What Do You Mean It's Not Didactic?: Difference between revisions
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== Film ==
* In the [[Criterion Collection]] DVD of Fritz Lang's classic ''[[M]]'', the booklet included with the DVD opens with an essay by film critic Stanley Kauffman which not only spoils the whole plot of the film, makes several pointless comparisons to totally unconnected works (including, of all things, '''''[[Oedipus Rex]]'''''--[[You Fail Logic Forever|you know, because there's a blind guy, and he knows something other characters don't know]]), and discusses ''ad nauseum'' the sociological implications of the
* This is taken even further in the old VHS collector's edition of ''[[The Godfather]]'' Volume III, which actually begins (remember, no menus on a VHS) with a ''twenty minute long'' segment of a film critic discussing the film, including spoiling every aspect of the ending, without so much as a warning. Then, the movie follows, though you're no longer sure why you're watching.
* Is ''[[Blazing Saddles]]'' a serious deconstruction of the Western and a profound statement on race relations in America, or just a lowbrow genre parody? Depends on who's asked; of course, [[Take a Third Option|"both" is a viable answer.]]
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* ''[[The Scarlet Letter]]''. What was once a simple romance novel about two adultering people in early Puritian society has been examined and re-examined to death since the 1850s, trying to find hidden meanings. The biggest offender is the notion of Hester's daughter Pearl being one giant symbol rather than an actual character.
* [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]], widely considered the greatest and most important poet and writer in German history, and particularly his most famous work ''[[Faust]]'', which by this time has been interpreted to death, undeath, back to death and straight into the sun, thought that the entire process of over-analyzation and insisting on trying to find a meaning and idea in a work was absurd and contraproductive even in the early 19th century.
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* [[Vladimir Nabokov]] explicitly disliked people's tendency to overanalyse ''[[Lolita]]''.
* Some of the newer editions of Penguin and Oxford World's Classics have started to give a warning that the preface reveals major plot details, likely because of complaints about this tendency.
* Steven Brust, the author of the ''[[Dragaera]]'' series, is part of an informal group of writers who call themselves the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, in reference to their perception that [[James Joyce]] started a trend in literary criticism which believes that meaningful works were meant to have obscure language and lots of symbolism and anything well-plotted was not in this category.
* A school of thought sprung up around ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' in which it was "proven" to be an allegory for [[World War II]]: the Shire was England and the hobbits were the English, the elves were the French, [[Mordor]] was [[Nazi Germany]] and Sauron was [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]], and the [[Artifact of Doom|One Ring]] was the atom bomb or nuclear power. Not even [[J. R. R. Tolkien|J.R.R. Tolkien]] emphatically
** Eventually, Tolkien went as far as to write an outline of what the book would have been like if he had meant it as a [[World War II]] allegory. Among other things, Saruman would not have been counted on as an ally, and Sauron would have betrayed ''him''; Saruman would have tried to make his own One Ring; and in the end the Fellowship would have had to use its power to win. It's also noted that both sides in that conflict would have held Hobbits in hatred and contempt, and they wouldn't have survived long even as slaves.
* ''[[Mark Twain|The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]'' starts with a death threat aimed at anyone who tries to analyze it. This is [[Forbidden Fruit|often taken as an invitation to do so]].
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** Though, according to a lot of current and former Mormons that have read the books, there ''are'' a lot of things in the books based on Mormon ideology/culture. However, the general consensus is that it isn't intentional proselytizing, just the author writing what she knows. For specific examples see this [http://stoney321.livejournal.com/317176.html hilarious series of posts].
** [[Cleolinda Jones]] recently blew her own mind when she realized that the Quil/Claire "relationship" (the one where the teenage werewolf imprints on a two-year-old?) may actually be named after/inspired by Clare Quilty in ''Lolita''. [http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/901129.html#cutid1 Cleo believes this might be some sort of cosmic joke.]
* One edition of ''[[The Moonstone]]'' added a footnote to highlight a sentence that had been dropped from certain editions of the book because it made the solution to the mystery too obvious. Which, of course, flagged it as a vital
** A very similar thing happened in an annotated copy of ''The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories'', in the story ''The Picture in the House''. It mentioned a dropped line that "disastrously telegraph[ed] the climax", and then went on to list the line, which did indeed ruin the ending. Of course, you really shouldn't read footnotes of annotated editions on the first reading.
* Decades after it was published, it was "discovered" that ''[[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz]]'' actually was intended to be read as an allegory for political people and events of the time it was published. Apparently the people who made this discovery had no problem believing that these allegories were meant to be there, even though they were much more clear to scholars looking for something to analyze than to readers of Baum's age who were surrounded by them every day.
* S. E. Hinton started to write ''[[The Outsiders]]'' when she was ''sixteen''. To ''vent''. Which really makes you wonder about how much symbolism ''she'' stuck into it.
** Not as much as ''Taming The Star Runner'', written twenty years later. It's about a sixteen-year-old who writes a novel and struggles with father issues. He goes to live with his uncle after fighting with his widowed mom's abusive husband. The uncle and the boy are basically both Expy's of the author at different points of her life.
* ''[[The Confidence Man]]''.
* Everyone has a high school English teacher who thinks every word of every book is ''dripping'' with meaning. The best is when the story actually does have an [[Anvilicious|obvious moral]], but the teacher is so busy hunting for [[Alternative Character Interpretation|some other theme]] in insignificant bits of imagery that he/she misses the point. Like, deciding that the main theme of ''[[The Stranger]]'' is something about nature.
* A recent printing of [[Jane Austen]]'s ''[[Pride and Prejudice]]'' contains an "introduction" that discusses the story and compares and contrasts it with Jane Austen's other works. It manages to spoil not only the plot of ''Pride and Prejudice'', but also ''every other Jane Austen book'' while comparing and contrasting it.
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