One person who didn’t enjoy those questions was Stephen King himself. The author was never happy with Kubrick’s film, so he scripted his own TV mini-series of The Shining which was broadcast in 1997. Its plot is more comprehensible, but King aside, not many people would class that as an improvement. Writing in The Dissolve, Tasha Robinson condemns the “thudding, overexplained literalism” of a mini-series which “opens with a clumsy exposition scene that lays out King’s symbolism and explains exactly how the story will end”. The same sort of thing happened with The Big Sleep. Also in 1997, the original cut was finally released, complete with the scenes in which Marlowe talked the viewer through his sleuthing. Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer-winning Chicago Sun-Times critic, noted that the film’s “charge” was missing: “This is a case where ‘studio interference’ was exactly the right thing.” Some mysteries are better left unsolved.
On the other hand, we like to feel that someone can solve those mysteries, even if we can’t. If a perplexing film seems to be nothing more than a self-indulgent mess, as some critics argued Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was, it’s easy to lose patience. But if there seems to be an intelligent, logical interpretation to it that’s somewhere just beyond our reach, we’re tantalised and intrigued. “Freud’s concept of the uncanny is useful in explaining the difference between a meaningless film and a mysterious film,” says Buckland. “The uncanny means unhomely and homely at the same time. When we watch a David Lynch film, it’s strange, but we still recognise something there.”
Above all, perhaps, what we recognise are the countless incidents in our own lives that we don’t quite understand. When a film is neat and tidy, it can seem false. In Lynch’s words, “that’s not the way life is, so it makes the film seem completely uninteresting”. But when a film has its conundrums and contradictions, it chimes with our own experiences. However fantastical it may be, it’s truthful in a way that some more lucid films aren’t. It’s probably going too far to say that The Big Sleep is naturalistic, but when we stumble through its jungle of red herrings, passing glimpses, mistaken identities and lucky hunches, we sense that this is what criminal investigations are really like – and this is what life is like, too.
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