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So often I have friends read a book or watch a movie and say "I don't really get it, it doesn't make sense, I didn't really like it" and then some time later they'll come back and say "actually, I read the Wikipedia article about it and now I understand. The author actually intended it to be about [xyz]"
Um, what? If those themes and ideas were not evident in the original story, then what does it matter what the author intended? Surely the author also intended to write a cohesive and understandable story (and evidently failed, for you). Surely the author intended to convey those themes in the story itself. You didn't enjoy the movie, you enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article about the movie.
If author intention actually matters to non-meta media analysis, then that totally undermines anything the author actually does to convey the ideas in the work itself.
If (to make a specific example) my friend watches Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg and concludes only from the Wikipedia article about it that it's abstractly about Oshii's loss of religion, then that totally ignores everything in the movie that does or doesn't convey those themes just to create a shallow interpretation based on what the author was allegedly trying to do.
I get what you're saying and I make that same criticism sometimes, but
Nobody outside of historians would be able to interact with like 80% of historical art if supplemental information wasn't valid.
I'm not prepared to say that death of the author is entirely invalid, or even that the viewer has to accept the author's intention, only that understanding or at least sensing that is a vital aspect of art.
I mostly agree although rather than saying author intention is a vital aspect of art I would say it can be, but that the raw, uninformed experience is almost always more important