Allegory: what's the fuss?

It is difficult to describe the movie Magnolia, its effect on me, my intellectual gymnastics in trying to separate my love for it from the fanatical attempts by movie-apologists to yank some allegory from the film. Now to be clear, I'm not against people who throw out allegories based on story-arcs; this is bound to happen, and it's happened in other artistic mediums, and I don't think it should be discouraged. If the allegory is probably drawn based on certain discerned themes the movie puts out there, then by all means point out the allegory if for no other reason than to illuminate your own experience of the movie, or the meaning the movie had for you alone; and if you meet someone else who pulled out a similar allegory, you can join hands in sharing your mutual experience and talk into the wee hours about the similar effect the movie had on you both. That's the beauty of it. My problem with the allegory-syndrome is that some movie-apologists try to foist the allegory on the audience, and that a failure to discern the allegory means a failure on the part of the moviegoer to discern the objective meaning of the movie.

But I'm trying to mesh this view with one I've always had a tendency to shy away from. I don't like the platitude that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But if I shy away from this, why do I not like the allegory-syndrome? Maybe this is what happens. Perhaps there is an allegory that, by the very nature of the theme in the movie, is a necessary part of the art; and that, by accident, the audience can tap into this inherent part, and by some further accident, hone in on this inherent part in such a way that this part effects the audience with some aesthetic experience: the audience is effected, and so the subjective and objective are for a moment bridged. My problem is that if the allegory is 'out there'/'in the movie', then the critic, or the movie-appreciator, has to examine it like a scientist examines some protoplasm in a slide under a microscope, and the subject-matter of the art is divorced from me/the subject; and it is a necessary part of art that it links/connects with the subject/me in a subjective way; and if it does that, it's impossible to - at the same time - examine in some scientific way the nature of the art that happens to be affecting me. Perhaps this is the appreciation/contemplation distinction coming into play.

In other words, there's a distinction between contemplating an effect in me made by the art, and actually being in the moment of being affected by the art. If you're watching a part in a movie that moves you so much it makes you cry, you can do a couple things. You can stay engrossed in the movie, focused on the story, on the screen, and what's happening on the screen, entering into the imaginative experience of the moviegoer, receiving that world, so for a moment you see the whole world through that experience, and you have a genuine aesthetic experience; or you can stop right on the threshold of the experience and start looking inward at how your whole biological system is reacting to the experience: a felt change of the nervous system, a fluttering in the diaphragm, a feeling of sickness, but pleasurable somehow. In the first case, you have appreciation; in the second, you have contemplation. Perhaps the allegory-syndrome comes from a process of contemplation that seeks to make sense of a prior experience of appreciation while in the aesthetic experience. But while I'm in the appreciation-stage, anyone who tries to tell me the insights of the contemplation-stage, that this or that scene is a perfect artistic rendering of the metaphor of Christ liberating us from the bondage of sin (for example), I'm repulsed, annoyed, and annoyed in such a way that when I happen to emerge out of the appreciation-stage and into the contemplation-stage, I remember those insights I was annoyed with, and because they annoy me, I'm denied certain inherent allegory-insights about the movie, because of a psychological disposition to shy away from them, because of the uninvited way they were foisted on me while I was in the appreciation-state.

I think the power of allegories in movies or any medium of art comes from private contemplation, from our thinking about the impact of the movie, or the meaning the movie has for us, in the privacy of our own imagination. It is very rare when you can discuss an allegory with someone else and have the power of the allegory affect them in the way you intended it to affect them and at the same time preserve the subjectivity that is at the root of all movie-enjoyment. Or, I can think of some other way allegory-hunting can be enjoyable: when you WANT to find an allegory. In that case, the 'want' is connected to subjectivity; you're seeking for an allegorical meaning, and when you find one that affects you, you seize on it as a means of understanding something or other. But this is delicate ground we're treading on, because subjectivity is delicate ground. So, I guess I can be open to allegories being inherent in movies; there's just a delicate way to go about talking about them. This could clear up something: that who cares how delicate we talk about the fact that the Earth is the third planet removed from the sun - that's a scientific fact, and it's proven objectively by science. But it's interesting that when we talk about movies, there is a delicate way we have to talk about allegory in movies; I find that this is because movies are closely bound up with our own subjectivity, even though there is an objective fact of the matter of whether or not there is an allegory, or whether the allegory inferred is right or not.