Ambiguities

 

 

These are SO important, they require a special section all to themselves.

 

What sorts of ambiguities are there?

 

SIMPLE SECRET

 

No deception, no ambiguity.

Low arousal Portal. Habitual thinking.

 

The red skin of an apple, simple clue to a ripe fruit inside, ready to eat

Coulisse, revealing further fields, hedgerows, trees and bends in the road

 

 

ONE CLUE, TWO REFERENTS

 

A Surprise pretending to be a simple Secret.

We focus on what they are expecting or familiar with, focus on a stereotype.

This way we try to get them into habitual thinking mode, unchallenging

to the wrong Pathway. Then the greater the surprise.

 

Strippers pants, and pants that are left unbuttoned to reveal the underpants

Is the hero interested in the heroine or not?

Is he cynical and smooth or lost and lonely?

The gap below the navel between shirt and jeans – is it deliberate or accidental?

Is it printed surface or three dimensional?

Lorries go…

The chord that spans two scales, two keys

Deep Blue Sea

Trojan Horse

Virus

 

 

More than one meaning, all valid, broadening the meaning.

I wake and feel the fell of night not day

Plant, Spirit/In me your power

 

 

 

NOISE = SIGNAL

 

Is it a clue at all? And if yes, of what? Is there a Portal at all here? Low contrast Focus.

Even the clue is a Secret.

Turn up the volume – high arousal, nerve endings to trigger

with a much lower level of input.

Risk of paranoia.

 

Mist, snow, rain, dusk

Shadows in the dark

Little noises when it’s quiet

Foreshadowing in a film or novel

 

"If you look at certain walls covered with stains and built

of mingled stones... you will... discern provinces with

their mountains, their rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great

valleys, hills in many aspects... battles and the swift

movement of faces and singular expressions, clothes

and innumerable other things."

 

(Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher, Phaidon, 2001)

 

Allusion to another text through use of proper name eg Language of Metaphors p165

 

 

Cognitive dissonance

 

This is clearly a clue, but of what could it be the clue? Is it impossible? High contrast, 

a Spike Focus. Here we are trying to create a new conceptual niche in the person’s brain – doing the opposite

of lulling them into habitual thinking. Challenging it in fact. Foreshadowing a high arousal Portal.

 

Hifi sound in your head

Draft Beer in a can

Smart Drugs

Back to the future

This fish is loaded

Property is Theft

 

 

 

The False Dichotomy

 

False stereotypical Ambiguity presented as the real one,

lulling the audience into habitual thinking. Extended arousal,

but looking in the wrong direction.

 

The stars in the Holmes and Watson joke:

The question is not – we can see a lot of stars, is there life out there or not

But, we can see stars, so the tent has gone

 

Jacuzzi: inside or outside? Public or private?

Neither. It is not a place where there are such rules – it is

frontier territory where there are no rules

 

The Fox in the Doolittle painting – hidden by being small, focussed with colour and being located centrally

 – the true ambiguity is the noise=signal of the birch trees

and the camouflaged riders.

 

In the story ‘Sarrasine’ by Balzac, the mystery is posed of the gender of the central character.

Is the character male or female? We are given clues in both directions:

 

“Oh! What a beautiful painting!” she went on,

getting up and going to stand before a painting in a magnificent frame.

We stood for a moment in contemplation of this marvel,

which seemed to have been painted by some supernatural brush.

The picture was of Adonis lying on a lion’s skin.

 

The lamp hanging from the ceiling of the room in an alabaster globe

 illuminated this canvas with a soft glow which enabled us all to make out all the beauties of the painting.

“Does such a perfect creature exist?” she asked me,

after having, with a soft smile of contentment,

examined the exquisite grace of the contours, the pose, the color, the hair;

 in short, the entire picture.

“He is too beautiful for a man,” she added, after an examination such as she might have made of some rival.

 

 

Saying that the Adonis could not be a man is part truth

 (he is a castrato – a boy singer whose voice was preserved by castration),

and in playing on the assumption many of us have that a person has to be male or female,

the writer has his lady character hint that this Adonis  might really be a woman,

thus focussing the reader on quite the wrong path). 

 

This can be seen too in much tabloid journalism. Is Michael Jackson a hero or a villain?

Is he a trickster – a villain posing as a hero? Or … (perhaps like Madonna), a hero posing as a villain to

keep the name in the press? Or are these false dichotomies? Does the truth lie

elsewhere?