Finnegan

I wonder about that constantly. That's one reason I haven't tried contacting anybody involved in making YA -- not even Voci, who seems approachable. I will, when I work up the courage, but not yet.

However, whether "intent of the author" fully captures "meaning" in a work is a very old problem in criticism. (There's a large literature on that in literary criticism theory.) The question boils down to how conscious the author is of why or how what he's doing "works," insofar as it does "work." That varies tremendously from author to author, obviously. But I think it's safe to say that art is never fully conscious. We are never fully conscious of why or how anything that we do "works," insofar as it does "work." We cannot fully understand ourselves -- it's a reflexivity problem.

So even if Antin didn't consciously intend some (or even much) of what seems to be in YA, it may still "be there." Antin may have tapped into themes and symbols without being fully conscious of them.

That said, a lot of what I've been doing in my posts on this board is exploring the extent to which Antin's artistry must have been conscious. For example, using the Oxford crest as the Rawley crest on the crew shirts in YA 1 and YA 2 (before the lawyers probably went ape****). Or the anachronisms: that's why I've taken such pains to document the exact models of the 1930s coke machine, the 1940s gas pump, that's why I've pointed out the carburetor cap in an apparently new Chevy truck, and researched that no Chevy trucks were made with carburetors after 1986. None of that stuff can be unintended, it costs too much to do it.

Similarly, when the frist line of a Dylan song is scrawled on the blackboard of a literature teacher -- Finn -- it's conspicuously anomalous. It's a flashing signal that almost breaks the fourth wall. "My love she speaks like silence" has its own meaning for YA -- it's about the way YA communicates. But the last line of that song is "My love she's like a raven at my window with a broken wing." Given that Fleming first sees the emotionally wounded character in YA from a window, while she's dressed all in black cycling gear, that just cannot be an accident, or unconscious. That has to be deliberate and calculated.

And again, Antin spent much of the 1990s making egghead art films with Jefery Levy. That's how he made the transition from actor to writer/producer. See my post about that on this board's "Steven Antin appreciation thread." So it's not too incredible that YA might have a lot of egghead artsy stuff -- notwithstanding that it was marketed to the WB for teen viewing.