain no gain.”–Excerpted from Ray Carney, “The Path of the Artist,” Part III, MovieMaker, Issue 38 (Spring 2000).