Lots of good suggestions as I write this. One I'd consider, though I regrettably don't have a convenient reference (and it really ought to be for something you

Lots of good suggestions as I write this. One I'd consider, though I regrettably don't have a convenient reference (and it really ought to be for something you've seen), is finding the director/author/composer of some work you like speaking directly about what they meant to put into the piece. There's the whole "death of the author" concept (that it doesn't matter what they put into it, it just matters what you see), but I think sometimes that gets taken too far, if not waaaaaay too far, because if you squint hard enough, you can read anything into anything. But if you can do that, there is no point to the reading. There's a "mirror reflecting you back to yourself", and then there's just "yourself", squinting so hard that it ceases to matter what you are squinting at. I am not a big fan of this myself. But the authors really are putting additional things into their works, and it can help to hear that from them directly. Also, now that I think about it, the Easy Mode for this sort of thing may be sci-fi television, where the superficial distance from the viewer's life and issues lets them encode things more directly and, well, frankly, at times clumsily than a more direct handling might be able to (because everyone's psychological defenses would raise). You could start with something like the Star Trek Original Series episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708435/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708435/ Being a bit removed from your cultural milieu may also help. I dunno if I'd call this one "clumsy" but it sure is blatent. You ought to be able to work out the subtext.