isi2019 In defense of spoilers (2006 Reader biog pos! | Jonathan Rosenbaum
In defense of spoilers (2006 Reader blog post)
Poses Max 208
This wasiis my first post for the Chicago Reader's film blog; there aren Wweren't any
Cinema, Hello
hyperlinks, This is reprinted in my most recent collection, Good
Ginephilia, — JR
Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 3:54 PM
Some people’s obsessive preoccupation with spoilers has been driving me batty lately.
It isn't only among moviegoers; many fiction readers are equally afflicted. Visiting @
‘Thomas Pynchon chat room lately in conjunction with a recent prepublication reading,
of Against the Day, I find other Pynchon freaks breathlessly advising one another
about whether they should read the short review of the novel that Time has already
posted, which actually mentions — horrors! — one of the characters getting Killed,
something that happens, if remember correctly, roughly a fifth of the way through this
almost 1100-page novel. Percentage-wise, that’s about as far as you have to watch The
Death of a President [see photo] before you witness the assassination that the ttle
already announces. Honestly, does that spoil the movie for anybody’?
Give me a break. Is this form of worry a fit activity for grown-ups?
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13isi2019 In defense of spoilers (2006 Reader biog pos! | Jonathan Rosenbaum
My objections to spoiler-think are multiple, so T might as well set them down in a list
1. Look at novels written from Don Quixote all the way through much of the 19th
century, and you'll find spoilers even in the chapter titles — headings that habitually
tell you what’s going to happen before it happens. Hell, Pynchon pays tribute to that
practice himself in his own first novel, V. How come nobody complained much about
this practice for a good three centuries before it started getting readers and moviegoers
so hot and bothered — mainly, it would appear, over the past decade? And what about
the titles of certain plays? Should William Shakespeare have been horsewhipped by
Elizabethan audiences for calling one of his comedies The Taming of the Shrew, thus
giving away the outcome of the story? And what about Death of a Salesman?
2. The whole concept of spoilers invariably privileges plot over style and form,
assumes that everybody in the public thinks that way, and implies that people shouldn’t
think any differently, It also privileges fiction over nonfiction (although Terry Zwigoft
actually once complained about some reviewers of his Crumb including the “spoiler”
that Robert Crumb’s older brother, Charles, committed suicide), and I'm not clear why
it necessarily should. Why is it supposedly a spoiler to say that Touch of Evil begins
with a time bomb exploding but supposedly not a spoiler to say that the movie begins
with @ lengthy crane shot? Is ita spoiler only to say that Dorothy travels from Kansas
to Oz, or is it also a spoiler to say that The Wizard of Oz switches from black and
white to color?
To be totally irresponsible and give a really big spoiler to Gilbert Adair’s very
enjoyable The Act of Roger Murgatroid: An Entertainment — his latest novel, an
Agatha Christie pastiche that you'll have to order from England as I did if you're an
‘American who wants to read it — the surprise ending isn’t so much the identity of the
murderer as itis the revelation that he’s been narrating the entire novel in first person,
just like Christie’s Roger Ackroyd. This is something we haven't previously realized
because Murgatroid, hiding under a different name, hasn't gotten around to using the
first person until the final scene, so we've been assuming all along that what we've
been reading has all been in third person,
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28isi2019 In defense of spoilers (2006 Reader biog pos! | Jonathan Rosenbaum
.:
Fanseets Roger
Murgatroyd
GILBERT
ADAIR
‘The same novel, incidentally, has a wonderful epigraph, from Raul Ruiz: “The real
world is the sum total of paths leading nowhere.” Metaphysically, I find this every bit
as entrancing as the epigraph for Against the Day, credited to Thelonious Monk: “It’s
always night, or we wouldn't need light.” ... Am I guilty just now of subjecting the
readers of both novels to spoilers regarding these epigraphs? How can I dare I give
away the delightful surprise of reading these sentences on the first pages of both books!
3. One thing that drives me around the bend about spoilers is that it’s impossible to
function as a critic if one can’t describe anything in a movie or a book in advance. So if
I'm expected to write a review of something, am I also expected not to analyze it?
4. The weird metaphysical implication of spoilers is that moviegoers and readers who
fret about them want to regain their innocence, perhaps maybe even their infancy, and.
experience everything as if it were absolutely fresh. From this standpoint, we shouldn’t
even know what films we're going to sce in advance, or who stars in them, or who
directed them, or what they’re about, or perhaps even where they're playing. Just so we
can experience the bliss of being taken there by benevolent parents
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