This is why I think people are wrong when they say that “Don’t look up” is too heavy handed.
Feel like part of the theme was just how explicit you had to be for people to understand your metaphor. And even then you had a bunch of people saying it was about covid.
You need your main character to spend 2 minutes screaming at the camera about what the movie is saying to reach these people.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you are writing and have a point you need to literally, textually beat the reader over and about the head with it while unambiguously yelling exactly what you mean, or they will miss the point and walk away with the opposite conclusion that you intended. Every work of fiction should be at risk of turning into a polemic. Symbolism, subtlety, and allegory are tasty treats that authors are only allowed to have after they’ve bluntly made their point.
The real solution is more just being conscious and aware of how things can be misinterpreted and how the expected audience’s biases will effect how they interpret it (so Starship Troopers to a leftist audience is funny satire, but to an American audience is just saying what Americans unironically believe but in a silly way). But that’s soft, easily forgotten advice compared to an exhortation to always be blunt and hyperbolic, delivered in a blunt and hyperbolic way.
This is why I think people are wrong when they say that “Don’t look up” is too heavy handed.
Feel like part of the theme was just how explicit you had to be for people to understand your metaphor. And even then you had a bunch of people saying it was about covid.
You need your main character to spend 2 minutes screaming at the camera about what the movie is saying to reach these people.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you are writing and have a point you need to literally, textually beat the reader over and about the head with it while unambiguously yelling exactly what you mean, or they will miss the point and walk away with the opposite conclusion that you intended. Every work of fiction should be at risk of turning into a polemic. Symbolism, subtlety, and allegory are tasty treats that authors are only allowed to have after they’ve bluntly made their point.
Ok but counterpoint, that sounds like a really unfun, boring, and artistically questionable way to write fiction.
Honestly i think the solution is just accepting that morons are not the responsability of the author lol
The real solution is more just being conscious and aware of how things can be misinterpreted and how the expected audience’s biases will effect how they interpret it (so Starship Troopers to a leftist audience is funny satire, but to an American audience is just saying what Americans unironically believe but in a silly way). But that’s soft, easily forgotten advice compared to an exhortation to always be blunt and hyperbolic, delivered in a blunt and hyperbolic way.
That plus accepting that art follows politics, not vice-versa.