Ways to Read a Work

There are three ways to examine a work:

·         Narrative Interpretation

·         Technical Analysis

·         Context of Creation

Narrative Interpretation

Narrative interpretation is studying the narrative elements within a work such as themes, metaphors or ideas the author wanted to express through their work. Every person can interpret a work differently, for example, someone can say that the play Romeo and Juliet is about the foolishness of young lovers but another person can say it’s is actually about the thoughtlessness of the old generation, technically neither is wrong, it’s up to personal interpretation.

Interpretation can lead to the discovery of things like hidden symbolism. For example, some people believe that the film Inception is actually metaphor for filmmaking; each character in the main cast represents different members of a film crew:

However, narrative interpretation can sometimes lead people to find meaning in things the author did not intend to have; an example would when some people interpreted that the ring from The Lord of the Rings series was an allegory for the nuclear bomb during World War 2, J.R.R. Tolkien however denied this:

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis is about observing the technics used to create a work, this can range from practical effects used in films to the craftsmanship of a pot.

These techniques aren't limited to visual imagery; they can also be seen in written works. For example, an author can express a character’s personality through their dialogue such as having a character talking for a whole paragraph about various trivia topics to show that the character is chatty and absent-minded without directly stated it to the audience.

Certain technics can be seen as the creator’s signature, for example, Stanley Kubrick’s films feature one-point perspective shots. Kubrick would use this technique to draw attention a subject positioned at the vanishing point.

Context of Creation

Context of creation revolves around looking into a work’s origin: who made it, why was it made, when and where it was make, etc. Understanding these area would shed new light on certain aspects of a work, for example in India there is a taboo against public kissing hence why there are lots of “kissing discretion shot” in Bollywood movies.

A more detailed example would be Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Blue which is made up of a single shot of the colour blue filling the screen with narration. The film was released four months before his AIDS-related death; complications from the disease had already rendered him partially blind at the time of the film's release. Before making the film, Jarman wrote a book called Chroma which was about what different colours meant to him, this in turn severed as the bases for the film.

What is Creativity?

Obviously, it takes imagination to create something new but would that new thing even be original? There are over seven billion people currently living on earth, each person with a mind full hundreds or even thousands of ideas, then there are all the people who have lived or will live and the ideas they had or will have. Does being truly creativity mean you have to be 100% original? Short answer: No.

Creativity is, in my opinion, the ability not only to creative but to “play with” what already exists. For example, take the simple story of a knight in shining armour setting out to rescue a princess from a tower guarded by a dragon; there are many ways to retell this in new and interesting ways, such as having the knight be a depressed death seeker more in dying in the fight against the dragon rather than saving the princess.

To illustrate this, “tropes” (concepts within storytelling) are often “played with”:

Using a basic archetype to use as a foundation to build upon using different ideas is very common in works today, mostly all books, films and games have the same narrative structure. However there are some other works will deviate from this norm.

This also applies to genre, an example of a work that experiments with a certain genre would be the video game Spec Ops: The Line (2012) which “deconstructs” (explores the to show various logical and moral problems) the war game genre by presenting issues real life soldiers face like PTSD. This demonstrates creativity on game developers who could have played it straight and make a standard military shooter that may have not been noteworthy but instead made a thought-provoking deconstruction.

Creativity Decay

"I am afraid to say that the history of entertainment is also the history of imitation."

— Satoru Iwata, late CEO of Nintendo

While the method of building off an archetype can lead to the creation of unique and interesting works, it can also lead to what I can “creativity decay”. Creativity decay is when a creator of a work copies elements from another successful work in the hopes of making their own work popular, this also known as “Follow the Leader” mentality.

An example of this would in the games industry after the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007 to which it received critical acclaim and financial success, games released following this featured element found in Modern Warfare such as regenerating health, a two-weapon carry limit etc. The creativity decay worsened after the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, the game made over 1 billion dollars in sales which lead to more games being made to be like Call of Duty, even games that weren’t “shooters” were now being made to have more action-focused gameplay with the notion that will attract the audience who buy Call of Duty. This attitude was not helped by developers relying on focus testing: