packbat | thinking about ambiguity

There was a great phrase in - I believe - a Folding Ideas video about filming editing, which was "unintended meaning". A bad edit, the video explained, can be bad from a failure to include necessary information ... but can also be bad because it creates an impact that doesn't gel with the rest of the movie, like confusion in a scene that's supposed to be comprehensible. A similar kind of problem comes when, to steal a joke we don't particularly like from Oxford comma enthusiasts, the comma in "x, y and z" appears not as a list-separator comma but as a - *checks Wikipedia* - an appositive comma: one saying that x is y and z. That's not what the writer meant, but the meaning jumped out to the reader anyway, becoming a source of distraction.

We usually hear Oxford comma enthusiasts describe the problem as "ambiguity", but a contradiction between common sense and apparent meaning isn't really what I'm thinking of here - the joke is about a meaning that is present but wrong. What we've been thinking about is when meaning is excluded.

We don't know what happened to the title character after the end of the movie "Michael Clayton" (2007). We don't learn the names of (most of) the characters in "Twelve Angry Men" (1957). We don't know where or when the events of "Star Wars" (1977) took place. All of these decisions feel intentional - "Michael Clayton" is focused on a specific series of events and what they illustrate, "Twelve Angry Men" is to some extent about types of people more than specific individuals, "Star Wars" is a sci-fi adventure story happening in exotic and unfamiliar settings. If "Star Wars" were set on Mars last year, the viewer might be distracted by mundane concerns like "people have looked at Mars through telescopes and it didn't have any people on it" - we know nothing of what all happened a long time ago in a galaxy far away, and therefore anything could be true there.

(Or not, but it's a step in that direction and one that encourages the audience to accept taking further steps for the purpose of enjoying a movie.)

I think the difficulty of translating art between mediums comes from both ways: from that which is difficult to communicate in the new medium and that which is difficult to avoid communicating. The meaning of a piece of music does not have the same type of specificity as words do, and neither has the same type of specificity as an abstract line drawing does.