Tony Sidaway wrote:
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.
Good thing that's not what I meant, then. Or, looking back, even what said.
I'm not saying that it isn't worth seeing if you know. What I am saying is that Welles carefully, beautifully used the power of a mystery to create a deeper emotional engagement in the viewer. Citizen Kane's power isn't the story told, it's in the telling of the story. The mystery is a part of that. Without need or benefit, that experience was denied to me, in a way that smidgen of care would have averted. Instead, I got to be irritated at the revealer every time Welles gave another hint.
If Welles went to all that trouble to set up something, why exactly do you feel empowered to undo it casually? From what I've read of Welles, if some marketing hack had put a giveaway on the posters, Welles would have ripped out and eaten his still-beating heart.
It seems to me that we can write a perfectly good encyclopedia while still respecting the both the artist's intent and the experience of readers. Our [[Citizen Kane]] article does that well, and without spoiler tags. Why you'd have a problem with that I can't fathom.
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).
Do you find that insulting the people you disagree with helps you much? Because it's not doing much for me, really.
William