Movies

6806 readers

223 users here now

Welcome to Movies, a community for discussing movies, film news, box office, and more! We want this to be a place for members to feel safe to discuss and share everything they love about movies and movie related things. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow!

Related Communities:

[email protected] - Discussing books and book-related things.

[email protected] - A place to discuss comic books of all types.

[email protected] - LW's home for all things MCU.

While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by the Lemmy.World Terms of Service: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
Shitposts and memes are allowed until they prove to be a problem.

Regarding spoilers; Please put "(Spoilers)" in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers, as we do not currently have a spoiler tag available. If your post contains an image that could be considered a spoiler, please mark the thread as NSFW so the image gets blurred. As far as how long to wait until the post is no longer a spoiler, please just use your best judgement. Everyone has a different idea on this, so we don't want to make any hard limits.

Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread. Most of the Lemmy clients don't support this but we want to get into the habit as clients will be supporting in the future.

Failure to follow these guidelines will result in your post/comment being removed and/or more severe actions. All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. We ask that the users report any comment or post that violates the rules, and to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Hurts

Tenthrow

JonsJava

"Under the Silver Lake" explanation (mbin.grits.dev)

submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/movies

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Okay so the explanation for "Under the Silver Lake" was so obvious (I thought) that I was waiting for the reveal, and then it never came, and then I looked up explanations online, and they also didn't arrive at the same explanation. So with significant spoilers in mind, here is my theory:

::: Spoilers

Sam is clearly the killer and an unreliable (insane) narrator. Everything in the movie is actually coherent and sensible (well... maybe except for the hobo king), except for scenes that are connected with some severe violence happening to someone who he's alone with, or scenes where he's by himself (figuring out some "hidden code" and deciding that it's leading him to some kind of breakthrough, or wandering around town aimlessly with weird shit happening to him). In no particular order:

He breaks into the rich guy's house, and it just happens that the guy fits perfectly in with Sam's conspiracy nonsense and also Sam has to kill him
Right after he gets the gun, when he goes skinny-dipping in the reservoir, the girl he's with mysteriously gets shot
He hangs out with Sarah, and then she disappears and her roommates all move out immediately and one of them attacks him and runs away when she sees him
He learns where the conspiracy guy lives, and then right after, the guy gets murdered and when he watches the video, what we're shown happening on the video is weird and semi-supernatural i.e. clearly not what happened in reality
He beats the shit out of those kids because they keyed his car, but later on, his car is clearly fine, i.e. not keyed after all
He walks up on the cult people and they talk conspiracy nonsense that fits perfectly with his delusions, and anyway long story short when he walks out they're all dead

Then on top of that, he's carrying dog treats around and in the middle of messing with Sarah's dog when he first meets her. The way the conspiracy reveals itself clearly isn't how it actually happened (it just so happens that the answer is in a Nintendo Power issue he just happens to have with him), this mind-blowingly secret bomb shelter clearly doesn't actually connect to a publicly accessible trapdoor in the back room in the grocery store or whatever, people don't actually start barking at him when they get mad at him. And so on. The guy is just out of his mind and we're seeing a mixture of what really happened and his delusions.

Oh and also he clearly gets excited from thinking about the death of the billionaire; the news story about the billionaire dying is one of the things he lays out for himself to whack off to.

The guy is a serial killer and about half the movie is just wacko stuff that's going on in his mind, and half is real. No? Am I the weird one here?

:::

top 4 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] TheControlled 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Sure why not? The movie is insane anyway.

You forgot to mention that he has some vile beliefs such as that the homeless are leeches and if I remember he briefly implies eradication or at very least something sinister. The hot rich woman cuts him off before he can finish.

Like the other commenter said, I can take it at it's word, but I don't see why this doesn't work too, as an alternative viewing. He definitely has something wrong with him though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

It's been a few years since I watched it and none of this made sense to me. Just read the Wikipedia summary for a refresher and it's one of the most incomprehensible summaries I've ever read. All I can say is that I remember taking the movie at its word more or less. Interesting idea though.

[–] graymess 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

I'm glad people got something out of the movie and enjoyed pouring through it for secrets, but I'm firmly in the camp of none of it is supposed to make sense and have an answer, but people will assign meaning to any little mundane thing they find and that's the point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, there's a whole different thing of whatever codes are embedded in the movie and a fairly successful effort, I guess, to read into that whole side of it and determine whatever is the mystery at the bottom of all the different codes. I have no opinion on all that stuff; I was just trying to read into what was going on with the plot and the events of the movie.

Although I think it would be hilarious if my "both of the characters who are into codes and finding secrets are out of their goddamned minds wasting their time because there's nothing there" theory translated also into "there's nothing at the bottom of all the different ciphers embedded in the movie and any fans who are digging into it are wasting their time because there's nothing there" 🙂.