Thomas Dalton wrote:
This is the kind of comment that reduces me to complete and utter baffled disbelief: that the extraordinary cinematic experience of a work like Citizen Kane can be reduced in some minds to a single, rather hackneyed mcguffin, which if known in advance, in some way "spoils" the film.
We do not write a good encyclopedia by pandering to that kind of illiteracy (a word that used in this context is, I think, doubly appropriate).
The film was written in such a way as to keep the fact secret until a particular point. If you already know the secret then you are seeing the film in a way other than that which the writer intended. If the film wasn't spoilt by knowing the secret early, why would the writer have bothered to keep it secret?
The simple fact remains that this film was released in 1941. Are there any other films from the era that we would treat the same way? Do we reveal who was the the 1939 Wizard of Oz? How do we determine which films get that treatment? At the other end of the scale, what possible benefit is there to putting spoiler warnings to every episode of a popular television series. In the old days when adventure movies were serialized, and the kids had to come back for the next Saturday matinée to see how the heroine tied to the railroad tracks would save herself from the oncoming freight train there was no point to keeping that secret beyond the next Saturday. I get terribly irritated when I'm watching an episode (of "Lost"? :-X ) and it finishes with "To be continued." That's great for those who are always at home, but I've got a meeting to go to at that same time next week. I prefer not to plan my life around TV schedules. If I know that something is always on Wednesdays at 8 o'clock, and I'm home I will probably turn the machine on. Pre-recording doesn't work, I tried that too. I have some tapes of "Startrek TNG" from years back that I recorded so that I could watch them when I got home. I still haven't watched them..If I miss an episode of "Lost" I can go to the Wikipedia article for exactly the reason of finding out exactly what I missed in that episode; it saves me the trouble of having to spend an hour watching it with all its commercials, not to mention the time and trouble that it would take to find the episode in the first place.
What doomed the spoiler warnings was their overuse. That use attached importance to every trivial plot line imaginable. If it had been saved for movies with the stature of "Citizen Kane", and warned the reader of a real potential that his experience might be spoiled the warnings might have lasted indefinitely.
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