[lbo-talk] "Ambiguities"

[Miles Jackson]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> It doesn't take a Marxist to see Poltergeist and notice that the film  
> attributes the cause of ghostly disturbance to the desecration of  
> Indian burial grounds, because it's explicitly discussed in the  
> dialogue at length (rather than fleetingly hinted at by images).   Some 
> viewers may still choose to ignore inconvenient or unpleasant  
> interpretive cues -- even if they were declared in CAPITAL LETTERS as  
> intertitles -- but that doesn't make moot the distinction between a  
> text that provides such cues or clues (Poltergeist) and a text that  
> does not (Jaws).

My point is this: is does not matter how "obvious" or "blatant" the 
meaning is to you; the signficance of the art is a social product, 
based on the varied interpretation, debate, and negotiation of the 
people who witness the art.  The artist--or a specific 
interpreter--cannot "force" the art to have a specific meaning, no 
matter how obvious the meaning may seem to the artist.

--Example: the popularity of "Every breath you take" at weddings. 
Sting meant this to be a creepy song about a stalker, but it is 
interpreted and used as a love song by many people in our society. 
Sure, that's not the artist's intent, but the meaning and importance 
of a work of art in a society has little to do with the artist's intent.

So if everybody in our society decided that "Jaws" was a symbolic 
representation of the horrors of capitalism, then yes, regardless of 
Spielberg's intentions, in our society Jaws would be a movie with an 
anti-capitalist message.

Miles