Can readers/viewers be "wrong"?

I haven't read the book, or seen the film, so forgive me if I am wrong. But does the film not function on the same level as Roman Gladitorial Games? Firstly in plot, then secondary as a film where the audience is consuming violence as a mode of entertainment?

Then it doesn't surprise me, that some one shouted out in the cinema. I openly admit to sitting in a cinema, watching a romance and urging the MC to punch his love rival. It means we are swept up in the story. Why is that an 'immature' thing?

CharacterInWhite said:

One of the "villainous" participants (I prefer "non-sympathetic"--it's complicated) is smashed over the head with a rock in the books and choked instead on screen. When this occurred in the theatre, someone actually cheered.

This is a story where children murder each other.

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That's what it is to you.

To that person in the theatre, it may be a story where mature warriors fight to the death, and a bad guy just got his/her comeuppance.

You'd get that sort of different interpretation just from a difference in age.

The proper time to cheer and otherwise vocalize at the movies is on the opening night* or very early in the run, when you're most likely to be part of an audience of dedicated fans. You know, people like me who cheer when Haldir leads the elf regiment into Helm's Deep or shout "Death! Death! Death!" along with the Rohirrim as they overrun the Pelennor Fields.

Then it's cool. The later in the run, the fewer people wearing pointed ears, the more dirty looks you're likely to encounter.



* The perfect time to vocalize is actually the second showing on opening night/day. The dedicated fans will have bought tickets for this one, too, and are now aware of the best times to yell.

Like Jim said... "The author just supplies the blueprint. The readers are the ones constructing the stories in their heads."

The author may find that readers are frequently wrong, but rarely in doubt (such are the natures of opinions). Interpretation is a reader's prerogative, notwithstanding the author's intent.

Worrying about it seems to be an exercise in futility. Why waste the time and creative energy?

CharacterInWhite said:

the closest alternative proposed in this thread is that reactions can be short-sighted or misinformed, but not strictly wrong.

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In case you're referring to me, let me clarify my position.

An interpretation, even when based on an appropriate knowledge of the facts in the work, can be short-sighted.

Being short sighted is not the same as being outright wrong.

However, the moment when the reader declares this short-sighted interpretation correct and all others wrong, and refuses to engage in constructive dialogue, he is, no doubt in my mind, unqualifiedly wrong.

CharacterInWhite said:

One of the "villainous" participants (I prefer "non-sympathetic"--it's complicated) is smashed over the head with a rock in the books and choked instead on screen. When this occurred in the theatre, someone actually cheered.

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I think it's important to consider the context:

• Movie theater (atmosphere simultaneously affords anonymous and participatory activity)

• "Hero" moment (character in question saves another participant in more ways than one)

• Unexpected appearance (often evokes visceral responses)

As for worrying about readers' interpretations, I'll toss my hat into the Barthes camp. Even if you attempt to thoroughly control every possible reading of your material, the likelihood remains some reader somewhere will find an alt. interpretation of the material and engage with it in ways you hadn't anticipated.

What is that advice about 'Once you publish a book, it stops being yours and it belongs to the readers, blah blah blah...'? I was going to mention that thing about Rue being black but some of you guys beat me to it. Factual errors due to not reading carefully aside, I think whether a readers is right or wrong is completely subjective. Interpreting a book is like interpreting one of those abstract artworks, like those really annoying ones that look like a crazed chimp just splattered paint all over a canvas. One person might feel like it symbolizes their chaotic divorce, another person might feel like it symbolizes an exploding rainbow, a third person might think it symbolizes all the hungry children in the world. Who cares which person is right? If the painter (or author) want to come out and say 'Well, actually, these splatters represent all the pimples I had as a teen,' I think that has it's ups and downs. On the one hand, the painter(author) gets to make their point and have their say but on the other hand, they are limiting the ways in which the viewers can appreciate the work.

Sorry, this is turning into an essay.

CharacterInWhite said:

So I have a question for you guys. As writers, do you worry about your audience missing the point? Do you take steps to reduce that? Do such steps even exist, or is this an inevitability for all art? Do you even write with "a point" in mind?

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I'm considering these types of questions as I'm working on a new project. I do have a theme I'm trying to explore. The story also includes violence and victims who are children. I know a reader is free to interpret as he will, but I still feel a sense of responsibility with my writing. If the theme were missed among the violence, I'd feel I hadn't been responsible.

You also have to separate the idea from the execution. The Hunger Games is an entertaining suspenseful spin on gladiatorial games but it is not a profound meditation on the destructive power of reality TV or the moral outrage of teens being sent to fight each other. What do you think they do in Harry Potter? No one thought the Goblet of Fire was morally repugnant.

The Hunger Games is an adventure story with a dystopian background. We can add our own profundities but ultimately it's entertainment.

To be honest, if they were real, thoughts of the moral dubiousness of it would be secondary to hoping that one of your fellow inhabitants would survive. It's life or death.

The danger in judging someone for cheering the death of a bad guy is that you really don't know why that person cheered. You only know they did.

Many years ago, when I was far younger and more confrontational, I was watching a particularly gruesome and violent movie. The protagonist died in the end, going out in a blaze of glory and his death, the way the director set up the final, parting shot, showed the irony of his life and ultimately his death.

I found that ironicaly funny. And laughed out loud. I thought it was brilliantly done. (remember, I said I was young )

As we were coming out of the theater, someone behind me sniped "well, some people will laugh at funerals".*

The thing is...either that person didn't see the irony of the final death or didn't see it the way I did. Neither one of us was right or wrong, we simply saw different things in the same ending to the same movie. And yet, they couldn't acknowledge that I came away with an experience different than theirs and made, in the grander scheme, an erroneous assumption about me.



*I whirled around and said, "And some people wouldn't know a brilliantly ironic statement and poignant final shot in a movie if it fell on them" and then kept walking. That would the more confrontational part of my story.

I went to a midnight screening of Battle Royale, (you know the other movie about kids killing kids) and people were laughing and cheering at strange places.

Stanley Kubrick pulled A Clockwork Orange from UK release until his death because he was disturbed by the audience's reaction to the violent scenes.

I think it is true, though, that you don't know why people are reacting this way, only that they are.

Lady Ice said:

You also have to separate the idea from the execution. The Hunger Games is an entertaining suspenseful spin on gladiatorial games but it is not a profound meditation on the destructive power of reality TV or the moral outrage of teens being sent to fight each other

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I could not disagree more strongly.

A reader gets what is relevant to them

In that, a reader cannot be wrong, because they realte the story to themselves. ( I have *blush* interpreted a Christian - supposedly - text as pagan because I just didn;t see the Christianity, I saw the Pagan)


This is why inserting a message can backfire - not everyone grew up with your culture/triggers/intentions etc. So people wll get ...what they get. You can't change that.

I could not disagree more strongly.

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Exactly! for you it's one thing, because of who you are. For someone else, it's something else. Who you are determines how you see the story

Jamesaritchie said:

Cheering had nothing to do with making anything glorious, it had to do with expressing a completely appropriate reaction to the right kind of person getting choked. In a theater, cheering or booing is about all you can do. Good for him. He cheered properly, and didn't sit back trying to see a point that you seem to have missed. He reacted with good, perfectly reasonable emotion.

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Well, there you have it. JAR says viewers can be wrong: namely, you. Now go out there and cheer properly when the right people die, or the Capitol wins!

HURRAAAAAAAH! Er, I mean, boo?

CharacterInWhite said:

Guilty as charged.

The character in question does something that most of THG's audience overlooks. That "villian" volunteers to save the rest of their district from the lottery entry into the games. Their sociopathic tendencies are bred from an early age so that no one else will have to fight. Literally the only crime they're guilty of is not being the protag. .

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that's your interpretation. I did not read the book, but saw the movie....they were also guilty of being sadistic, twisted, arrogant pricks. Now, you can argue the whole nature/nurture thing all you like, but that's probably most of what folks there saw, was the surface.

They wanted a popcorn flick with good and bad guys, they got bad guys, complete with a "evilly twirling their evil moustache of evilness" level of two-dimensionality. They got that.

honestly, I think it would have been much more interesting if they HAD been presented as reluctant villians, but they weren't--they were highly trained, heavily favored competitors who strutted around like the more obnoxious d-bags in the NFL, NBA, or most any other sports franchise of today--you seem to be one of the few or only ones romanticizing them....remember them chuckling about how the one girl they killed begged for her life, and wasn't this poor "victim" the one who was telling Katniss she killed the little girl, snickering and bragging about it?


so, I'm not seeing much cause for moral outrage here. I'm also not seeing a terribly sympathetic or noble character. Brainwashed most likely, but unless you saw a very different movie this was if anything a priviledged little prick who expected to kill everyone around her, get famous for it, and be a rock-star.....all without any real concept of her own mortality. Pity the kid, any kid, would be that messed up by any society, but she wasn't "shouldering a heavy burden to save the rest of the children in his district." She most likely died thinking something along the lines of "wait, this isn't how this was supposed to work.... I was the star...."