Meaning And Intention

So there's something that's been on my mind for the past couple of days, as the result of two different conversations with two different people. In the first instance, I was talking about the characters in my book and realized that, taken in a certain context, my characters really represent a pretty powerful metaphor for the issues of one's sexual identity and whether gender is something defined by a person's body, or by the mental image one has for one's self.

In the other conversation, we were talking about Avatar, and whether it was "too preachy."

Now, my thoughts on the matter (I'm building to a larger point, don't worry) is that for a movie to be "preachy," the message has to be the point. There are undeniably movies that have a message, that tell a certain story because the creator wants the audience to understand and hopefully come to accept his or her personal view. The message is the focus, it's the entire purpose for the movie. The story is entirely a device for conveying that message.

On the other hand, you have movies in which the message is entirely incidental to the message that one takes away from the film. Avatar, in my opinion, is a good example of this. While it certainly has all the tropes in place about overthrowing the evil capitalistic machine that seeks to despoil the pristine natural world, I don't think James Cameron really wants us to walk out of his movie and run off to the rainforest to fight logging or whatever. All of the tropes invoked, despite perhaps conveying that particular message, were largely inconsequential; they happened only because that's the particular story Cameron wanted to tell.

One might say that a writer or director or creative person should be cognizant of the message that invariably appears in their works. If it wasn't Cameron's intention to portray modernity as an evil force in Avatar, he shouldn't have made them all seem like such bastards. He should have told a different story, or been more careful about the story he was telling.

I don't think that's fair, though. Speaking entirely from the perspective of a creative type, you tell the story that you want to tell. You tell the story that's on your mind, in your heart, the one you feel passionately about. You make the story that you want to make. So, my little novel about a fallen angel turns out to have some powerful metaphors about transgendered individuals and perceptions of sexual identity. Okay. Awesome. That doesn't mean that's why I wrote it, and that doesn't mean that's what I'm trying to tell people who will read my story. It's just something that happened as a result of the particular story I chose to tell.

The reality is that when you make something, be it a movie or a novel, as soon as you release it into the world, it's no longer yours. As soon as it enters the mind of your reader, or your audience, it becomes theirs to do with as they will (violations of copyright notwithstanding, of course). They can read into it how they wish, take away from it whatever they wish to take away from it. You can tell them they are wrong, that such a message was not your intent, and you might well be right... but that won't stop them. It shouldn't stop them, because all too often, the work in question is larger than the creator. The work will have layers that the creator never even dreamed existed, because in so many ways, the creator is little more than a conduit for the story itself, the means by which the story is brought into the world.

If a movie specifically tells me to run out and save all the trees, and the director made said movie with that specific goal in mind, okay, fine. That's the message. But if a director makes a movie about a beautiful natural world and an invading force, and the point of the story is to become engaged with the characters and the world he or she has created, then the message is largely inconsequential. My inadvertent metaphor about sexual identity does not mean I have personal opinions on the matter, or that I want my readers to embrace my opinions. It's just something that happened, it's a sort of baggage that carries along as a result of invoking storytelling tropes and using a shared language in which volumes of meaning are often embodied in something as small as a single word choice.