I genuinely wish I could read deeper into movies and book like this. Is this an inherent trait or one that can be learned? I wouldn't even know how to begin to learn to do this.
I've always read books and watched movies for the simplistic entertainment value. Now as I grow older I'd like to get a deeper meaning / inspection to enhance the entertainment value (if that makes sense).
Remember that movies are HIGHLY produced works, each item in a scene, the color and angle of the lighting, the angle and perspective of the camera, the editing (types of cuts, speed of cuts), any sound you hear, etc, those were ALL specifically chosen, if not outright preplanned by the director and his team.
Since each is a choice, you can ask yourself, "why did they choose it this way?" Or next level, "How do these choices contribute to the story and/or emotionally manipulate me as a viewer?"
The suggestions for classes/essays are great because you will see people's responses to these questions and also teach you a bit of the "language" of how these elements are commonly used to evoke certain effects. But the ultimate analysis is up to you and asking yourself questions about what you are watching is the way to get there.
I also find that watching a first time attempting NOT to look for these things and then watching again very closely is my preferred path. I just be the hoi paloi on the first pass, then put on my critic hat (if I think it's worth it).
> Remember that movies are HIGHLY produced works, each item in a scene, the color and angle of the lighting, the angle and perspective of the camera, the editing (types of cuts, speed of cuts), any sound you hear, etc, those were ALL specifically chosen, if not outright preplanned by the director and his team.
This is true of good films, certainly, but films like the ones Roger Corman made, or Ed Wood, well, neither of those directors were friendly to the concept of second takes or wasting time in general. (Corman because he was immensely proud of how none of his films ever lost money, Wood because he simply wasn't that good of a filmmaker.) Similarly, cinéma verité projects are more friendly to things that just happen, and Dogme 95 leans into this as well: Naturalistic film, film without artifice, film without props brought in from elsewhere or lighting effects... it all reduces the number of choices the director can make and, therefore, the number of things which can be said to be the director's choice.
But, yes, the average mainstream (Bollywood/Tollywood/Hollywood) production is very highly managed and someone (possibly the director, possibly not) actually is in complete control over what ends up on screen, even if the film goes through multiple writers and directors and the editor is the only one who leaves a consistent mark.
I disagree. One of the things I think makes a good movie is the subtlety in which metaphor is used. It can't be too subtle or bash the viewer over the head. There's still a lot of metaphor going on in bad movies, but it's usually on the "bash the viewer over the head" end of the spectrum. And that makes it easier to recognize.
To me, bad movies lay bare the bones of how movies are made. You can much more clearly see what people were trying (and failing) to do with the film.
I think we're talking at cross-purposes, here, because I agree with everything you said.
Let's take Plan 9 From Outer Space as an example: Ed Wood had a very unsubtle anti-war (particularly anti-nuclear-war) message and he pounded it into our stupid minds (Stupid! Stupid!) but that isn't what I was saying. I'm saying that his gravestones were cardboard and obviously moved like cardboard. Was that intentional? No, it was incompetence and not recognizing the need to do another take when a special effect failure is obvious onscreen. You can't read anything textual into the flimsy gravestones because Wood didn't intend for them to do that; it's all paratext, of the "This is a badly-made movie" variety.
Sometimes, it's a bit ambiguous: The characters in the film use their handguns in ways that would cause any range safety officer to disembowel them for the good of the species. Is that intentional on Wood's part, to show how stupid (Stupid! Stupid!) they are, or is it just bad actors treating props like props? I'm inclined to think it's the latter; in a better film, I'd be more apt to give it the benefit of the doubt, but in a better film, it would be reinforced through other means.
In a good film, everything is intentional and serves some purpose in the story. In a great film, there's multiple stories and themes going on, so there's layered meaning and the film rewards re-watching and debate. In a poor film, the only symbols are the obvious ones, pointless and accidental stuff happens, and the film contradicts its themes without intending to.
True, but also John Hughes was notoriously fast at producing works. There are independent rumors [1] that he wrote first drafts for both Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club in a day.
That's not to say he couldn't invest in explaining his motivations to the production designers, but sometimes a personality and idea is clear enough in your head, you can spill its' dialogue out without filters.
Definitely true, but also doesn't negate the fact that he may have "understood" the choices he made and their impact even while working fast. After all, improvising musicians, Bob Ross, and comedians often make great choices "in the moment". put more succinctly, the speed of a decision doesn't necessarily mean it was not well considered, at least in art.
This is one of the reasons I have respect for those involved in the filmmaking process. It's a LOT of blinkin' work.
We had a videographer come through to do a video on one of our software products. Kind of a "here's how it could be used" type a video.
At one point, I watched him record someone opening a cell phone 10 times in a row. Just a hand, and a cell phone, flipping it open. A cheap shot to be sure, 10 times is no big deal.
But that's get extrapolated to the entire production. The set up, the tear down, the repetition. Consider that, especially on TV, if you see a conversation between two people, cutting back and forth to their faces, odds are that scene was simply shot twice and edited together. You hear stories about how family scenes at a dinner table take all day to shoot because they have a single camera, so they shoot it over and over and over and over again, to capture all of the characters.
Then there's the waiting for the light, and other aspects of filmmaking that we, as consumers, get to take for granted.
> Remember that movies are HIGHLY produced works, each item in a scene, the color and angle of the lighting, the angle and perspective of the camera, the editing (types of cuts, speed of cuts), any sound you hear, etc, those were ALL specifically chosen, if not outright preplanned by the director and his team.
Movies are no different than anything else. Tons of choices have no meaning as people rush to get their jobs done on schedule and under budget. Sure, sometimes they were consciously decided but not even close to 100%
They do choose to include them. Not always for some greater Purpose, but nothing (more or less) gets in the film without the say-so of, usually, several people.
Exception for location filming without extensive preparation of the location, I suppose, but anything captured there is still included by choice, the location was selected on purpose, shot angles were selected to capture a certain background rather than another one for a reason, et c—even within the confines of natural-light outdoor shooting, there are usually still several options available that would look more-or-less equally good from a lighting perspective, but the one on screen is the one that was selected.
The point isn't that everything means something, but that the entire experience (in like 99.9% of films, anyway—close enough, and covering so much of mainstream cinema, that we may as well say "all of them") is crafted and curated. Not much makes it on the screen unless it's on purpose, barring mistakes like a boom mic dropping into frame or nobody noticing a Starbucks cup on a table in a Star Wars shoot. The character doesn't say something because they just happened to say it, but because one or more creative people crafted that statement (even if it's improv! That's still not actually the character coming up with it, because the character doesn't exist! And on top of it, the film doesn't necessarily include every improv'd line, so they're still curated).
Out of all the shirts in the world, someone selected that shirt for the character—they thought about it, and they picked it, probably at least for some combo of simple visual effect and fitting one or more people's idea of what the character might wear on this particular day. That sort of thing.
This means that it's rarely outright nonsensical to ask why something's in a film. That doesn't mean there's always some deep answer behind it, or that it's knowable or something that can reasonably be deduced or productively guessed-at from available evidence, but it means the question's always relevant.
Unless it’s a deliberate choice by the director, like how "Werewolf By Night" added cue marks even though it was shot digitally for a streaming service.
> Remember that movies are HIGHLY produced works, each item in a scene...
Your comment makes me think of the movie "Dark Star" where the crewmen sitting in front of these crappy prop control consoles flail away "working" by mashing all the buttons at random. hilarious!
Try this: every page, come up with a question to ask. Even if it's shallow nonsense: "why was his shirt blue?" and write it down.
It doesn't matter if you only end up with a few good ones, the point is to make a habit of asking questions in the first place.
Eventually you'll get bored with the shallow questions and start asking ones that begin to expose what your author is up to, like why write this story in particular?
If you notice an answer to one of your previous questions, write that down too. You're also developing the habit of looking for answers.
I learned this from my wife who is a highschool English teacher. I reread several books after picking up these habits from her and definitely got a lot more out of them the second time.
Until I read your post I didn't even realize that I have been doing this subconsciously for years. My favorite book, while a bit childish, is the omnibus edition of the first three novels in the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane.
I like it for the world building, the characters are simple but evolve over time, the settings are banal but made intriguing by the characters' presence in them, the basic idea that absolute truth is literally magic, that the fundamental language of the universe is truth and that by speaking it you can cause the universe itself to change, and that some people are given that power, and that you the reader is essentially the Wizard of Oz, peeking into the grand events from behind your curtain.
But I never stopped to wonder why did Diane Duane write these novels? What was her motivation to write these stories?
Mayhaps it is wish fulfillment. Wanting something to be true enough to imagine a story about it and how it would play out is likely the essence of sci-fi and fantasy writing. Taking that wish, the ability to change the universe with words alone, and finding a milieu to fit it into, a viewpoint character, and a series of events that would justify that character being trusted to hold onto such a power and use it as they saw fit would be a tall order for anyone, but if you can do it you should, right?
This theme of being given power and having to show that you are worthy of keeping it also appears in some of her other stories. The Door Into Fire has essentially the same thematic concept but in a different universe full of strange and wonderful things.
I just realized this is a full rant so I will stop here, but I'll keep in mind to think of asking Why the events in the stories that I consume in the future.
That's an interesting thing to build a fantasy universe around. It makes me wonder about the author's metaphysics. Perhaps one of:
-Duane thinks that absolute truth is difficult to come by. A skeptic or a fact relativist perhaps. And wonders what things would be like if it were more accessible (magic being your litmus paper for having accessed Truth).
-Duane thinks that Truth is both accessible and powerful, and wants to show how important it is to take its pursuit seriously.
If she is skillful, she won't be pulling an Ayn Rand and bashing the reader over the head with her philosophy--a story should be enjoyable whether or not you agree with the author--but I bet she leaves enough hints for the discerning reader to figure out where she stands.
Of course I'm talking out of my ass here, not having read the books, but that's the kind of thing my wife and I debate over dinner. It's usually easy to tell which themes an author has chosen to play with, but if they're good (i.e. their story is not full of straw men for the positions they disagree with) then it can be hard to tell if they're making a stand.
I'm a Wheel of Time fan. In the later books the biblical allegory comes across pretty strong. But there are things about the ending and the world building that feel very Buddhist. The author died while writing it, it was his life's work. While reading it I always wonder whether he achieved a coherent Buddhist/Christian synthesis towards the end, or if his feelings about afterlives ended up flopping one way or the other.
She has definitely aimed the books at the 9-13 crowd, which is probably about when I stumbled into it, so there's no Randian overtones, although there are a few hints of a gradual thematic slide away from a Hellenic polytheism towards a pan-monotheism it's never blatant or strictly wedged into a specific religion.
It's a surprisingly complex piece of literature for a kids book.
There are sentient White Holes and predatory Supercars becoming loving pets, polymorphing into a whale and swimming with sharks, traveling to other dimensions and planets, computers that evolve into turtles to fight the devil, who while bad (as in, destroys stars to enjoy the looks of terror on the faces of the frozen inhabitants of that star's planets isn't all bad, a never ending battle against the heat death of the universe...
It's imaginative and entertaining and it hit me just the right way.
There are very few books I can read more than once. I get about 3 pages in, realize I've read the book before, and then immediately grow bored of it.
The "Support Your Local Wizard" Omnibus edition (Containing "So, You Want to be a Wizard, Deep Wizardry, and High Wizardry) and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever Decalogue are the only 2 series I have been able to read more than once.
I do have the Wheel of Time complete series in my to read group, they take up a whole shelf so it's daunting but I'll get to it soon.
Was it on Slashdot that the custom began of posting a warning along with links to TV Tropes—a warning that you risked losing anywhere between 2 and 5 hours of hour life, clicking your way down the rabbit hole?
I don't think OP is really unearthing a hidden message/theme deliberately buried in the movie as much as they may be simply interpreting it through their own unique lens. We all look at entertainment through our own lenses and there's the tendency to project a lot of ourselves and our own thoughts onto it--stuff the media's creator may not have even thought about. Different people have different lenses and might see vastly different things in the same movie.
I have to admit, I never read that deeply into Ferris Bueller. I thought the character was just kind of a charismatic bully and that he spent the movie pushing his own ideas of fun onto his introverted friend, ultimately at that friend's expense. Wildly different take-away than OP's, and neither of us are "correct".
The way I came to it started with a basic appreciation of film course in college. But that only really gave me the vocabulary. It didn't really solidify until I started watching movies with the Director Commentary tracks enabled on DVDs. You don't have to guess at what the director intended. They will just tell you. Do it a few times, and you can start to pick out the patterns yourself.
Pick a movie that you have seen at least once, preferably recently, get the DVD for it, and watch it with the commentary enabled. In particularly good films, it can be a whole new way to see a movie. In particularly bad films, it can make the choices make sense. Not make them better. But at least make some kind of sense.
Speaking of bad movies, getting better at film analysis gave me a much better appreciation for them. To me, the rough edges and the tortured metaphors and the bad acting lay bare the bones of the movie. It makes it easier to see what people were trying to do when they made the film. They might have failed at it. But the general, ham-fisted lack of subtlety in the efforts makes it easier to pick the intentions out.
Unfortunately, Director Commentaries are victim of the streamification of modern film distribution. You can get some of the same sort of thing with Behind The Scenes featurettes that the streaming services provide alongside their big releases, but they aren't as direct, candid, or frequent as the Director Commentaries were on DVDs.
Left field advice here, but I'd recommend helping out on a movie, or even making your own short. If you want to understand film literally nothing comes close. This sounds intimidating, but it's no more of a bar than attending a local Kino Cabaret Event [1] or similar. If you work on a film through production - even a simple two day shoot and edit, you'll start to build an intuition for how the medium works. The more you participate in creating it, the more you'll understand film in its native language. There's a strong analogy to learning to programme / basic hacking projects -> understanding software and hardware.
In as much as film appreciation courses and youtube critical videos can be interesting, or draw your attention to things you've missed, they're usually from an external interpretive lens. An example of where they can miss the point is Noam Baumbach's latest film 'White Noise' which is has been critically misunderstood [2]. Meanwhile all the filmmakers I know are in awe of it technically and structurally.
> An example of where they can miss the point is Noam Baumbach's latest film 'White Noise' which is has been critically misunderstood [2]
Not to go too far off track, but I blame a huge amount of that misunderstanding with how Netflix has marketed the movie. Expectations play a big part in appreciation and understanding - at least initially.
Just FYI, the original book by Don DeLillo was huge when it came out and everyone was passing it around in the early 1990s. If you were a fan of books in the 1990s, you had either read a copy or you owned it.
Yikes, I'm film-nerd-adjacent—I'm semi-serious about it, and am close friends with others who are way more into it than I am—and I like Noah Baumbach (probably more than he deserves—he's the sort I recommend to others only with some hedging, but I like him a lot) yet this one hadn't shown up on my radar, either. And, on top of that, I have Netflix!
Me too, and I'm a fan of Baumbach and mumblecore / highly verbal in general (although this film doesn't meet the definition). Netflix seem to have just launched it into cinemas without much of a campaign. Stumbled across it in an art house here in Germany. It was streaming two weeks later.
If you read a lot of good books and watch a lot of good movies, and then also read books about psychology, philosophy, and art, and music, and read reviews about the things you consume ...
What is a good book? If it's older than 30 years and still talked about, it'll probably be worth a read. The same goes for other forms of media. Once you have developed good taste, you'll be able to find good art among contemporary stuff.
Basically, you have to grow as a human being, learn about the human condition, have lived through painful, difficult experiences yourself and fully experience them instead of pushing them away, and maybe seek help with these things from more mature people.
Then you'll probably come to this kind of interpretations.
But on some not so conscious level you will understand many of those things intuitively, without being able to put your finger on any single one. Because that's how art works. The artist will do most of the hard stuff for you.
The endgame of spending a ton of time analyzing cinema (as someone who hangs out with a lot of film buffs) is that at some point the expectation of having to analyze a good movie burns thin, and you end up spending a prolonged period of time only watching bad movies that you know will be bad, because making fun of bad movies is A) a skill you've incidentally honed by paying a lot of attention to movies and B) a hell of lot less effort than paying an appropriate amount of attention to a good movie.
Don’t go “meta” trying to read director intent etc.
Instead watch a lot of movies beyond your normal set. Start acquiring a taste for films with deeper character and emotional complexity.
Do this in life with your experiences and relationships.
What will happen is you’ll be deeply moved by something you relate to in a film. And that will drive you to ask how’d they do that.
If you don’t feel anything profound when Ferris holds back Cameron in that scene, any kind of meta-analysis is going to have an opposite effect to your overall goal.
And may cause you to react to moments in a movie which others would consider uneventful.
Like laughing about the setup of a scene that is about to unfold.
Or getting frustrated about a movie breaking (or lacking) consistency in the underlying mechanics of the world its drawing.
I'm constantly in this situation, starting to laugh about something that is building up below the surface of a scene, just to frame something (entirely else) that is then presented directly to the viewer in that scene. While people sitting next to me look bewildered at my face and back at the screen...
> Interesting! Can you share an example or two of such an observation?
It's really nothing as elaborately intelligent as it may sound.
Just that the experience of a movie or series can be good/bad for entirely different reasons for me.
A really serious scene like Joe Pesci getting upset in Goodfellas [1] makes me smile because of how the tension of the scene keeps building, despite being a very serious scene (and not being funny at all although actors in the scene are laughing).
Watching Anthony Hopkins in the Restaurant scene of Westworld [2] deliver so much more than just the content of his dialogue is just stunning for me to watch, while for others it might just be a scene like many others.
Or even more basic, I already have to laugh just watching Gavin Belson in the series Silicon Valley, just because the character is crafted to be such an awful tone-deaf person...
The other night during a minor scene I said aloud "what a great camera setup"
(it had beautiful bokke or possibly focal plane manipulation to put the character in sharp focus while what was beside or possibly behind him was softened)
Or my least favorite, able to destroy everything in an instance just by connecting the movie to reality: "Ah, they search for a killer? It's that guy, because there is no other reason to cast that role and pay the premium to have this person also talk!"
Most blatant example: "The Bone Collector"
I don't even remember the turns of the story in that movie, as it was clear within the first 10 minutes...
That would be almost every movie and tv show ever for me. My wife is much better than me at figuring out whodunnit, but I can see stuff like this easily. Fortunately it rarely gets in the way of enjoying things.
I experienced what seemed to be a variation of this in Amsterdam, a David Russel film no less. Everything is revealed at the end but a character is tasked with verbally and lengthily repeating everything that just happened as if the audienced hadn't just witnessed it themselves. I was taken aback by sheer idiocy of the segment that it seemed like a caricature of a studio exec finding a very basic plot confusing and taking the final cut from the director and adding a ELI5 scene at the end.
Examples are hard to remember. Often modern movies are attempting to subvert the tropes. Thus as parent comment mentions you might notice the structure of the film is doing X only to subvert that expectation.
For me the most memorable time was "Captive State". Namely in how the film subverted the heist tropes. The film did poor in the box office, but personally I found it the best film in recent memory. Exactly because I noticed how the film raised tension never relieving said tension. I'd say more, but I truly think you, the person reading this comment, should watch it.
Adam Sandler films are another good example. In that his films do not subvert tropes. Which in part makes watching easy for mainstream audiences. Which will cause you to laugh at his jokes a scene early.
This goes for many things in regards to being able discern quality from average. A friend of mine who does fashion (something I’m not interested in) taught me a few things about clothing assembly and it’s amazing. But you just can’t stop seeing it and everyone is wearing poorly crafted shirts from all the big name stores selling them and hardly anyone notices.
For a fashion person, going out can be frustrating.
Sometimes stories are just a meaningless jump from one set piece to the next. Action movies tend to be this. MacGuffin, suspense, adrenaline, Hero's Journey.
When characters have emotional arcs and growth, you see a little more depth and humanity. The characters might have secret intentions or desires, unresolved internal conflicts, and often these are put in opposition with other characters. Sometimes the characters will say and do things that don't reflect how they feel. Dramas and romcoms tend to have this.
Sometimes pieces of the story contextualize or contrast against what a character is experiencing. You can play these themes in unison or dissonance as an instrument. It tends to shine when it's left unsaid, in the subtext. These stories tend to have a "meaning" that the author or director had in mind. Look for films with a lot of critical awards or accolades to find good examples.
The more a work aspires to be art, the more analogies are loaded in. You're meant to subconsciously feel a certain way or unpack that meaning with some thought or consideration.
Information can be conveyed in so many ways. Camera direction, lighting, tone, composition, pacing, music, editing, set and props, unspoken intentions, unpredicted actions, and more. And when the director embraces "show, don't tell", all of this can add up to a beautifully layered composition that transcends what the characters actually say and do.
A proper course in film appreciation can definitely help here IMHO. Certain techniques of the craft, when repeatedly brought to your attention, become easier to see and interpret as pointing to higher purposes. In conjunction, having a favorite movie (that clearly wasn't produced to just ride the coattails of some prior movie in a series or solely to showcase something mindless like action sequences or a heartthrob actor) which you appreciate enough to rewarch several times can help sensitized you to detail.
Oooh! I sometimes have felt criticized for my interest in "reading deeper" into movies and books, so I'm thrilled to share some of my process, as far as "learning the skills".
Two things:
1. Keep a background process running for things that strike you as "interesting". In my mind, "interesting" means "improved compression speed/ability", as explained more here: https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-hu...
2. Before watching a movie/tv show or reading a book, find the entry for it on Wikipedia, and read it. Often you'll find ways that the work serves as a mirror for ourselves, or some aspect of society. It'll be said explicitly or implicitly.
That's the foundation I build the rest of my "reading deeply" skillset around. If this helps, cheers! Good luck! I think this is a domain worth putting "energy points" into!
I just started reading “White Noise” (the book) and found the Wikipedia article very helpful in understanding what De Lillo is trying to do. I have little experience or patience with mainstream or postmodern lit fic, but knowing a little bit about what to look for has added to my enjoyment.
One thing: I think it gets easier with age. Because what you "see" in movies is a reflection of your life experiences. And don't forget, reviews like this are mainly from professional reviewers.. So their careers are dedicated to this type of work and they will have more experience and education in this area.
I think it also helps to just read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies. Then by contrast you'll start to notice things that are special and/or meaningful in certain works. You could try reading reviews of movies you've watched and those can serve as a kind of guide to the interesting and important features/aspects of a movie...
In any case, try to just enjoy the watching and reading.
This is the skill that is taught in literature classes. If you've never taken one (or only under duress as an undergraduate requirement), it might be worth trying one at your local community college or similar.
Be careful where you go, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and not some subtle representation of a penis.
One of my friends insists that "The Lion King" is a metaphor that white people should rule over non-white people. He points out that Scar's underlyings are all dark and all have "stereotype of inner city low income accents". Whey they get in charge the jungle goes to shit. It takes the lighter colored, "proper" accented to rule and bring the land back to prosperous.
I don't agree with that interpretation but it's hard to un-see
The key is to remember that everything portrayed is a choice by the author or the director, cast & crew. Ask yourself, "why are they telling me this?" Make some hypotheses, then whittle them down (or add to them) as the story progresses. Try to determine the characters' motivations, the necessity of the setting, what virtues and vices the characters display, how they interact with objects and each other. Try to think if any of the characters, settings or objects in a story represent anything else or are allusions to other stories. For instance, Christ is an extremely common allusion, from Walter White in the finale of Breaking Bad to Bruce Wayne/Batman in the Dark Knight trilogy. And the One Ring to Rule Them All isn't just an ancient, magical object from a constructed myth, but has parallels that we should recognize in our world and recent history.
Many movies and books don't have a terribly deep meaning, and that's okay. I watched John Wick for the first time a week or so ago, and it was shallow but good fun.
I find that superb movies, books or shows leave me thinking about them long after the end credits or the final page (I stopped thinking about John Wick immediately when it was over). The best stories leave the interpretation up to you, the audience, and they also tend to give you more insight on repeat viewings or readings. Once the factual matter in the pages is known, it might be easier to see the symbolism (if it exists).
I think it helps if you just talk about a more brainy movie with others - online or in real life. For a lot of people nowadays, films like Fight Club or (more superficially) The Matrix were films that made them go "whoa" and question their own existence for a bit, to the point where some based their whole personality off of films like that for a while.
Other things you could try (and I'm no expert, just armchair etc) is to watch multiple films from the same director in a row, try to see patterns and commonalities. Might be better to avoid the more prolific ones, since their repertoire will be very large. But e.g. Darren Arnokofsky's films would be good for that, there's... less than ten, lol. But the films are more low-key than e.g. Spielberg or Nolan, more about people and filmmaking and the like than big action shots or whatnot.
For example, I really liked The Fountain, but that's a controversial film because there's a nearly 50/50 split between people who love it vs those who hate it.
One I'd consider, though I regrettably don't have a convenient reference (and it really ought to be for something you've seen), is finding the director/author/composer of some work you like speaking directly about what they meant to put into the piece.
There's the whole "death of the author" concept (that it doesn't matter what they put into it, it just matters what you see), but I think sometimes that gets taken too far, if not waaaaaay too far, because if you squint hard enough, you can read anything into anything. But if you can do that, there is no point to the reading. There's a "mirror reflecting you back to yourself", and then there's just "yourself", squinting so hard that it ceases to matter what you are squinting at. I am not a big fan of this myself.
But the authors really are putting additional things into their works, and it can help to hear that from them directly.
Also, now that I think about it, the Easy Mode for this sort of thing may be sci-fi television, where the superficial distance from the viewer's life and issues lets them encode things more directly and, well, frankly, at times clumsily than a more direct handling might be able to (because everyone's psychological defenses would raise). You could start with something like the Star Trek Original Series episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708435/ Being a bit removed from your cultural milieu may also help. I dunno if I'd call this one "clumsy" but it sure is blatent. You ought to be able to work out the subtext.
> I genuinely wish I could read deeper into movies and book like this. Is this an inherent trait or one that can be learned? I wouldn't even know how to begin to learn to do this.
Watch some Red Letter Media reviews. Specially mr Plinkett. Interestingly though, at the time Siskel did not like it, though Ebert did.
That said, sometimes people are fond of over examination and place more meaning into something than the director intended. Like music, often lyricists will not disclose the meaning of a song because people will give it their own meaning and may diverge significantly from the lyricists intent.
For one example of a director who candidly will admit to not knowingly adding specific meaning to a scene, see David Lynch. He'll say, I don't know, it felt right, or words to that effect.
> For one example of a director who candidly will admit to not knowingly adding specific meaning to a scene, see David Lynch. He'll say, I don't know, it felt right, or words to that effect.
Yeah, you gotta treat Lynch like an abstract painter, at times: sometimes, something's there not because it's part of some coherent subject, but just because it seemed right. It contributed to a mood, perhaps. Or he just thought it was funny, or it made him feel something (maybe not even related to the narrative!) when he looked at it. Or he liked the way it juxtaposed with something else, just aesthetically, even if together they don't really mean anything. You can ask "what effect does this have on the viewer?" with his works, and usually that bears fruit, but you have to accept that sometimes even very basic narrative questions simply don't have a fixed answer, for anyone, including Lynch, or that things like "why is this scene included?" may have plausible answers, but none that strongly connect to the rest of the work (at least, on a narrative level—theme and mood, often, they do).
It's the kind of thing only someone very special can pull off. Anyone with worse taste or judgement or a worse gut couldn't do what he does, and produce anything worth watching (except to laugh at). Plus he has to be good at the basic mechanics of film-making, for it to work at all.
There are many great YouTube channels that show you these details. I love Every Frame A Painting, Cinefix and Now You See It. Nerdwriter is so-so, but it's there too.
You can also try dating an art student and be around while they do their assigned work. I picked up a lot this way.
Learning to look deeper is always worth it. With film it's a little easier because so many good video essays are out there. You don't have to make a few bad chairs like with woodworking.
It can be learned. I didn’t “get it” much until I was older. Most recently for me, Station Eleven (HBOMax) is so full of “deeper meaning” in every scene, I’ve rewatched it 5 times and still get moved by something I didn’t catch previously. I suggest watching it and the cast/crew talks after each episode.
I still have a hard time getting it from books, but I think I’m getting better.
A fun option to get more into this might be to start listening to the "Blank Check" podcast. They go through individual director's filmographies and help to place them in context of both the director's life and the surrounding culture happenings (and they're hilarious).
I'd recommend trying some typical english 101 books, like a Norton Reader, or similar. The stories are good, and there are questions at the end that help you understand some of the more subtle choices that the authors made. It directly applies to interpreting movies.
This is the kind of thing that we will miss if college classes in literature and the humanities are devalued for students in STEM specialties. The unique analytical skills learned in the humanities are valuable across technical, mathematical and scientific disciplines as well.
> Is this an inherent trait or one that can be learned?
I'm sure there's some element of in-born talent involved, as with almost anything, but nobody's purely a natural at it. It's kinda like people who can tell you all kinds of stuff about some Beethoven piece that you, a non-classical-music fan with little or no knowledge of musical history or theory, didn't notice—they don't come out of the womb being able to do that, they trained and they spent a lot of time not just listening to music, but thoughtfully listening to music, to get to the point that they seem to be able to do such analysis effortlessly, and even on a first listen. Maybe they had some natural talent, too, but it's largely a trained skill.
> I wouldn't even know how to begin to learn to do this.
Read, watch, and listen to criticism. Maybe try Every Frame a Painting on Youtube (sadly not making any more videos, but the existing ones are excellent). It covers, especially, visual storytelling. They're nice and short and fairly content-dense. Pick some for movies or directors you're familiar with, first, I'd suggest.
If you can handle the affected narrator-character, some little meta-narrative horror-tinged digressions, and a longer-form work, try Red Letter Media's reviews of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. It's basically hours and hours of someone asking the sorts of questions one asks to understand a narrative (and mostly coming up with unsatisfactory answers, because the scripts of those movies are bad). This especially covers story structure, suspension of disbelief, and character motivation.
There are tons of other Youtubers doing this kind of thing, many of them good at it, and others here have already suggested some of them.
Basically, seek out and read or watch analyses of films by people who already at least kinda know what they're talking about. It'll help you get a sense of how to approach media, and to tell when you're headed down a productive path versus when you're looking for something where there's not much to find. Then, watch movies and try to apply what you've learned.
The main habit to get into is asking questions. Why is this character included? Why is this scene included? Why is this scene so red? Why is the camera tilted in this shot? Why is the camera moving in this shot? What does this sequences of shots make me feel and how does it achieve that effect? Is there an overall mood to this piece (or scene) and what is it? How does it convey that? Are there elements in common across this film? Do those constitute or contribute to some kind of message or theme(s), and if so, what are they?
Past that, you might start to become aware of things like rising and falling tension at various levels—a scene, an act, the entire work. Those often play into the answers to the why questions.
Beware, when you get good at this and it becomes second-nature so it's not even something you can really turn off, a lot of minor reveals (that guy was a bad guy all along!) become so obvious that you figure them out tens of minutes before most viewers—sometimes within seconds of the introduction of the element you figure out :-)
Also, you may find bad or lazily-made movies worse than you did before, largely because they tend not to have much to say, and have lots of missed opportunities for better use of their medium, which can be grating when you learn to spot those—but you might, oddly enough, find very bad movies to be better! Marveling at how much they get wrong, and how very wrong they get it, can become its own kind of fun.
Much of this (except the stuff that's very tied, specifically, to cinematography) carries over to other media, like books and even (to some extent) video games, so you can practice a lot of the same skills there.
I've always read books and watched movies for the simplistic entertainment value. Now as I grow older I'd like to get a deeper meaning / inspection to enhance the entertainment value (if that makes sense).