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Note to helpful commenters: Please at least attempt to explain what is incomprehensible, even in brief (I realize this is inherently difficult.) For example, "I understood it until Dave turned into a giant space fetus, unless that was supposed to be metaphorical."
If the series/movie/whatever is still running or is very recent (like Tsubasa) please black out or rot13 spoilers! (Go to rot13.com to encrypt and decrypt, it's easy.)
I did not find Angel Sanctuary that hard to follow once I got past the first few volumes. On the other hand I am still not sure what what happened to God, Lucifer, or the flying cannibal angel embryo armada, so I think it qualifies. It was probably just comprehensible in comparison to, say, Fairy Cube.
I still have no idea what happened at the end of Akira, except that I think it involved destroying Tokyo.
My further nominees: The Quiet Earth: A mysterious event leaves Earth depopulated except for three people. I am not sure what happened at the end or why, but it's possible that one of the men was mysteriously whisked to a moon of Jupiter.
Was Altered States the movie in which William Hurt watches a trippy light show for twenty minutes, then turns into a chimpanzee?
If the series/movie/whatever is still running or is very recent (like Tsubasa) please black out or rot13 spoilers! (Go to rot13.com to encrypt and decrypt, it's easy.)
I did not find Angel Sanctuary that hard to follow once I got past the first few volumes. On the other hand I am still not sure what what happened to God, Lucifer, or the flying cannibal angel embryo armada, so I think it qualifies. It was probably just comprehensible in comparison to, say, Fairy Cube.
I still have no idea what happened at the end of Akira, except that I think it involved destroying Tokyo.
My further nominees: The Quiet Earth: A mysterious event leaves Earth depopulated except for three people. I am not sure what happened at the end or why, but it's possible that one of the men was mysteriously whisked to a moon of Jupiter.
Was Altered States the movie in which William Hurt watches a trippy light show for twenty minutes, then turns into a chimpanzee?
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I remember being really strongly affected by that movie when I was a kid. Now I wonder why.
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From what I remember, the ending is --
SPOILER
SPOILER
SPOILER
Zac was one of the scientists who was working on the energy project. He tries keeping this from the other two people, but it's why he went mad in the first place. He steals the truck and sets off to kill himself, destroy the laboratory and kill the quantum effect that made everything go fuckedy in the first place. But he fails -- the truck blows up, he dies, the generator or antenna or whatever it is blows up, but this makes the grid freak out _again_ and he isn't dead, but alive by himself somewhere absolutely else. We don't know what happened to the other two people or everyone else back on Earth (or wherever it was they went). Once again, he's the only survivor. I've always seen it as a kind of commentary on the atomic bomb and how the scientists who set it off saw it as a great scientific achievement (Oppenheimer's oh-so-famous quote notwithstanding -- we read a Los Alamos casebook at my Santa Fe junior high school, and most of the scientists were not standing around feeling griefstricken, and there is a huge defensiveness about "the bomb saved more lives than it took" NO RLY around there to this day) -- and how the people it actually affected had no choice in the matter and no idea what was going on. Rather than leave the grid alone, or try to figure out some way of dealing with it other than BLOWING IT UP, he just has to mess with it. It's miles away from the acid-trip fruitbat crap at the end of 2001. Plus, it has a gorgeous score I've been trying to find for years and years.
My two cents anyway....I just love the movie so I'm probably defensive about it. I would chime in more on this topic but the kind of thing I think of is "The Magus," which is about six years long and which nobody else has ever seen, ever.
Also yeah, that's Altered States, altho it makes more sense if you read the book (which I read because it was by Paddy Chayefsky). The combination of the LSD and sensory deprivation, which was taken rather more seriously back then, somehow magically physically turn him into Early Man (this also happens to the dude wayy early in the first fifteen minutes or whatever of the book/film), and then he actually transforms into primordial GOO, and only the love of Blair Brown restores to us the hunky William Hurt. Stupid, yeah, but the famous slamming-himself-back-into-reality-against-the-hallway-walls sequence at the end has been copied and parodied in other films/commercials/music videos dozens of times.
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http://www.oldmovies.net.au/userimages/user1367_1173659520.jpg
I didn't take that to mean so much that he's actually _on_ a moon of Saturn/Jupiter (neither planet has those tides or waterspout-clouds, right?) -- more like, it's somewhere absolutely alien, and he thought he was going to escape his guilt through dying. But his sentence is to live, even when he tries attempting suicide -- again. Which goes back to, for me, the central point of how you can't escape responsibility and yet how often scientific 'achievements' are divorced from any possible real-world consequences they might have. I mean, presumably among all the millions of planets out there, there _are_ some with oxygen atmospheres, and with the quantum engine power machine generator plant thing, all kinds of whacky shit was going on. I guess for me that sounds more like a nit (altho I hate that term, it's so deprecating) than something like the end of 'Neon Genesis Evangelion,' but obviously mileage varies &c &c.
It's sort of hilarious how all the movie posters use the final SPOILER shot, but then again, it's not really a spoiler until you know how the film ends, I guess.
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NGE had a double-dose of incomprehensible, given that one finale eschewed plot over low-budget, freaky psychotherapy, and the other decided to, um, melt the entire world or something? I don't know. RIGHT?
(Hell, the friend I watched it with even said, "It's not about making sense." (It's about "being affecting."))
And, not being a depressed nihilist, I still add Lain to the list. It sure never quite explained what was up with the Wired and how many Lains there were and what/who was real and what/who wasn't and whether any of the story really mattered by the end. Also I think one of them was Satan? I don't know.
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Or the alien's won. We're still trying to figure it out.
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And then there is a revelation at the end that may or may not explain a crucial point, but I am not entirely sure. I strongly suspect it turns the whole thing into a tragedy, but I would need to rewatch to be more sure, and I want to know, but since it was weird all the time and soporific in spots and there is the potential that it really is tragic, I haven't gotten around to rewatching it yet.
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I really can't attempt to explain Zardoz. There is no way. It is orthogonal to conventional reality. It's vaguely like a Sean Connery-in-a-loincloth movie crossed with The Prisoner, except that it isn't. There are also elements of Riddley Walker. And a surprising quantity of naked women.
On the other hand, Fairy Cube made perfect sense to me.
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Are books ok?
From what DWJ says, I may just be too old to understand them -- apparently kids have no problems.
Robin McKinley's _Deerskin_ has some parts that my brain refuses to accept -- what exactly happens when she leaves the castle, mainly. And somehow I always remember the ending as her running away for ever and ever as the moon woman, when really there is a much more hopeful ending where she wants to try to be with the dog-loving prince. But I think my heart doesn't think she succeeds, because I'm always surprised by it.
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There are all these creepy trees growing translucent eggs with disturbing-looking bird-fetuses, a little girl living in a post-apocalyptic city trying to protect an egg, a soldier who might just be Jesus who arrives riding on a big phallic war machine with a weapon shaped like a cross, statues of men that come to life when a klaxon sounds and start trying to harpoon giant shadows of fish that swim along the walls of buildings and the ground, bizarre references to Noah's arc and implications that the whole world is still living on it, and a giant thing rising up out of the ocean with a stained glass eye and all of these angelic statues rising out of it, including a statue of the little girl with the egg, and pretty much nothing makes any sense but it's all so awfully lovely.
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What makes Tsubasa incomprehensible: 1. There are so many clones of the main two characters floating around right now, that it's nearly impossible to keep track of them. As of last week there are three Syaoran and five (possibly four, depending on how you count) Sakura. One Syaoran and three (possibly two) Sakura are already dead, though, so that helps narrow things down. 2. BTW, the "main" Syaoran in the series is a clone of another Syaoran who is the identical son of another Syaoran/Sakura pairing, and yes, he's in love with another Sakura, so that makes this whole thing FUCKING OEDIPAL. And yes, CLAMP is blatantly not even bothering to hide the incest. Syaoran even comments on how his love interest Sakura's mother, Nadeshiko, is exactly like his own grandmother - because she IS the same person, but in an alternate reality. Ewwwww. 3. We find out that Syaoran made a wish to "reset time" seven years ago. So we've flashed back to two different childhoods that he's experienced so far. Yep, he relived his childhood twice. And the Clow Country that he experiences is completely different both times - i.e., originally Fujitaka was the king of Clow Country and Sakura's father. In Syaoran's second childhood, however, Clow Reed is the king and Sakura's father, and Fujitaka is a childless archeaologist who adopts Syaoran. So far there has been no explanation for how these inconsistencies can reconcile. It's even more confusing because Yuuko said that she prevented Clow Country from being reality-altered by the time reset that Syaoran initiated at the end of his first childhood... But clearly not well enough. Bwuh. What. Dunno. And then we find out that for some reason time reset twice again, somewhere around chapter 200-something, so I dunno there have been like four time resets or something at this point, but who's keeping track? 4. Oh yeah, and Clow Country is actually the far-far-far future of Acid Tokyo, as it turns out. Or at least, one Clow Country is. There may be more than one at this point, as an alterna-Clow Country may or may not have been spawned by the second or third time reset. 5. The villain, Fei Wong Reed, has gone from having a simple goal and taking straightforward actions to accomplish it, to... I dunno, doing a bunch of incomprehensible, ridiculous things that make no sense. Apparently he attacked Sakura when she was seven years old, but instead of killing her right away, he put a "death seal" on her that was set to go off and kill her on her fourteenth birthday. FOR NO REASON. Seriously, that part of the story makes absolutely no sense given everything that we know about FWR, especially given the fact that his goal was originally to keep Sakura alive long enough to let her travel across many worlds and inscribe the memories of multiple dimensions into her body. He even, as it turns out, employed Fay *specifically for the purpose* of keeping Sakura alive during her journey. Then we find out in a flashback that he randomly tried to kill Sakura, way back before the multiple time resets, for some reason. And not even a straight kill. He did that stupid "death seal" thing, I guess because he wanted to wait seven years for her to die, for some reason. WHUT.
And that's just scratching the surface. There's more stuff that makes no sense, but that's the gist of it.
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Oh, CLAMP, why so crazy? I swear, it's like they've taken every drug in existence and mixed it with every brand of liquor in existence, and that's the stuff they use every time they need to figure out something new in the story.
"Okay, ladies, it's plot time! Drink up!"
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I feel I should be allowed to include Dollhouse, too, but that's more because of its ability to keep me watching. Though it does have "But they are like TODDLERS and the boy toddler is having sex drive things happen!" and "You...did you just tell me to sympathize with the serial rapist because he misses his wife? YOU JUST TOLD ME TO SYMPATHIZE WITH THE SERIAL RAPIST BECAUSE HE HAS A SAD STORY, DIDN'T YOU!?!??!"
ETA: And I'm not ENTIRELY certain that's exactly what's happening in Speed Grapher. My brain refuses to process some of it. Then there's the villain's origin, which I hope is just impossibly convoluted and not yet truly explained, because if I understood things right He was created 15 years ago from the body of the 15 year old heroine's father to carry out the pain of all the men who died in war. Or something. This would be relatively normal for anime. What is not relatively normal for anime is deciding you are going to marry the teenaged girl your body fathered. I SINCERELY HOPE HIS ORIGIN WAS JUST INCOMPREHENSIBLE, AND NOT WHAT THEY WERE SEEMING TO SAY!!!
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My first nomination is Loveless. Frankly, if I have no explanations and no idea what the fuck is going on by volume 9, I think I've tried hard enough.
My second nomination is Judas. Admittedly, I read only the first two volumes, but that was because I couldn't fucking figure out why a magical boy was dressed like a girl wielded a scythe got his dick stolen, and was possessed by Judas.
Big O. I think that's all that needs to be said.
Lastly, the American TV version of Tenchi Muyo--which was not only shown out of episode order, but out of season order as well, like they fished episodes out of a giant hat and played them on TV.
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Yep, that's about the way it was for me here, too.