I just watched Gremlins 2 for the first time since 1990. The entire film is built around a dim, vain, tasteless New York developer named Daniel Clamp, his sprawling Clamp Building and his gimcrack Clamp Empire, which includes TV stations, his inane self-aggrandizing books, and a line of jams and jellies. At the end he falls for a character named Marla. This has been a remark about how the meaning of a work of art is not something fixed or under the control of its creators.