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arguing that we should embrace ambiguity. This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something. "You decide how it e

arguing that we should embrace ambiguity. This is probably my most despised media trend of the 21st century, and that's saying something. "You decide how it ended" "You decide if she lived or died" "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" "It means whatever you want it to mean" It's an excuse for lazy writing and for being too cowardly to make decisions.

jerf 5y ago
I feel similarly about the "twist" that "it was just a dream!" or something similar. It's already fiction. It's already made up. If I wanted to be stuck with just the stories & endings and such I could make up, I wouldn't be coming to you for a story. Not that there isn't room for ambiguity or complexity or anything, but, I already know what I think. I'm here precisely to find out what someone else thinks, and "well, what do you think?" is not very helpful.
- Joeboy 5y ago
  "It was just a dream" only works if it suggests an actual ending. Eg. Brazil, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I don't think it's a viable twist in itself.
  - recursive 5y ago
    "Scenic Route" is another movie that does this. I like it.
  - earleybird 5y ago
    Which ending of Brazil?
    - Joeboy 5y ago
      Not the Sid Sheinberg "Love Conquers All" ending, if that's what you're getting at! I did watch it once, hard to believe that seemed like a good idea to anybody. Makes me wonder how many other great films we lost to that kind of studio butchery.
graposaymaname 5y ago
Well it might be at times. But there are movies/stories where it adds a whole different layer upon leaving that decision to the viewer. For me the final scene in Inception is a really good example of using the above said ambiguity.
leephillips 5y ago
Ambiguity, the planting of multiple possible interpretations, has been a part of art forever. All art: literature, painting, etc. I would even say it’s an integral part of the best art.
- dang 5y ago
  Yes, but not ambiguity about the basic facts of a story. That's a modern thing as far as I know. It's also a risky artistic move because it thwarts one of the main satisfactions in a story, the resolution of tension. If you're going to take that away, you'd better 'give' something that's equally satisfying, or else the reader/viewer will feel cheated.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    I think this has become a modern trend especially in long-form art (television, book series), where it's been noticed that mystery plots are a good way of attracting and maintaining an audience with much less effort than crafting a satisfying narrative takes. That's how we get things like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, or the Game of Thrones TV show (perhaps the ASOIAF books as well, but time will tell), as two prime examples of captivating the audience without a clear plan.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    > but not ambiguity about the basic facts of a story. Really?? The "unreliably narrator" is a classic literary device that introduces ambiguity about the basic facts of many well loved stories. See "Wuthering Heights" as an almost 200 year old example, or "The Handmaid's Tale" as an extreme example of factual ambiguity from about 40 years ago.
    - dang 5y ago
      Unreliable narrator is something different. How do you know the narrator is unreliable in the first place? Because the story includes enough information to contradict them. The narrator is unreliable, but the author is not—you're relying on the author to subtly inform you that the narrator can't be trusted. That's a device which goes back much earlier, at least to the romantics. What we're talking about here is different. "Unreliable author" might be a good name for it though.
bazeblackwood 5y ago
The art understander has logged on.
- dang 5y ago
  Can you please not post unsubstantive/flamebait comments to HN, and especially not snarky ones? We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
nimih 5y ago
Ah yes, the famously lazy and cowardly filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch.
- ratww 5y ago
  I don’t think those two are a good example of the trend. Especially Lynch. While he leaves a lot of small details for interpretation, he does it from the beginning and doesn’t ask the viewers to decide between a story-changing yes/no answer like Inception. It’s like Hitchcock’s McGuffin: would be fun to know but it doesn’t detract from the story. Even Twin Peaks second season famous cliffhanger leaves no doubt about what happened to Bob and Agent Cooper.
  - nimih 5y ago
    Admittedly, Kubrick is the better example here than Lynch: 2001 is a stellar example of both "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" (w/r/t HAL's behavior) and "It means whatever you want it to mean" (Kubrick quite famously refused to provide any sort of guidance whatsoever as to how it should be interpreted) For Lynch, Mulholland Drive was on my mind--probably since it was mentioned in the article--as the ending (and, honestly, the narrative structure as a whole) requires the viewer to bring quite a lot of assuming and surmising to the table in order to arrive at something coherent. Perhaps the OP meant to purposefully exclude explicitly surreal and abstract works from their critique, but that's certainly not the tone I got from their post. Perhaps a better counter example could've been Kelly Reichardt's filmography, as she is also quite clearly a meticulous and thoughtful filmmaker (I remember hearing a profile of her on some NPR show a number of years ago that talked about the amount of time she spent getting even the ambient bird songs in Certain Women accurate, or reading her comments about how she would've filmed First Cow in a different aspect ratio if she had known COVID was going to keep it from being widely seen in theaters), but typically cuts off the narrative abruptly, leaving plenty of loose ends dangling: Meek's Cutoff and First Cow are probably the best examples. As an aside, I feel like the point of Nolan leaving the ending of Inception with an open-ended yes-no question is intended to highlight that, from the character's perspective, the answer no longer matters. I dislike the film for other reasons, and don't particularly like Nolan's screenplays in general, but that particular choice seems pretty reasonable in the broader narrative context of the film.
stuart78 5y ago
Like any other technique, leaving on a question can be a poor substitute for a more fitting ending, but when done properly it can reinforce a core theme within the work. I am not a huge Inception fan, but I do think the cut at the end is an important part of the movie and a good example of effective ambiguity. It might scratch an itch to show the top falling of hold longer (to confirm he is in a dream), but what value comes from that resolution? Ending the film before the answer allows us to think about what we've seen earlier to try and answer it for ourselves. Even though the movie is over, the audience is left with a part to play as they leave the theater.
ubermonkey 5y ago
This is a deeply predictable (and pedestrian) take, and I 100% expected to see it here (as I expect to see it in any technical forum). Highly technical people -- developers, engineers, etc -- are much more likely (at least in my experience) to react negatively to nonlinear storytelling. Further, the reaction is almost never "wow, not for me" but instead "THIS IS STUPID". It's essentially the equivalent of walking through, say, a Mondrian exhibit and spouting "my kid can do that." I do not know why this correlation exists. I could make guesses, tying the exacting nature of programming with an attraction to well-defined and explicit storytelling, but it is what it is. THE BIG SLEEP is awesome. MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a tremendous (and award-winning) film. Ambiguity and vagueness are integral to art (and life!). Years ago, I saw a play by Maria Irene Fornes called THE DANUBE. It's a bizarre, baffling, and beautiful piece, and you cannot really approach it like you would (say) a Marvel film expecting a traditional narrative. That's not what it's FOR. It's an experience. You have to let go of the desire to tick off plot points and characters like players in a football program and just experience the art on its own terms. Creating something that includes, or even hinges on, ambiguity is challenging in the extreme. It's like when jazz musicians break the "rules" of music and melody; you can only break the rules and have it work when you have really mastered the underlying craft. Exploring these kinds of challenging works can be incredibly rewarding. I encourage anyone reading this to do so. I long ago decided that if I only ever saw plays/read books/watched movies that I liked, I wasn't branching out enough. Find things that challenge you, and engage them on their own terms. Figure out why (for example) a host of professional movie critics loved Lynch's film when it left you cold and maybe even angry. What do they see that you don't?
- ryandvm 5y ago
  Programmers are generally unhappy with fuzziness or else they wouldn't be good programmers.
  - Joeboy 5y ago
    The enjoyment of figuring out what's going on in something like Mulholland Drive is rather similar to the enjoyment of debugging a complex bug. There's a frustration about it not immediately making sense, but there's also a pleasure to working it out. Primer on the other hand, I think all you can really do is accept that there are big unexplained gaps in the story, and no amount of debugging is going to help. I personally take that as a fun hint of a larger story you're not seeing. Never seen The Big Sleep so not sure which it's more like.
nonameiguess 5y ago
It's interesting that you're citing a film made 60 years before the 21st century as an example of a 21st century trend. If anything, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Star Wars tried to explain where the force comes from. Christopher Nolan includes ridiculously detailed exposition dumps explaining everything (in spite of the ambiguous ending of Inception, everything about how the world worked was explained in meticulous detail). Even the canonical mystery box master himself, Damon Lindelof, took to heart all the backlash about the non-explanation ending of Lost. Nobody expected The Leftovers would ever give an explanation of what caused the Sudden Departure, but it did. Heck, even David Lynch himself gave Laura Palmer an origin story in Twin Peaks: The Return! And even where he tried to preserve some mystery, the companion book by Mark Frost explained all of it.
- psychomugs 5y ago
  I really root for Nolan; I very much liked Interstellar and enjoyed Tenet, but I think he's a clear example of someone who excelled so much at a commercial medium that the get-the-most-butts-in-seats factor necessitates the exposition diarrhea. There's just enough ambiguity for the common pseudo-news-site or vlogger to make "the ending of $FILMTITLE REALLY explained" content. I think Lynch, who's learned to "rule over small films than serve large corporate ones" [1], probably bent over a little bit to get The Return made, but I still left with as many, if not more, questions as I had coming in. [1] https://youtu.be/GopJ1x7vK2Q?t=567 https://youtu.be/GopJ1x7vK2Q?t=567
chowells 5y ago
Exactly none of those are what ambiguity means. Ambiguity means that there are multiple resolutions that fit the existing evidence equally well. That doesn't mean you get to decide. Ambiguity isn't choose your own adventure. You aren't having agency assigned to you in order to be the ultimate arbiter. Ambiguity is the opposite. You are having agency withheld and being told by the author that you don't get to know. It's an exercise in accepting that some things are unknowable and a challenge to you to find enjoyment in the story despite that. Maybe you fail at that challenge. That's ok. Some people demand their art be unlike life, in that everything is always fully explained. But some people enjoy the construction, the ride, and the occasional recollection and reconsideration as time goes on. Ambiguous art is for for them. But it's not a choose your own adventure story for anyone.
- ghaff 5y ago
  It depends on the film. Without getting into a long rambling film analysis, there are certainly films (Inception is probably one), for example, in which the ending really is ambiguous and those assert otherwise are probably looking a little too deeply into discerning patterns in the tea leaves. There are others (probably including Total Recall) where there is a logical argument to be made as to why the film actually ended in a particular way.
wccrawford 5y ago
I absolutely agree. I love being made to think during a movie. I despise the movie ending without an ending. It's incredibly easy to set up a scenario that could have multiple endings, but it's hard to see what the ending actually is before it happens. It's a lot more entertaining and satisfying to view that scenario to the end and then have the tale end in a satisfying way. Any idiot can come up with an ending to those tales. (And they do, because you'll find them posted on the internet afterwards, even if the movie already has one!) Only good writers can come up with good endings.
- recursive 5y ago
  Sometimes I enjoy not being satisfied. On a few occasions, I've even not watched or read the end of a work, just to keep the possibilities open in my mind. Stories with big open questions have the ability to stick with me longer. Sometimes I like that.

jerf 5y ago

I feel similarly about the "twist" that "it was just a dream!" or something similar. It's already fiction. It's already made up. If I wanted to be stuck with just the stories & endings and such I could make up, I wouldn't be coming to you for a story. Not that there isn't room for ambiguity or complexity or anything, but, I already know what I think. I'm here precisely to find out what someone else thinks, and "well, what do you think?" is not very helpful.

Joeboy 5y ago
"It was just a dream" only works if it suggests an actual ending. Eg. Brazil, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I don't think it's a viable twist in itself.
- recursive 5y ago
  "Scenic Route" is another movie that does this. I like it.
- earleybird 5y ago
  Which ending of Brazil?
  - Joeboy 5y ago
    Not the Sid Sheinberg "Love Conquers All" ending, if that's what you're getting at! I did watch it once, hard to believe that seemed like a good idea to anybody. Makes me wonder how many other great films we lost to that kind of studio butchery.

graposaymaname 5y ago

Well it might be at times. But there are movies/stories where it adds a whole different layer upon leaving that decision to the viewer. For me the final scene in Inception is a really good example of using the above said ambiguity.

leephillips 5y ago

Ambiguity, the planting of multiple possible interpretations, has been a part of art forever. All art: literature, painting, etc. I would even say it’s an integral part of the best art.

dang 5y ago
Yes, but not ambiguity about the basic facts of a story. That's a modern thing as far as I know. It's also a risky artistic move because it thwarts one of the main satisfactions in a story, the resolution of tension. If you're going to take that away, you'd better 'give' something that's equally satisfying, or else the reader/viewer will feel cheated.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  I think this has become a modern trend especially in long-form art (television, book series), where it's been noticed that mystery plots are a good way of attracting and maintaining an audience with much less effort than crafting a satisfying narrative takes. That's how we get things like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, or the Game of Thrones TV show (perhaps the ASOIAF books as well, but time will tell), as two prime examples of captivating the audience without a clear plan.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  > but not ambiguity about the basic facts of a story. Really?? The "unreliably narrator" is a classic literary device that introduces ambiguity about the basic facts of many well loved stories. See "Wuthering Heights" as an almost 200 year old example, or "The Handmaid's Tale" as an extreme example of factual ambiguity from about 40 years ago.
  - dang 5y ago
    Unreliable narrator is something different. How do you know the narrator is unreliable in the first place? Because the story includes enough information to contradict them. The narrator is unreliable, but the author is not—you're relying on the author to subtly inform you that the narrator can't be trusted. That's a device which goes back much earlier, at least to the romantics. What we're talking about here is different. "Unreliable author" might be a good name for it though.

bazeblackwood 5y ago

The art understander has logged on.

dang 5y ago
Can you please not post unsubstantive/flamebait comments to HN, and especially not snarky ones? We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nimih 5y ago

Ah yes, the famously lazy and cowardly filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch.

ratww 5y ago
I don’t think those two are a good example of the trend. Especially Lynch. While he leaves a lot of small details for interpretation, he does it from the beginning and doesn’t ask the viewers to decide between a story-changing yes/no answer like Inception. It’s like Hitchcock’s McGuffin: would be fun to know but it doesn’t detract from the story. Even Twin Peaks second season famous cliffhanger leaves no doubt about what happened to Bob and Agent Cooper.
- nimih 5y ago
  Admittedly, Kubrick is the better example here than Lynch: 2001 is a stellar example of both "Their motivations for doing that are up to you" (w/r/t HAL's behavior) and "It means whatever you want it to mean" (Kubrick quite famously refused to provide any sort of guidance whatsoever as to how it should be interpreted) For Lynch, Mulholland Drive was on my mind--probably since it was mentioned in the article--as the ending (and, honestly, the narrative structure as a whole) requires the viewer to bring quite a lot of assuming and surmising to the table in order to arrive at something coherent. Perhaps the OP meant to purposefully exclude explicitly surreal and abstract works from their critique, but that's certainly not the tone I got from their post. Perhaps a better counter example could've been Kelly Reichardt's filmography, as she is also quite clearly a meticulous and thoughtful filmmaker (I remember hearing a profile of her on some NPR show a number of years ago that talked about the amount of time she spent getting even the ambient bird songs in Certain Women accurate, or reading her comments about how she would've filmed First Cow in a different aspect ratio if she had known COVID was going to keep it from being widely seen in theaters), but typically cuts off the narrative abruptly, leaving plenty of loose ends dangling: Meek's Cutoff and First Cow are probably the best examples. As an aside, I feel like the point of Nolan leaving the ending of Inception with an open-ended yes-no question is intended to highlight that, from the character's perspective, the answer no longer matters. I dislike the film for other reasons, and don't particularly like Nolan's screenplays in general, but that particular choice seems pretty reasonable in the broader narrative context of the film.

stuart78 5y ago

Like any other technique, leaving on a question can be a poor substitute for a more fitting ending, but when done properly it can reinforce a core theme within the work. I am not a huge Inception fan, but I do think the cut at the end is an important part of the movie and a good example of effective ambiguity. It might scratch an itch to show the top falling of hold longer (to confirm he is in a dream), but what value comes from that resolution? Ending the film before the answer allows us to think about what we've seen earlier to try and answer it for ourselves. Even though the movie is over, the audience is left with a part to play as they leave the theater.

ubermonkey 5y ago

This is a deeply predictable (and pedestrian) take, and I 100% expected to see it here (as I expect to see it in any technical forum). Highly technical people -- developers, engineers, etc -- are much more likely (at least in my experience) to react negatively to nonlinear storytelling. Further, the reaction is almost never "wow, not for me" but instead "THIS IS STUPID". It's essentially the equivalent of walking through, say, a Mondrian exhibit and spouting "my kid can do that." I do not know why this correlation exists. I could make guesses, tying the exacting nature of programming with an attraction to well-defined and explicit storytelling, but it is what it is. THE BIG SLEEP is awesome. MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a tremendous (and award-winning) film. Ambiguity and vagueness are integral to art (and life!). Years ago, I saw a play by Maria Irene Fornes called THE DANUBE. It's a bizarre, baffling, and beautiful piece, and you cannot really approach it like you would (say) a Marvel film expecting a traditional narrative. That's not what it's FOR. It's an experience. You have to let go of the desire to tick off plot points and characters like players in a football program and just experience the art on its own terms. Creating something that includes, or even hinges on, ambiguity is challenging in the extreme. It's like when jazz musicians break the "rules" of music and melody; you can only break the rules and have it work when you have really mastered the underlying craft. Exploring these kinds of challenging works can be incredibly rewarding. I encourage anyone reading this to do so. I long ago decided that if I only ever saw plays/read books/watched movies that I liked, I wasn't branching out enough. Find things that challenge you, and engage them on their own terms. Figure out why (for example) a host of professional movie critics loved Lynch's film when it left you cold and maybe even angry. What do they see that you don't?

ryandvm 5y ago
Programmers are generally unhappy with fuzziness or else they wouldn't be good programmers.
- Joeboy 5y ago
  The enjoyment of figuring out what's going on in something like Mulholland Drive is rather similar to the enjoyment of debugging a complex bug. There's a frustration about it not immediately making sense, but there's also a pleasure to working it out. Primer on the other hand, I think all you can really do is accept that there are big unexplained gaps in the story, and no amount of debugging is going to help. I personally take that as a fun hint of a larger story you're not seeing. Never seen The Big Sleep so not sure which it's more like.

nonameiguess 5y ago

It's interesting that you're citing a film made 60 years before the 21st century as an example of a 21st century trend. If anything, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Star Wars tried to explain where the force comes from. Christopher Nolan includes ridiculously detailed exposition dumps explaining everything (in spite of the ambiguous ending of Inception, everything about how the world worked was explained in meticulous detail). Even the canonical mystery box master himself, Damon Lindelof, took to heart all the backlash about the non-explanation ending of Lost. Nobody expected The Leftovers would ever give an explanation of what caused the Sudden Departure, but it did. Heck, even David Lynch himself gave Laura Palmer an origin story in Twin Peaks: The Return! And even where he tried to preserve some mystery, the companion book by Mark Frost explained all of it.

psychomugs 5y ago
I really root for Nolan; I very much liked Interstellar and enjoyed Tenet, but I think he's a clear example of someone who excelled so much at a commercial medium that the get-the-most-butts-in-seats factor necessitates the exposition diarrhea. There's just enough ambiguity for the common pseudo-news-site or vlogger to make "the ending of $FILMTITLE REALLY explained" content. I think Lynch, who's learned to "rule over small films than serve large corporate ones" [1], probably bent over a little bit to get The Return made, but I still left with as many, if not more, questions as I had coming in. [1] https://youtu.be/GopJ1x7vK2Q?t=567 https://youtu.be/GopJ1x7vK2Q?t=567

chowells 5y ago

Exactly none of those are what ambiguity means. Ambiguity means that there are multiple resolutions that fit the existing evidence equally well. That doesn't mean you get to decide. Ambiguity isn't choose your own adventure. You aren't having agency assigned to you in order to be the ultimate arbiter. Ambiguity is the opposite. You are having agency withheld and being told by the author that you don't get to know. It's an exercise in accepting that some things are unknowable and a challenge to you to find enjoyment in the story despite that. Maybe you fail at that challenge. That's ok. Some people demand their art be unlike life, in that everything is always fully explained. But some people enjoy the construction, the ride, and the occasional recollection and reconsideration as time goes on. Ambiguous art is for for them. But it's not a choose your own adventure story for anyone.

ghaff 5y ago
It depends on the film. Without getting into a long rambling film analysis, there are certainly films (Inception is probably one), for example, in which the ending really is ambiguous and those assert otherwise are probably looking a little too deeply into discerning patterns in the tea leaves. There are others (probably including Total Recall) where there is a logical argument to be made as to why the film actually ended in a particular way.

wccrawford 5y ago

I absolutely agree. I love being made to think during a movie. I despise the movie ending without an ending. It's incredibly easy to set up a scenario that could have multiple endings, but it's hard to see what the ending actually is before it happens. It's a lot more entertaining and satisfying to view that scenario to the end and then have the tale end in a satisfying way. Any idiot can come up with an ending to those tales. (And they do, because you'll find them posted on the internet afterwards, even if the movie already has one!) Only good writers can come up with good endings.

recursive 5y ago
Sometimes I enjoy not being satisfied. On a few occasions, I've even not watched or read the end of a work, just to keep the possibilities open in my mind. Stories with big open questions have the ability to stick with me longer. Sometimes I like that.