FFS you don't have to explain everything
It's OK for a story to be ambiguous
This video appeared on my YouTube feed a couple of weeks ago and I became immediately irritable:
The title of the video - Banshees of Inisherin - Meaning and Ending Explained - and the giant yellow EXPLAINED on the thumbnail is the perfect encapsulation of everything that is annoying about internet cultural discourse. I don’t mean to single out this particular creator, because this isn’t specific to this video but is a wider issue.
The Banshees of Inisherin is an astonishing film, a genre chameleon that shifts between farce and tragedy and which refuses to be pinned down. Its story unfolds both unexpectedly and with awful predictability. It’s won a lot of awards. Farrell and Gleeson give remarkable performances. It takes the trope of men needing to leave a legacy and rips it to shreds.
I’ll say no more, because it’s a film best seen without knowing much about it. If you haven’t seen it yet, go dig it out (it’s on Disney+).
What The Banshees of Inisherin absolutely does not need is an explainer video on YouTube. Its story does not require a Storytelling for Dummies guide book. The strength of the film is in its ambiguity and each viewer’s personal interpretation. As a mid-40s man, I’m probably going to get something quite different from it than, say, someone in their early-20s. And that’s OK! The ambiguity is a major strength of the film.
Remember 1980s kids cartoons? Especially US ones like MASK and He-Man? You’d have a violent adventure for 20 minutes, followed by a tacked-on Moral Message at the very end that would tell the child what they should be thinking. For the record, I loved both of those shows. But there’s a difference between making clear moral statements in fiction for children, and a film for adults like The Banshess of Inisherin. There’s a trend for YouTube content creators to want to deliver The Definitive Hot Take on everything, leaving no room for personal interpretation. YouTube ‘ending explained!’ videos are the epitome of this, serving the function of those simplistic moral messages of He-Man cartoons, this time glued onto the end of grown-up material.
Wait a second. I really don’t want to sound mean spirited towards the video creator’s efforts. The video itself is not nearly as irritating as the thumbnail and title. I’m aware that YouTube creators are forced to pursue trends and employ a very limited range of presentation styles if they have any hope of succeeding. Much of my annoyance here is towards YouTube’s algorithms, rather than the Film for Thought channel specifically. He’s clearly working the system effectively, given the 129,000 views on the video.
It floats around on the surface of analysis and criticism, though. It is primarily a 6-minute recap of the film, a retelling from Film for Thought’s point of view. I’ve already seen the film, so don’t need someone to tell me what happened in it. To his credit, Film for Thought makes it very clear that it’s their perspective, rather than anything ‘definitive’ - though a glance at the comments finds people describing his take as ‘100% right’. That’s where the thumbnail and title treatment become problematic and highly reductive.
The thumbnail and title doesn’t present the video as being an opinion, but as an explanation. It encourages the notion, perhaps inadvertently, that there is a ‘correct’ reading of the film.
An explanation is ‘a statement or account that makes something clear.’
If you search for ‘What is the offside rule’, a video called Football Rules Explained would be very useful. An explainer aims to reduce something complex down to something simple. Opinions, if anything, work counter to explanations, often making a situation less clear - though hopefully more interesting in the process.
The reductive nature of an explainer is fantastic for understanding how to fix a door, or how to play squash, or how to mend a flat tyre on a car. That same reductive approach doesn’t enhance art, though. It shrinks it. Makes it less interesting.
This isn’t specifically a YouTube thing. Here’s another example, from traditional print film criticism: Empire’s article Why Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Final Five Minutes Is The Perfect Tribute To Chadwick Boseman.
Now, to be fair, Wakanda Forever will have been seen by children as well as adults, so perhaps this article was aimed at younger viewers. The hand-holding might be useful in that context. Though a child young enough to need Wakanda Forever’s ending clarified is probably not going to bother reading a lengthy article on the subject.
The article itself begins well, with a look at the cultural context surrounding the film and the Black Panther character, but then shifts into a start-to-finish description of exactly what happens in the last ten minutes, retelling the story beats and lightly explaining Why They Matter. The confusing part, for me, is that the film itself already did this. Ryan Coogler, the writers, the other craftspeople on the project - they already delivered a superb examination of grief and loss and hope, wrapped up in big blockbuster spectacle. It’s not an ambiguous film, like Inisherin. Wakanda Forever wears its heart and its themes on its sleeve. The ending in particular is effective and moving, using simple but clever editing to make its points.
Tell me what to think. I don’t want to form my own opinion. Help me see the absolute truth.
Much like YouTube’s enforced thumbnail homogeneity, I’m also conscious that online writing - and headlines in particular - are all funnelled down that post-Buzzfeed semi-bait-and-switch, click-to-find-out style. That’s how magazines get eyeballs on ads, which is how they make money to keep operating. That doesn’t mean it’s good or OK for journalism, though.
If the article, given it’s from a professional film magazine, had focused on the filmmaking techniques used to achieve its emotional and storytelling impact then it would have contributed something more concrete. Something about editing and pacing and juxtaposition.
I think this bothers me because step-by-step recounting of a story’s plot also over-emphasises the importance of plot. When you read a review of a movie in a lot of magazines, the vast majority of the word count is simply telling us the plot, in a sort of round-about, spoiler-avoiding way. There’s a misconception that the question “what is it about?” means “tell me the plot”.
I wrote about how focusing too much on plot can be a problem ages ago:
In the AI-powered world we’re entering into, this kind of plot-regurgitating article will also be the first to fall to ChatGPT’s advances. It’s the sort of thing AI will be able to churn out by the truckload.
To be less grumpy, let’s look at some examples of YouTube film analysis which do something a little different.
The Cinema Therapy guys do invariably excellent work, using movies as a talking point to examine very real issues. They’ve tackled all sorts of thorny issues via a fun and frank look at pop culture.
They don’t merely recount the plot. Their videos are either using movies as a method for exploring psychology, or they’re bringing a new, psychology-infused take on the film.
Looking at more traditional film criticism, there’s Mark Kermode. In fact, here’s his The Banshees of Inisherin review:
Although Kermode touches on the plot of a film, it’s rarely his area of interest. He talks about genre, and character, and theme. Any brief mention of plot in Kermode’s reviews is to enable a discussion about something deeper. It’s why his reviews tend to give a really good idea of whether you’ll like a film - regardless of whether Kermode himself liked or disliked it.
At the opposite end of the critical spectrum, at least in terms of presentation style, is Moviebob. About as YouTubery as you can get, his videos are technically extremely shonky, sometimes rambling and overlong, and unapologetically nerdy. They’re also full of interesting ideas, their duration giving the guy the breathing space to fully explore a concept or thesis. Pop culture essays, in other words. I first encountered his work via this very serious video about the 1986 cartoon The Transformers: The Movie:
Transformers (pre-Michael Bay) was a formative part of my childhood, especially the 80s and 90s comics by Simon Furman, which is how I ended up stumbling on this video in the first place. Moviebob doesn’t just recap the film’s plot, but uses the movie as an excuse to explore popular culture in general, and consider whether anything produced by huge corporations can ever be art.
The key differentiator for me is that the likes of Kermode, Moviebob and Cinema Therapy add something to the films they talk about. They make you want to go and re-watch, equipped with new insights layered on top of your own. The ‘explainer’ videos and articles do the opposite: they reduce and compress, simplify and package up the subjects. There’s no need to re-watch The Banshees of Inisherin or Wakanda Forever after someone has told you exactly what they’re about and what you should think.
I’m aware that this is a grumpier post than usual. Normal service will resume next week.
But don’t even get me started on YouTube videos that declare their reviews to be ‘honest’.
Meanwhile. I’m still trying to shake this weird headache-cold that won’t go away. Fine one day, wiped out the next. Most annoying.
I’m working on a special ebook version of Tales from the Triverse, which will be exclusive to paid subscribers. The idea is that this will be a handy way to catch up or re-read the entire story, without having to click through 70+ individual Substack pages (or scouring your email archives). It’ll be a pretty cool perk of upgrading to the paid option.
Adjacent to that subscriber-only ebook, I’m also developing Triverse into a series of ebook and paperbacks. These will be edited and polished up and aimed at new readers (or any of you who want a physical copy!). There will always be readers who prefer to grab a paperback or ebook rather than subscribe to a newsletter, so the idea is to have multiple entry points for different types of reader.
Right, I’m taking part in a bunch of fun ebook giveaways this month. Do check them out if you’re looking for somethig new to read:
See you on Friday for the next part of ‘Electioneering’.
You missed the obvious title, “Explainer Videos EXPLAINED”
The key thing you’re missing is that you (and I’m assuming most of your subscribers) are on the extreme end of the media consumption spectrum. Of course we are going to understand what happens in these movies where any explainer video is painfully redundant. But you’re seriously underestimating how little the vast majority of the population notices or even cares about the nuances of narrative entertainment, especially TV and film. They watch these things while doing other things, or having conversations. I think it’s rare for the average viewer to make it a priority to give their full attention to what they are watching, or to look deeper for themes or any sort of nuance. I have a friend that routinely invites me over to watch a movie, but ends up spending most of it doing paperwork, or laundry, or unloading the dishwasher. I’ll pause the movie waiting for her but she always says, “Don’t wait for me.” Inevitably, she’ll ask questions about the most basic plot points and ultimately will have an incomplete opinion at best about the movie we watched. I’m sure we all experience this.
Or even better, I have an extremely nerdy friend who used to own a comic book store. He watches all the nerd stuff, but fantasy is the lowest end of the nerd stuff he watches. So some friends of mine and I would gather every week to watch Game of Thrones. For YEARS. We’d been watching and discussing the episodes every week, like good nerds do. I thought we were all on the same page. So it gets into season seven, when Dany and Tyrion finally arrive in Westeros. This one nerd friend pauses the video during one of the episodes and says, “Wait a minute. They were in a different place this whole time? I thought Dany and Tyrion and that whole story was just in another part of Kings Landing.” We were flabbergasted, and still are to this day. For six seasons, he thought that whole other continent storyline was taking place in the same area as everything else. “What did you think the whole animation with the map going ACROSS the sea meant??” Anyway, that was my proof that the super-nerds are just a special breed of movie and TV watchers. Not better, just different. We aren’t as numerous as we’d like to think.
Most people probably LOVE the explainer videos. It helps fill in all the blanks on the show they were only halfway paying attention to.
I wouldn't necessarily call what you're describing ambiguity. I might call it multifacited or multilayered on an emotional level, especially if it's personally speaking to different generations on different levels. However, some films are purposefully ambiguous and I absolutely hate them. The perfect example is Inception. Is it real? Is it a dream? I don't care. I didn't spend $20 and 3 hours to leave with more questions than I brought. I will say the same of novels, even more so because the investment is greater. It's one thing to end and wonder "what will the future hold" for our characters, and it's another thing to put the book down and feel like a promise was broken. Most endings should hit us like a piano dropped from 20 stories, not like a feather behind the ear.
Hope you're feeling better soon! It sucks to be sick, but you managed to crank out a great article at the same time and that's to be commended 😁