On 6/21/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Now I could imagine wanting to know something about Citizen Kane before seeing it, but without having the central mystery given away. Happily, [[Citizen Kane]] does a good job of that through careful writing. The article makes clear that a mystery is central to the plot, and the plot summary only gives away the goods at the end. You are unlikely to hit the secret accidentally.
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).