Embracing Ambiguity: Why We Should Stop Trying to Understand "Confusing" Films

By Shannon O’Shea

Included in Spring 2021 Magazine

Primer. Inception. I’m Thinking of Ending Things. What’s one thing all these films have in common? Sure, they’re all critically acclaimed. They’re inventive, they’re widely known, and they’re visually striking. But, perhaps more discussed than anything else is the fact that they’re all, well… confusing. The plots are difficult to follow, the themes are ambiguous, and in some cases, the protagonists are unreliable narrators. Qualities like these are what seem to define, for lack of a better term, the “confusing film.” Obviously, a convoluted plot will lead many viewers to confusion. But the type of film I want to discuss has an added layer. It’s not just that they don’t make sense. They don’t want to make sense. Not immediately, anyway. They seem to have a clear idea of their own intentions, but they aren’t interested in allowing the viewer that same clarity from the beginning. Some of these films may feel like an invitation for cognitive work—if you’re like me, you’ve spent hours scrolling through the depths of YouTube intently watching videos with titles like “The Time Travel in Primer Explained in 20 minutes.” But over the last year or so, I’ve come to embrace a different style of film viewership: embracing the confusion.

I’ll track this journey through the use of two primary texts: Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 auteur hit I’m Thinking of Ending Things and a somewhat lesser-known release from the same year, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a genre-bending trip into oblivion. Things start out pretty normal: a woman is traveling with her boyfriend to visit his parents. But the film quickly becomes stranger and stranger, and by the end, it’s more or less indecipherable (especially if, like me, you did not read the book first). There’s an unexplained dance number, momentary casting changes, and an animated pig. Much of the film just takes place in a car in the middle of the snowstorm, yet it’s still incredibly hard to follow. By around the halfway point, I wasn’t enjoying watching it anymore. I had no idea what was happening, and things seemed to be getting a little dull in the absence of a discernible plot. I was watching it late at night, and I felt myself getting more tired as I sat through it. But around three-quarters of the way through the film, something changed for me. I began to ask myself why it even mattered whether I understood what was happening or not. I decided that the answer was “it doesn’t” and that changed everything. I allowed myself to just appreciate the film at face value, rather than trying to piece together a coherent narrative or searching for the deeper meaning. I admired the shots, the colors, and the boldness of the film to make such unusual choices. And I found that when I wasn’t expending all my mental energy as a viewer in an effort to decode the film’s secrets, I actually enjoyed the film more. By the end, I was still pretty lost, but I at least felt like I had experienced something, rather than just sitting through something. I made a decision that night to allow confusing films to wash over me like running water, appreciating every ripple in the current, instead of trying to pick apart each individual wave. A film is a completed project, with innumerable different elements—perhaps sometimes it’s okay to see the forest for the trees. Maybe instead of trying to fully grasp every element of a film’s timeline, plot, or thematic undercurrent, it’s okay to just take away from it what speaks to you the most.

My viewing of Black Bear pushed me further into this mode of spectatorship. This movie depicts a filmmaker, played by Aubrey Plaza, who is searching for a new story idea, at times with breathtaking intensity. The film offers fascinating commentary on art and the ethics associated with it, but I also appreciate it for its unusual and confusing approach to narrative storytelling. Black Bear is best experienced with as little background knowledge as possible, so I won’t get into the specifics of what make it difficult to follow—it’s a film I’d recommend checking out, so the last thing I want to do is ruin the viewing experience for anyone. But suffice it to say that the second half of the film is very different from the first, to the extent that it’s difficult to know what to make of the film as a complete unit. As soon as I finished watching it, I began searching for articles explaining what it all meant—I can’t help myself!—and rewinding my way through the film in an attempt to piece things together. But reading critics’ explanations of the film and its actors’ comments on the production (see Mary Solossi’s article/cast interview with Entertainment Weekly) actually steered me even further away from trying to understand it. The consensus seems to be that the best way to digest the film’s different elements might be to forgo any attempt at narrative explanation and instead consider the ways the elements relate to each other in service of larger themes. I’m fascinated by this approach to storytelling, and it has made me rethink my own conceptualization of the narrative film as a medium. Maybe we don’t need to be able to follow a linear story to appreciate a film, or even to reach an understanding of it. I’m starting to believe that there can be multiple ways to understand a film, and that even if no understanding is reached at all, we can still enjoy and appreciate what we’ve watched.

Perhaps the confusing film is a film that wants to pose more questions than answers, and I think we should embrace that. Let’s accept a lack of closure and understanding. Surrender to the questions, and instead of trying to answer them directly, just see where the questions themselves take you. After all, it’s about the journey, not the destination.