spellbinding storytelling: intentional ambiguity

spellbinding storytelling will be a reoccurring thread on this blog, featuring my thoughts on the writing in various pieces of pop culture. today's feature is the use of intentional ambiguity, and how people struggle with it, even when it's done well. the two (and a half) examples i'll be drawing from will be the movie 'inception', and the movie 'blade runner', as well as the source for the latter, phillip k. dick's 'do androids dream of electric sheep?'

this discussion will contain spoilers, because my focus is on the ending of these pieces.

in inception, the end of the film is dom cobb returning to his children at last, and the screen cuts to black before we see if his token will fall, indicating whether or not he's in a dream. people have been debating about what this means since the film came out. there are those who insist dom's true token is his wedding ring, and that since he isn't wearing the ring in the final scene, he is in the real world, awake. there are also those who insist because the top was wobbling, this also means it was about to fall, and thus he is still in the real world. yet another theory notes the similarity of the scene to dom's dreams, and the lack of change in his children, and take this as proof he's still dreaming. all of these theories fail to miss the actual point of the film, the one nolan himself finally mentioned in a commencement speech.

we don't know if dom is in a dream or not because dom no longer cares.

a similar debate revolves around the sci fi classic blade runner. now, i haven't seen 'blade runner 2049' and have no idea how it effects the canon, so this is purely discussing the original film and the novel that inspired it. the number one debate about this film is whether or not rick deckard, the protagonist, is a replicant (android). some take harrison ford's interviews and the work of dick to mean deckard was unquestionably human. others look to cues in the film and the words of ridley scott and are completely convinced deckard is an android. but this concern with deckard's humanity completely misses the point of the source material. there's a scene, towards the very end of 'do androids dream of electric sheep', where deckard finds something, a frog if i recall, which he thinks is real at first, but realizes is in fact electric, like every other animal he's ever seen. after hunting down the androids, and questioning whether or not he himself could be one, he looks at this creature and decides "the electric things have their lives too."

deckard, and hopefully the reader, come to the conclusion that the idea of 'alive' is more complicated than organic versus electric, and all things that think and feel to some extent are, in fact, alive. debating deckard's status as either an android or a human completely miss the point of his personal journey.

the endings of these stories are ambiguous, but not because the writer/director/creator wants you to deduce what 'truly' happened. the ambiguity is the point. we don't know if dom is in a dream or awake, because dom doesn't know, and in seeing his kids' faces, he's accepted that he no longer cares. he wants his life back, however he can get it. objective reality has ceased to matter. deckard, through the events of blade runner/do androids dream, comes to question his humanity, as well as everyone else's, but in the end, it doesn't matter what's 'human' and what's 'electric' (whether deckard is human or replicant), because he decides these things are alive all the same. like with dom, we don't know because he doesn't know, and he no longer cares.

i love a nice, neat HEA as much, probably more, than the next person. but some endings are more suited to a question mark, and there's no point in debating what these things 'really' mean when the entire point is that, just like in out actual lives, some things we just have to accept and move on, without knowing the whole story.

take