Thiago's Thoughts

Last week I wrote that a correct interpretation of a scene required the filmmaker's (author's) intent and that any interpretation a viewer might have that wasn't intended by the filmmaker is not significant. Now this week I had some guy named Barthes try and tell me the exact opposite. Barthe's claims that a "text's unity lies not in the origin (the author) but rather the destination" (the reader). So to Barthes, it's the reader's own interpretation that is important and that "to give a text an author is to impose a limit on the text."

To Barthes, limiting the interpretation of a text to only what the author intended is the desire of the critic (me i guess) to find a "secret" or "ultimate" meaning to the text, and to the critic "discovering the author beneath the work" is the only step in explaining the "ultimate" meaning. But Barthes believes this is impossible since "text is not a line of words releasing a single meaning (the author's) but rather it is a multi-dimensional space in which, a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash." Furthermore, Barthes beleives that in the "multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered." So to Barthes, no definite "explanation" can be obtained from analyzing just the author and is also not desirable.

So given everything I said last week, reading "Death of an Author" was difficult because I held a believe that was the complete opposite and so had a hard time understanding where he was coming from, but I guess according to Barthes I shouldn't be trying to understand where he's coming from but where I'm coming from. So here goes:

I still don't agree with Barthes' ideas in "Death of the Author" especially when it comes to film analysis. In film, Auteurism is the belief that the filmmaker is the most important creative force in the work. So i'm a big supporter of this "author theory" especially when it comes to directors who have unique, identifiable styles, such as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, to name a few who are considered auteurs. When it comes to watching their films, obtaining meaning from the filmmaker's (author) intent is a must.

Maybe Barthes' theory only applies to writing and text and not to film. I thought about this and it did make more sense. When I read a book or novel, I hardly ever think about the author or look up their biographies to better understand the story they are telling. Even author's that I really like and have read more than one of their novels, such as Bret Easton Ellis, I never take them into consideration when it comes to interpreting the story and characters. So, I guess I agree with Barthes when it comes to writing, but not movies.




Here's Patrick Bateman (cristian bale) from the movie American Psycho based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. In the novel, Bateman is a psychopathic mass murderer. So does this mean that the author Ellis is a psychopath too? Probably not.