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The Walrus Was Paul
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Sub-trope of Mind Screw where the creators are intentionally trying to confound explanation. Whether they're poking fun at the fans' tendency to explain and codify everything, trying to express that Real Life doesn't always have clear-cut answers, amusing themselves, or simply more interested in evoking a mood than communicating a specific message, they'll make the weirdest, most incomprehensible work they can. When adding examples, remember that the authors must have stated their intent to dish out a Mind Screw (quotes are good here). Subjective guesses and theories go in 'normal' Mind Screw. Often used to subvert What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?, by means of not having any deeper meaning. A frequent story element of a Mockstery Tale. Compare Faux Symbolism, where it's merely "throw some meaning at a wall and hope it sticks", Criminal Mind Games, when this is done in-story to throw the pursuers off-track, and Cow Tools. Contrast Viewers Are Geniuses, when there really is an attempt at a message, but it's too esoteric for its audience; and The Chris Carter Effect. See also Shrug of God and Teasing Creator. For a whole setting comprised of those, see World of Mysteries. The trope name comes from a line in a song by The Beatles called "Glass Onion", which is referring to a song on the preceding album called "I Am The Walrus", which notably was sung by John Lennon, not Paul McCartney. Not to be confused with Warm-Hearted Walrus or Wily Walrus, which are tropes about literal walruses. |
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The Walrus Was Paul / int_1298743d | type |
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P J Hammond keeps saying that he never had any explanation for any events in Sapphire and Steel that didn't appear in the show's dialogue. | |
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The Walrus Was Paul / int_14f12541 | type |
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The Notes at the end of The Waste Land, which aren't necessarily as helpful as one might like. Easy to imagine T. S. Eliot having a chuckle at the expense of the critics. In The Frontiers of Criticism, he claimed he padded them in order to fill out the book "with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day". | |
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The Mirror Lied: A complete and deliberate Mind Screw. To quote the author: "It has no defined story by me, that's certain — but its point is to be on the extreme end of the scale as far as ambiguity goes, for the sake of a possibly refreshing experiment of interpretation for some." | |
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Serial Experiments Lain is this. A lot of what goes on in the series has multiple interpretations. One of the producers of the series has said he wanted American people to understand the show differently from Japanese people. He was dismayed to discover that foreigners interpreted it the same way the Japanese audience did. | |
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Faith No More's "Epic" has inspired many theories about what in particular "it" is (The last half of the song is in fact just a refrain of "What is it? / It's it."). The most popular theories are "rape" and "style," showing just how vague and contradictory the lyrics are. Eventually, the song's writer mentioned in an interview that he just put together words that sound good, without any regard to meaning. | |
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Æon Flux messes with your head constantly, and Peter Chung has gone out of his way not to explain anything, in hopes that the viewers will derive their own meanings. This approach eventually backfired badly on him, though. The plot of the film, almost universally considered terrible, had its genesis in the scriptwriters' own interpretation of one of the mind screwiest episodes of the series. | |
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Neon Genesis Evangelion: Word of God stated numerous times that this work was generally designed with Mind Screw first, plot second. This became more and more apparent in later episodes with all of the symbolism and Freudian imagery splattered all over the place in such disjointed fashion, mainly in the form of jump cuts, and of course the trope-naming, infamous Gainax Ending. The (Japan-only) video game Neon Genesis Evangelion 2 does give explanations for many of the bizarre events, but its canonicity is dubious at best, as while Gainax and the developers claim it is, Hideaki Anno himself has stated that no information outside the original anime itself is needed to understand the story. | |
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Silent Hill: Even the stuff that's All There in the Manual doesn't help anyone make sense of the series. It's not meant to. Even the fans' most cherished theories have never received any confirmation more solid than a shrug or an inconclusive reply from the producers. Among other things, they claim that the only canonical conclusions to each game are the UFO Endings. | |
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Twin Peaks, which despite its apparent Myth Arc, was simply David Lynch making things up as he went along. Among other things, he originally never intended for the killer of Laura Palmer to be revealed. | |
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A Series of Unfortunate Events gets this way toward the end, with the Lemony Narrator outright admitting that there are no straight answers, and we must keep on questioning. | |
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Alice in Wonderland: The riddle "How is a raven like a writing desk?" as posed to Alice by the Hatter. The Hatter did not know the answer to the riddle, and it was never revealed. A Riddle for the Ages indeed. A great many letters to Lewis Carroll requesting an answer to this madness-inducing question returned replies that there was no answer, which was the point of the riddle. Carroll added in a preface to a new edition of the story: | |
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Revolutionary Girl Utena: like many surreal anime series, was put together to promote differing interpretations and discussion. Ikuhara trusts the fans to do analyses on themselves, though, which results in him more or less pretending to know nothing in interviews, often blatantly lying about "not having thought" about some of the most basic parts of the show. For example, the ending of the movie (in which Utena turns into a car) fits with what cars mean in the show (adulthood), but Ikuni's official explanation is "I wanted to see a beautiful girl turn into a car." The Shadow Play Girls embody this most of all because you can never tell whether they're legitimate symbolism or parodies. | |
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BBC's Robin Hood has a scene in season 2 in which Sir Guy has a dream where Marian massages his shoulder and says that she "Should have let [him] take care of [her]" then Marian turns into Allan who says "I'm your boy" "I should've let you take care of me". The scene pleased many slash fans, but the writers admitted that it was just to get people talking. | |
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Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: In his introduction, Khan makes a show of removing his left-hand glove, but leaves his right-hand glove on for the rest of the movie. According to director Nicholas Meyer, this was meant to provoke this reaction. When people ask for an explanation, he likes to reply, "Why do you think he left one glove on?" | |
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According to the director of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, the infamous beard shaving scene was there just to provoke the confused, conversation-sparking reaction that it did. | |
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OFF makes a few explanations for its madness, but they're either very wacky or very vague. | |
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Game Boy Camera has some creepy images and sounds hidden in the game. Of note are the vandalised pictures of Nintendo employees, accompanied by a horrific sound and the caption, "who are you running from?". Why are they there? The developers are complete and utter trolls. | |
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Southland Tales. Director Richard Kelly (who also did the equally convoluted Donnie Darko) has admitted that he made the plot so convoluted that almost no meaning can be extracted from it. It includes Time Travel, the impending end of the world, Orwellian dystopia, revolutionary new energy sources which will change the world, Neo-Marxist terrorists, an actor who seems destined to be the new Messiah, and a government conspiracy all colliding in Los Angeles aka the Southland. | |
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"The Riddle" by Nik Kershaw has deliberately nonsensical lyrics which were chosen simply to fit the lyrics, combined with an equally-incoherent music video depicting The Riddler doing various bizarre things. | |
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2001: A Space Odyssey: There is enough contradiction between the book and movie to allow for multiple interpretations anyway, as Kubrick was not involved with the former and Clarke never had the last say on anything in the latter (his script having been changed a lot). | |
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The singer Seal intentionally does not put out official lyrics to his songs, feeling that if someone realized the lyrics were something other than what they thought it was, it would rob them of what they feel the song's meaning is to them. | |
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The Illuminatus! Trilogy: Robert Anton Wilson has said the whole point was to pile up enough conspiracy theories so that no one could be sure what was 'true' by the end. | |
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In Blade Runner, there is intentional ambiguity over whether or not Deckard is a replicant, clearly meant to leave the audience thinking. Unusually for this trope, the creators have actually weighed in on the matter, and they disagree. Ridley Scott says he is, Harrison Ford says he isn't, and various special cuts have made it less ambiguous in both directions. | |
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The ending to The Prisoner (1967). Patrick McGoohan wanted people to scratch their heads and cudgel their brains out trying to understand the final episode. He did too good a job — apparently disgruntled or just plain confused fans showed up at his house demanding to know what it was all about. | |
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In the season 4 finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon placed a weirdo with cheese spouting nonsense lines in each of the four main characters' dreams. Although the rest of the episode is heavy with symbolism, he specifically wanted something in each dream sequence that meant absolutely nothing whatsoever. This doesn't stop fans from trying to explain it anyway. | |
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The surreal comedy short Too Many Cooks has spawned all sorts of elaborate theories about its supposed hidden meanings, but Casper Kelly has specified that it was made to be a joke that goes on for way too long in order to confuse unfortunate viewers who happened across it during its original 4 AM airing. The increasingly bizarre things which happen during the short were simply added to make the joke longer, not to make a sophisticated statement about the state of modern television like many believe. | |
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The first half of Batman (Grant Morrison) put heavy emphasis on the Joker utilizing a black and red color scheme. Compounded with the appearance of the criminal group known as the Black Glove, Batman begins to obsess over the real meaning behind the Joker's colors and their true purpose. The Joker eventually admits the use of red and black didn't signify anything important at all. He thinks he might've been inspired from when he beat Jason Todd with a crowbar, but admits he only made it look like the colors were important because he knew Batman would go nuts over it. In this, Grant Morrison's admitting they were trolling the readers who kept obsessing over finding hidden meanings in every little thing they wrote in this story. | |
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A Babylon 5 episode features Sheridan having a dream with all kinds of symbolism that actually means something... and Garibaldi with a bird on his shoulder, which was only put in because JMS thought it would be a funny thing to make the actor do. | |
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Inception is clearly designed to provide ammunition for numerous different interpretations of the ending (and the whole film). Christopher Nolan has said very little about the movie due to this. The only thing he's ever really said about it is that he views the ending as real but that he's biased because he's a sentimental father of four himself and that his view shouldn't stop anyone from interpreting it another way. | |
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