When I went to see Obsession earlier this year, my perspective was clouded by matters of reception. I had read one Letterboxd review by an acquaintance which suggested Curry Barker didn’t understand consent and that the film perpetuated rape culture. On the contrary, I had seen otherwise ardent feminists claim it as a scathing humiliation ritual for its ‘nice guy’ protagonist. I walked out of it thinking it was indifferent to sexual morays though tapped into post-Me-Too anxieties across the sexes about as effectively as a wide release film could.

Obsession was not quite apolitical, nor angry, but sharp, aware, and knowing that its gendered preoccupations were gonna scare the fuck out of a Gen Z exhausted by divisive gender discourse. As the film’s notoriety grew into blockbuster status, the discourse devolved into Twitterian mudslinging; my favorite being “i broke up with my ex because of his take on obsession” on r/GirlDinnerDiaries — it’s a real bummer of a post but the title is hilarious. Obsession’s explainification is the product of its oversized popularity; the “Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of ‘Boss Baby’ vibes from this“ effect. Unlike the most interesting films this year — not necessarily the ‘best’, Barker didn’t seem to prefabricate debatable talking points, instead stumbling his way into an onslaught of OBSESSION EXPLAINED YouTube slop and media illiterate discourse about protagonists equating to directors’ worldview by way of a compelling logline premise.

My foreknowledge of Obsession, my indifference towards its politics, and the six months of rancour it derived put a lens on most of my 2026 viewing — one that looks for signs of baked “explainification” or lack there of; i.e. movies that weaponize ambiguity to intentionally keep the conversation going. To define explainfaction, in its embracement, rejection, and when it happens by fluke, I want to look at the movies that begot the most discourse on intent, ideology, and/or thematic ambiguities the most this year: DIGGER and TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA.

I should clarify that my chief preoccupations in this essay are thematic ambiguities more so than narrative ones. There is more meaning to be mined from hermeneutics than from SparkNotes though the former is the arbiter of vitriol and the latter is a simple human desire to make sure you’re following the story. Movies like Buddy and Backrooms are genre films; they draw discomfort from the inexplicable and unrevealed, though their chief inspirations are lost media memories and ‘liminality’ respectively which both beget rampant speculation about backstories and in-world logic.

The impulse to elaborate and clarify narrative in mysterious or expansive cinema is similar to thematic explainfication — we hate to miss something —  but it does not reduce nor increase the meaning of the source material; it simply keeps it alive through secondary chatter. These films bake in narrative explainfication through their well-to-do horror elements; their mysterious and imply a world greater than what’s shown; they want those video essays made but that’s all lore; I’m here to talk about meaning. 

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Digger is a wilhelm scream of explainification; of all the films I’ve seen this year nothing has been a more elated subject of debate and intrigue. It’s a “big swing” (hack term) — a cynical, misanthropic meta-satire gleefully misleading you into thinking it’s a DNC-approved version of a leftist satire like Don’t Look Up before revealing itself as a misanthropic act of self-immolation and art about the limitations of art; a satire of satire. If I’m being intellectually honest, it took me four kilometers on foot to piece together what it was trying to say — that your family is more important than your art, that popular art is always compromised by evil money, and that there is reprieve in laughing at the darkness even if comedy does not bring about an eternal light.

Thirty minutes in, it’s revealed that everything we’ve seen thus far is a satirical play about an apocalyptic disaster brought about by Digger Rockwell, a brash oil tycoon; the events we’re seeing cartoonishly transpire have already happened. In the end, we discover that the production is being funded by the real Digger’s nephew; whose wealth has entitled him to dialectics. Iñárritu does not necessarily posit that the nephew as evil by proxy; he’s there to remind you that art, or art at this scale, is a privilege and not a right. Basically, Digger’s nephew explains to the cast and crew ‘dialectics’ — that two seemingly contradictory things can be true; that Digger itself serves no utilitarian purpose but hey, maybe it’ll provide some relief and give us a laugh. 

Its debate prep for the viewer; it can be, say, an unfunny comedy because it’s on purpose — it’s meta. It can be a leftist satire critical of the very system its built by because so is Fossil Fools (the play within the film). The very same defenses Iñárritu stages for himself are the attacks its critics have used; its discourse is spoonfed to you. Digger has all the necessary ambiguities to superimpose whatever reading (or reception) you want onto it; to explainify it to death. It’s as exhausting and annoying as it is deftly self-reflexive and intriguing.

I imagine the exemplar video essay on Digger would run five hours long written in the loquacious, research obsessed, personal-aside filled prose of Tim Roger — who talked about Digger for an hour on his last stream and concluded that it’s annoying though admirable. It would take the form of an exhaustive, shotily cited, assemblage of archival footage in the vein of Adam Curtis with neoclassical and ambient UK garage underscoring its long-winded diatribes. It would begin with a history lesson on oil money, draw comparisons to The Producers, Don’t Look Up, Dr. Strangelove, and There Will Be Blood, talk about David Zazlav, Paramount, and the failure of the last Mission Impossible movie, and probably only really get into the meat of the film itself for 25 minutes mostly focusing on the stuff outside of the play; on Digger’s real-life counterparts, the rugpull hellscape ending, and its parallels to Tom Cruise real anxieties about Suki; on its satirical intent; on its anti-woke-wokeness.

It’s a meta movie that requires a meta reading; ripe for explanation; as it intended. Digger wants to alienate viewers who dislike its meta nature to argue with galaxy brained humanities majors equipped with terms like ‘metamodernism’ and ‘historiography’. It is 2026’s shining exemplar of generous explainification; its begged me to write this very essay just days after seeing it; to get mad at Letterboxd reviews that suggest its metanarrative is a shield from its “lack of direction” (its the most directed movie of year) even if I concur with Rogers that its more admirable then it is good; for me to take it into my own hands to explainify it beyond its ambient free jazz politics; a movie whose discourse is more exciting than itself.

I didn’t walk out of Digger or go into it knowingly aware that it fit within my explainfication preoccupation, nor do I have much of an affinity for Iñárritu’s stage-like form and boomer existentialism though I loved Babel solely for its scintillating Ryuichi Sakamoto score. Without the explainfication that Digger begets, it’s a messy, highfalutin failure vying to earn Cruise his much coveted Academy Award. It thrives best outside of itself; I thought Digger was going to be some neolibbed DNC Strangelove wannabe and only saw it because of a screenshot comparing it to Megalopolis which suggested to me it was polarizing thus exciting. I appreciated Megalopolis’ experimental melodrama and senile neoliberalism-by-way-of-Ayn-Rand but it’s not the same kind of “big swing” (hack term) as Digger — any ambiguities and hermeneutic intrigue read as playful experimentation by an ultra creative old man terrified of an apocalyptic future he’ll never see, though it may be rich with semiotics alluding to broad ideas of mythology, religion, and spiritual matters beyond my single viewing interpretation… honestly… a superior movie despite painfully explainifying itself to oblivion in the final monologue. 

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Camp Miasma is 2026’s anti-explainification masterpiece. Schoenbrun is a student of Lynch, creepypastas, misunderstood DTV masterpieces and postmodern literature. Inexplicably, her work resonates beyond any of those disparate influences and has seemingly resonated with a sizable, diverse audience despite her organically ambiguous form. I Saw the TV Glow was beloved by even my most trans-apprehensive (phobic), lauded for its moody sense of nostalgia and open-ended vie for the outsider. It’s easy, even cheap, to explainfy Schoenberg’s three features as trans allegories; straight-ahead GNDR100 pink-pilled metaphors.

I think Schoenbrun’s movies resonate because they are not really about trans matters if you don’t want them to be. Their lonely tone poems about media, identity, and the outsider; queer people by both definitions. My simple reading of Miasma is that it’s about where your head goes when dissociating during sex, evident in the ‘Little Death’ nomenclature and the sex scenes in the film, but really that’s but a part of its sum. I thought of Lynch’s The Return — a lifetime of unrealized dreams collaged into a reality-disrupting swan song by a dying artist. I sense from this interview Schoenberg sees the comet looming for her career — that as film monopolized and right wing ideologues and technocratic losers take hold of our media she may never get another wide release theatrical film out, and took the chance to insert as many preoccupations, images, and ideas —dreams— into this feature without concern for thesis-pilled filmmaking.

The disregard Miasma has for distinguishing reality from fantasy and film from fact supports my theory that Schoenberg rejects explanifaction outright. Like Lynch’s The Return, Miasma is filled with myriad avenues of thematic resonance that don’t neatly entitle explainfaction — in fact, Hannah Einbinder’s character learns to resist explainification from Gillian Anderson; that you can just like something because it makes you feel joy. It is Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” personified.

We don’t interrogate our preference for Jolly Ranchers Gummies yet we interrogate the pathos of our erotic desires. “Long December” is just a great, lonely, wintery song; it’s neither ironic nor semiotic. Dale Cooper just loves coffee and so does Lynch. That’s what makes love intoxicating and the expainification of it paralyzing; it’s an inexplicable feeling: sensory, vulgar, personal, reflexive, stupid, life-affirming; art as limerence. If Digger is art as benign utility then Miasma is a magnificent wet dream discharged onto a canvas.

I fucking hate explainifaction because it proliferates foreknowledge on social media and clouds my enjoyment; my ability to be surprised; my enchantment and wonder; but that has zero to do with the films itself unless they bake it into the form. Explainfication is the artists as intellectual, manifesting Sontag’s claim that interpretation is the “revenge of the intellect upon art” in an ouroboros-like fashion; treating interpretive meaning above the sensuous and personal. I watched Obsession with consent on the brain. I didn’t watch Anora as to avoid discussing its portrayal of sex work (a hot topic amongst my friends around its release). But I can’t help myself — I’m online as hell and drawn to polarization, ragebait, and discourse. But, god-willing, let’s read the news before we look at the comments section.