Some of the Most Misunderstood Films of All Time

Compared to painting, sculpture, or music, movies are an extremely young artistic medium. The unique implications of a moving camera compared to a live performance are so vast that it has taken many years for film to fully develop as an artistic medium. It's natural, therefore, that filmmakers should have experimented with a wide variety of different forms and narrative techniques. Imagine their frustration when their movies, which they had carefully written, nurtured through development, and finally released, were vividly misunderstood by the very audiences the films were aimed at. These are just a few of those misunderstood gems.

The Shining

When the talk turns to misunderstood classics, there's hardly a better starting point than the filmography of Stanley Kubrick, who spent the better part of thirty years acting as a sort of one-man misunderstanding machine.

In "The Shining," Kubrick knocked horror fans for a loop by driving them up to a spooky old mansion in the mountains and throwing at them a monster, who turned out to be a normal guy. No rubber suits, no aliens, and not even one car chase were worked into this thriller. Audiences took it as a simple story about an ax murderer. What those audiences overlooked was that the film, and the book on which it was very loosely based, had many kinds of subtext. Author Stephen King has publicly stated that the book was a meditation on his own struggles with alcoholism. Kubrick, for his part, left his own interpretation open to speculation. Entire cottage industries exist to decipher the symbolism in Kubrick's movies, and "The Shining" is no exception. Quite a lot of evidence has been gathered-online, naturally-in support of "The Shining" being an extended metaphor for the domination of the Americas by white Europeans. As usual, everybody is free to interpret the film through their own lens, but one thing "The Shining"isn'tis a simple slasher pic.

Starship Troopers

Nothing sets off the alarm klaxons faster than a cheerful depiction of fascism. "Cheery" and "fascist" don't usually go together, but Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" manages just that. The film is surprisingly close to the original novel by Robert Heinlein. Audiences, especially in Europe, took the happy-go-lucky depiction of a delightful future dictatorship at face value and accused the film's director of trying to smuggle extremism into theaters. Paul Verhoeven has vehemently refuted the charge, but the joke's on him after all. Much like Heinlein, Verhoeven-himself a former refugee from Nazi aggression-got caught in a trap. Heinlein's original intent was to depict the horrors of fascism without rubbing his readers' noses in gore. Anyone can horrify an audience with footage of concentration camps, goes the thinking, but to really devastate the extremists' case one should show a best-case scenario for fascism. The society in "Starship Troopers" is a deliberate attempt to show fascism at its absolute best. A society of law and order. A society that works. It's also a society that isn't good for anything but war and murder, which astute viewers might have noticed.

The trap here is that the temptation to make positive suggestions seems to have gotten the better of them both. Halfway through the book, Heinlein finds himself shoehorning in every great idea he'd ever had about good government, but putting the words in the mouths of characters who've already been set up as rabid militarists. While Verhoeven resists the temptation for the most part, even he can't entirely resist making the film a fun adventure story.

Wall Street

"Wall Street" is another movie that was intended to teach a lesson, only to see it backfire horribly. According to filmmaker Oliver Stone, the character of Gordon Gekko was always intended to be an absurd caricature of '80s-era greed and short-sighted policy. Gekko's iconic "greed is good" speech was intended as a send-up of the extremist Objectivism found in "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

Imagine Oliver Stone's surprise, therefore, when an entire generation of supply-side bond traders started slicking back their hair, shopping for Armani, and giving similar speeches about the virtues of selfishness to their hapless interns. To his credit, Stone did try to undo some of the damage in the 2010 sequel, " Money Never Sleeps." Unfortunately, the film was doomed to fall short of the iconic status of its predecessor, so the "greed is good" line seems doomed to be repeated infinitum.