"Sometimes," Sigmund Freud said, "a cigar is just a cigar." We all know what this means. Sometimes instead of a deeper symbolic meaning, it is what it is. When it comes to film and literature, many writers and directors do in fact put in a deeper meaning to a scene. Have you ever seen Citizen Kane? As Kane and his wife eat dinner, and time progresses, the viewer sees the two separated by a longer and longer table. This idea is to symbolize the love leaving their marriage as they are growing farther apart. That was probably intentional. The same can be said in literature as well. Sometimes an author purposely puts in a symbol to mean something. Look at George Orwell's Animal Farm. It was (and is) no secret that Orwell was using the characters in the story as an allegory for Stalin's Soviet Union.
Still, as Freud said, sometimes we have to take it at face value. Sometimes we read into aspects of film, or literature, or dreams, or even life that mean nothing. A student of mine talked to me about a dream she had. She was sitting at her desk at school working on homework. That's all she did in the dream. "What does it mean?" she asked me. This one is pretty simple. "You were doing homework before bed, weren't you?" I asked. "Yes, I was." she replied. "Case solved. You had homework on the brain." Now this one is pretty easy, but there are others that maybe go a little too far. Hell, I'm even guilty of that. When I was in college, I wrote a paper about Scooby-Doo. That's right, good old Mystery Inc. I wrote about how Scooby and Shaggy were Heroin addicts. I put it this way:
1. Scooby and Shaggy would only go down the tunnel for a Scooby snack. Scooby snacks were essentially "fixes".
2. Whenever Scooby has a Scooby snack, he has the ability to float after he eats it. Perhaps he just feels like he's floating.
3. He and Shaggy always see the monsters first. Maybe there is no monster, and it's a side effect.
You get the idea. Now I don't think that Hanna and Barbera had this in mind when they created the show. It was not about drugs (even though it was 1969) but rather about a talking dog that solves mysteries with his friends. I read too much into the subtext (and got an A-, because my teacher said I was ruining one of her favorite cartoons). I bring this up, because I read an article the other day where a critic accused George Lucas of being "Anti-Bush" and using Star Wars as a diatribe. So here's the thing: I have been in a few film study classes. Sometimes we shouldn't read too deep into films. For example: (I'll use Star Wars again) At the end of the first Star Wars (and I mean the 1977 film) Luke flies through the canyon and fires a missile into the Death Star. Now, a critic and scholar (whose name I have forgotten) said that the destruction of the Death Star via the Luke's run was in fact about rape and Lucas' feelings about rape. Huh? I never got that idea. I really don't think that's what Lucas had in mind when he shot that. I think it was just about blowing something up. So when I read that this critic thinks that Lucas is making a diatribe that is ant-Bush, I, once again, felt that someone was reading something that was not there. It's like the Disney cartoons. Do you really think that the writers and Disney animators really were trying to make a statement about being a homosexual with The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Yes, of course it can be construed that way. Just like everything can be construed a certain way if enough is applied to it. Thus the song "Kiss the Girl" from the Little Mermaid is really about rape as well, because the little crab says, "You know you want to, so just kiss the girl." I really don't think that's what they had in mind.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe everything in life really has a meaning, and nothing can be just taken at face value. The problem is that if we read into everything then we lose the ability to trust what is being said to one another. Maybe that comment I made really was a hidden insult? Maybe when someone says, "I love you," it really means, "I love you this much, but I would love you more if you did this for me." I would like think that Freud was right. Sometimes we say something or see something, and it just is what it is. No more, no less.
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