The Death of the Author debate is way too blinkered in scope

[GloatingSwine]

Exactly - except in lower level education where "Blue means depression. This is automatic, and if the author denies that he was depressed, he is delusional. If you disagree, you fail." I flunked a college literature class because of things like this.

They were trying to teach you a skill (recognising semiotic meaning in multiple aspects of a scene) and you demonstrated that you weren't able to do that.

The other thing to realise is that authors aren't always consciously aware of using pathetic fallacy. As in the example I already gave, that it's seemingly always raining at funerals in films, rather a lot of the time it probably isn't a conscious inference of "rainy weather depressing, put in to show characters are sad".

For instance it's raining, as ever, at the funeral at the start of Logan even though Logan himself has no emotional connection to the funeral. Because it always bloody rains at funerals in movies.

Also, remember that we're reading the text not the author. Insistance that the text reflects anything specific about the author's mentality is as invalid as insisting that the author's personal interpretation as to its meaning is privileged over the reader's and for the same reason, because the meanings assigned to various elements by the reader are not necessarily the same as the meaning assigned to them by the author.