The Author Always Dies in Childbirth

Oftentimes when a piece of art gains a large audience, there will be a certain subset of commenter that mocks a chunk of that audience for taking away the wrong message.

TV Tropes has dubbed this trope “misaimed fandom,” i.e., when an audience and creator clash over the meaning of a work. Examples abound, most often in the context of politics and philosophy.

“Red-pilled” is a phrase that has been used by the online right for years to mean embracing hard truths and rejecting “the blue pill,” or comforting lies. The terms, of course, originate with the 1999 film The Matrix.

But don’t those idiots know that the creators are transwomen and red pill and blue pill are metaphors for gender transition? They got the movie completely wrong!

Well, no. In the film, the red pill is about pulling yourself out of an illusional world to battle the dystopian reality, and there really is no gender subtext involved outside of the heads of the Wachowskis. There are many causes that could latch onto the red pill/blue pill dichotomy, even if some of those causes are at cross purposes. And the intent of the creators doesn’t matter one whit.

That is because once an author releases something into the world, they cannot control how it will be received - a phenomena known as “The Death of the Author,” which if you haven’t guessed, is the view I take on these matters.

Promoters of the idea of misaimed fandom would claim that Objectivists should hate Bioshock because it is intended as a satire of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Environmentalists should hate Ghostbusters because it lampoons EPA bureaucracy. How can Rage Against The Machine be Paul Ryan’s favorite band? doesn’t he know those messages are against everything he stands for? My guess is he doesn’t care.

And if social conservatives marched down Main Street to the tune of “Bulls on Parade,” chanting “We rally ‘round the family with a pocketful of shells!” can you really say that the joke is on them?

Political movements and figures have been repurposing art meant to deride them forever. The most famous being when the French army played “Yankee Doodle,” at the British surrender to the Americans and French at Yorktown. The song was originally used to mock the American Continental Army for their silly attempts at playing soldier.

More recently, songs like “Keep Your Rifle by Your Side,” from Far Cry 5 have been adopted by the American Gun Culture the song is meant to mock. There is even a YouTube animating the libertarian right’s appropriation of the song from Ubisoft. Take a listen, it’s a banger.

In other cases, the author so accurately portrays the beliefs of his enemies that they embrace a character that the author meant to hate. One of the most high profile cases of this is Rorschach from Alan Moore’s Watchmen comic series. Rorshach is a cold-hearted and relentless vigilante who refuses to let anyone get a pass. The character was meant to satirize comic book artist Steve Ditko’s heroes - in particular the Objectivist hero The Question. But many Watchmen fans admired Rorschach’s uncompromising moral code and his relentless fight against criminality - the very things that Moore disapproved of.

Sometimes, the creators themselves don’t understand the subject they intend to satirize, and inadvertently create a work of art could not possibly send the message they intend. This is the clear case with the 1997 film Starship Troopers by Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven intended the film to be a satire of Fascism, but in his script, the supposedly fascist United Citizen Federation has a surprising degree of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free markets, property rights, and accountability for government leaders.

Carl Benjamin has an excellent analysis of how off-the-mark Verhoeven’s portrayal of the Federation is from actual fascism:

As authors, “Death of the Author” means we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we lose control of our works once they are out in the world.

After first watching the 2004 film Downfall, about Hitler’s last days in his bunker in Berlin, my roommate commented to me that Neo-Nazis would probably approve of the film because it is a just-the-facts work that seeks to portray the zeal and derangement involved. I think he had a point - but that is to the discredit of the Neo-Nazis - that they would approve of Goebbels’ murder of his own children to spare them from a world without National Socialism is not a condemnation of their understanding of the work of art, but of their values on their own merits.

I have to contend with this in my own writing. In particular, in my novella The Loki Exodus, the protagonist, Jane Leone is the agent of an authoritarian socialist government. Writing her was an experiment for me - an effort in stretching my empathy muscles. Anyone who has read my Substack for any period of time would know that her values and my own have very little overlap, and I think I’ve highlighted that values clash in the story.

But if I’ve done my job right, an unironic communist would side with Jane no questions asked. Would that commie be mistaken in doing so? Well, yes, and no. He’s morally mistaken because he’s a communist. But he is not mistaken in seeing a kinship in the character. Should it bother me that they miss - or, rather, admire - the negative aspects of that character?

Maybe, but the moral intuitions of the audience are out of my hands - and as an author, it is probably for the best to skip all the steps from denial to depression and get right to acceptance of the death of my control over how others view my work.