Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012)
In 1967 Paul McCartney was involved in a car accident. He was fine, but subsequent to this began a rumour that he had in fact died and that The Beatles hired a lookalike to take his place in the band. These rumours were compounded by the cover of the 1969 Abbey Road album. Supposedly McCartney is pictured as the corpse, Lennon as a holy man, Harrison as a gravedigger, and Starr as an undertaker. There were various other clues and/or interpretations, some of these intentionally placed there by the band, and others were misinterpretations (such as the mishearing of 'cranberry sauce' for 'I buried Paul').
In 1968 young Ohio boy Charles Manson found himself in California and sat down and listened to Helter Skelter and heard something very different to that which others heard.
Interpretation, and reading subtext into a text.
Some things are placed there deliberately, as clues to the creators intention, but then some aspects are pure happenstance. The Coen brothers mentioned in an interview that there is potentially a PhD essay in the random passage of birds in their films Blood Simple (1984) and Barton Fink (1991). Spanish director Luis Buñuel revelled in putting red herring objects in his films that he knew people would try to read meaning into, but which were in fact empty vessels.
But whether the object contains intention or not is perhaps not the point. Some of these recurring features and motifs are subconscious, and do have meaning bound up in them, but the object was chosen unintentionally. Sometimes the case can be made so strongly that the intention or truth of the meaning becomes completely secondary to the possibilities that are opened up by the reading. Look at Rene Magritte, forever painting figures with the face obscured by material, just as the body of his dead mother had been covered as it was carried out of a nearby river, and out of his life. Or how artist Joseph Beuys was taken from the wreckage of his crashed World War II plane, and wrapped in fat and felt by the Tartars (the nomadic tribes in the Crimean mountains), which thus explains why both fat and felt formed the cornerstone of his following art career. Does it matter that these two stories are completely fabricated? They're very convincing.
Personally, I can take or leave a large amount of interpretation. But that doesn't mean that I think it's a waste of time. In fact, what better way is there to show that an object has succeeded and taken root in the world than by showing how it has taken root in people's minds? Is there any greater goal for an artwork than that of impacting people to such a level that it requires analysis, interpretation and discussion? Probably not.