Meaning that the author is maybe not very good at their craft, but inadvertently created a work with a lot more meaning than they intended, or they accidentally did something quite clever that they didn’t mean to. Or maybe a work which is good in its own right but there’s a particular “unofficial” interpretation which makes it so much better.
Obviously a bit of this question involves knowing authorial intentions, but in a lot of instances authors have been able to state that they did or didn’t intend a particular interpretation.
Commented about this recently somewhere else, so it’s what came to mind first - ‘Mother’ by Darren Aronofsky. I came away from watching it really excited about interpretations involving artists, egos, glorified relationships with their ‘muse’ that drains that partner completely until they have nothing more to give and are discarded, shattered, while the artist is adored etc.
Aronofsky himself describes it with a fixed interpretation of (paraphrasing) ‘she represents mother earth, and we are taking from her and destroying her’. Which in my opinion is just kinda boring. I can see it fitting, but it just makes the whole movie much less interesting to me
absolutely great movie
Why would the earth have anxiety about wanting to spend quality time with us? That’s definitely ‘death of the author’ territory.