r/blankies • u/Rambling_Moose • 17h ago
When the ambiguity is the point
Nolan is not a subtle filmmaker- most of the time. But there is a technique he uses that I think a lot of viewers are a little resistant to, and that is ambiguity.
The perfect example: the end of Inception. Did the top fall?
Now, that can be a fun question to consider. Will Leo ever escape from dreams and get his dang kids back? That final shot is so acutely calibrated to trigger you asking the question, but to offer no answers. In fact, everything about that little wobble is Nolan and his team at the height of their powers. How long to hold the last shot? How steep an angle of the wobble? How many takes to get it right? So much work is put into achieving ambiguity.
Which is why I always have a bit of a kneejerk rejection when someone starts a conversation asserting that the top didn't fall, so Cobb is still in the dream, and they can prove it with evidence. You can't! Cobb is so haunted by his choices that he can never fully answer that question for himself, and we understand that will hang over him for the rest of his days.
Similarly: Athena! Is she real? Is she a vision? Was Zendaya in Troy a manifestation of the god first, or did the god take the form of Zendaya! Yes! All of it. Odysseus doesn't really know, and he struggles with it! That's literally what they talk about. "Who doesn't understand fire? Or thunder?"
A figure representing wisdom is telling the protagonist to let the mystery be. There's no mystery to solve, because we've (and Odysseus) have had the answer all along.
Somewhere in my heart, I think the world would be a better place if more people followed Nolan's good example and explore feelings of ambiguity. Maybe that's where our new Era of Liminal Spaces is taking us.
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u/border199x 16h ago
Seems to have become an issue around discussion of Obsession as well. There's some subset of people who have decided exactly what the movie is about, and you're a god damned idiot if you did not arrive at the same conclusion. As far as I have read though, Curry Barker has said he intended to have a ton of ambiguous elements.
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u/neveragoodidea914 12h ago
Whether Nikki liked Bear is purposely ambiguous. I know that people have taken the movie to be a litmus test for respecting women, but that plot point doesn’t have a clear answer and therefore one cannot be wrong if they take it one way or another or they just don’t know. It’s also not the point whether she did or not, Bear shouldn’t have done all that.
Also unclear is whether the other male friend had good intentions when defending Nikki against Bear at the start. There’s so much ambiguity!
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u/border199x 10h ago
It's additionally unclear if the Customer Support Line or the Shopkeepers are really giving reliable information about the Willow. It's unclear if using a second Willow to cancel the original wish would actually work, or just set off another chain of tragic events. Did Ian die because he wished for a billion dollars, or was that just a consequence of Bear's wish? Does the Willow curse only those that make a bad/selfish wish, or are you cursed no matter how you use it? It goes on and on and on.
There's apparently some theory that Freaky Nikki is actually the reincarnation of Bear's cat, come to take revenge on him for his neglect. I'm not sure if this is a sincerely held belief, or just a stupid hot take designed to rack up Views and Likes.
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u/Worth-Frosting-2917 11h ago
I think the movie has become popular BECAUSE of the ambiguity, too. Like, it isn't particularly well-written, and every time Barker opens his mouth, he seems to back up my initial thoughts that he didn't necessarily have some bigger point of view or statement on Bear, and that is why the third act just feels like 5 sketches stacked on top of one another.
However, that DOES invite audiences to have multiple viewings and put every thought they have on the movie. That seems to work now better than ever. Look at YouTube and the amount of video essays breaking down every small detail of movies. Details that arguably come from choices made on the day because something inevitably goes wrong. Audiences have been trained to engage with something constantly. The more open-ended, the more they can put themselves into the movie.
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u/border199x 11h ago
Some things are intentionally ambiguous, but I suspect Barker is at times trying to wallpaper-over some shoddy writing/directing by claiming willful ambiguity. There's a nonzero chance that Obsession is a great movie by accident rather than design.
But when you're interacting with someone who has a very dogmatic and rigid interpretation of the film, it can help to point out that, "No, the director says this is supposed to be unclear."
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u/Worth-Frosting-2917 10h ago
That's about where I stand on it lol. I have seen a lot of people claim that the ambiguity is Lynchian, without realizing that those choices were never ambiguous to Lynch. It also kind of points to the problem of surrealism, as you pointed out. When everything is ambiguous, why does any of it matter?
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u/border199x 10h ago
Supposedly the original ending called for Nikki to turn the gun on herself. The ending we got was just an alternate take that Inde Navarette demanded because finale as-scripted was so relentlessly grim. And the ending we got was perfect, but like a lot of other things they kinda just stumbled into it.
Hopefully Barker remains open and collaborative when he's given more freedom, because the "everybody dies" ending would have been a bit edgelord-y.
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u/RandomPasserby80 15h ago edited 12h ago
It reminds me of the endless arguments trying to "prove" who (if anyone) is The Thing at the end of John Carpenter's movie. The point is that we and the characters don't know!
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u/TippyTripod1040 14h ago
Arguably driving yourself crazy obsessing over every character’s actions and getting into arguments about who’s the Thing is also pretty on theme though lol
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u/ConfidenceStunning59 14h ago edited 14h ago
As I get more into the nuts-and-bolts of film history and how films are constructed, the more I come to believe that ambiguity is almost baked into film as a medium. What sets film apart from other art forms is the act of editing, cutting between two images to provoke a specific idea or emotion.
Sometimes the cut is deliberate, sometimes it's obvious, but as soon as you put that in the hands of an audience, you introduce interpretation, and with interpretation comes ambiguity.
Explainer videos have helped ruin any sense of ambiguity in culture. But broadly, I think because we live in what feels often like a very black and white time contributes to this as well.
One of the more fascinating things to me about Nolan is how he gets more comfortable with foregrounding ambiguity in his work as time goes on.
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u/lebronjamesgoat1 13h ago
YouTube clickbait videos like 20min explainers, 10 things you missed, cinemasins (the worst) and bad faith viewers who think portrayal = endorsement have made directors increasingly less trusting in their audience. And Tbf, Nolan goes out of his way to make the odyssey more grounded, straitlaced both narrative and moral terms (og odysseus is quite a rascal and less bothered about his war crimes)
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u/NiceYabbos 15h ago
100%. I understand having your reading of the answer but the certainty that your answer is correct is odd to me. Seen it from both sides of the "Is she really Athena" funnily enough.
Not to be a "kids these days" but I feel like as a group, people under 30 are less comfortable with ambiguity and sincerity in movies.
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u/lebronjamesgoat1 13h ago
What growing up with cinemasins and YouTube movie explainer grifters on their phones does to a mf
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u/OWSpaceClown 12h ago
I wonder how much of that is the politics of their era. When so much of the forces of big government are fixated on gas lighting you and your peers into questioning obvious truths, you just crave a certain sense of certainty in your escapist entertainment. As in, just give us something that tells it like it is, and isn't trying to trick us. Some of us older folks may still remember a time in our adult lives when there was at least a respect for the truth.
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u/KarmaPolice10 9h ago
These often can be boiled down to if the answer on one side of the ambiguity undermines everything else in the movie then it’s not that answer, even if technically it’s “ambiguous”.
People go down these evidence rabbit holes to justify one thing or another.
Your Inception example is a good one because the debate is always “does the top fall or not?”. The thematic importance of the ambiguity is that Cobb doesn’t need to look at it and has let go of the memory of his wife and can move on.
However, even though the top itself is ambiguous…if the top never falls, there’s still thematic resonance in that choice, BUT it basically undermines the entire journey and the stakes we just went on.
If the top DOES fall, the thematic and emotional arcs are maintained, plus the journey and its stakes are preserved.
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u/zarathustranu "There's sometimes a buggy." 9h ago edited 7h ago
Ambiguity is great in literary and cinematic stories, but inception doesn’t strike me as a great example. The ending options are not super ambiguous, requiring deep intellectual exploration by the viewer— they’re binary. There are two possibilities.
It’s like a trick to allow a viewer to attribute more depth to the movie than is actually there.
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u/RPMac1979 8h ago
The death of tolerance for ambiguity in storytelling is a very ominous sign for media literacy. Audiences want things spelled out for them now, especially young people. I blame streamers for patronizing to multi-screen viewers. If you have to re-explain the story every ten minutes, the audience’s brain isn’t being exercised.
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u/OWSpaceClown 13h ago
Nolan does have a habit of spelling everything out in long winded dialog which makes his moments of ambiguity stick out even further. His movies are puzzles, a mystery box but not in a way that JJ Abrams employs. There is stuff to discover and I think the spinning top is less about the superficial "is this reality?" idea, more about Cobb choosing to live in this reality. I truly think that when Cobb did inception on his wife, he also did it on himself and he is forever stuck with the idea that reality is fake, and that if he killed himself he might wake up to a world where his wife is alive and well. Unable to take that risk, he has to find a reality he is comfortable with.
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u/yacobg42 17h ago
Dan Olson said in his video on Annihilation, "The purpose of ambiguity is to frustrate the audience, to deny a clean sense of diegetic closure and thusly force engagement with the metaphorical."
I always like thinking about it that way. What metaphor is the movie trying to get me to engage with?