Rosebud — Buzz Dixon

Oct 8

Oct 8 Rosebud

There’s an interesting series of discussions going on the Facebook pages of Steven Barnes, Adam-Troy Castro, and others that cover different aspects of writing / film making / movie watching that all link up in not so obvious ways, and since we can start measuring a circle from any starting point, let’s begin here:

Spoilers

No, not spoilers about movies (though there may be a few in here if you’re particularly unobservant about pop culture), but the concept of “spoilers” in general.

Again, for the record, I agree it’s rude to spoil entertainment for others, but at a certain point topics have to be considered fair game for discussion.

I think everybody’s on the same page as regarding spoilers in recent or even contemporary media: Don’t.

(At least not without warning folks in advance.)

This is only fair since a lot of the pleasure derived from many stories or presentations comes from the surprise they bring.

If a murder mystery is released this week, don’t be a doofus and reveal the colonel committed the crime in the study with a candlestick (not unless you want to be the recipient of a homicide).

But if the story is popular enough at a certain point the plot twist passes into public common knowledge.

Nobody seeing the original Planet Of The Apes for the first time today is going to be shocked or surprised by the Statue of Liberty ending.

In fact, truth be told, a lot of us sci-fi fans weren’t shocked when we saw the movie in 1968, recognizing the ending as a corny, trite, hackneyed low brow pulp trope that had been done to death in the 1940s and 50s. We saw it marching down the avenue from the moment the apes first appeared riding horses, using cartridge rifles, smoking cigars, getting their pictures taken, and reading / writing / speaking American English.

We knew =bingo!= at that moment we were on Earth in the future after some cataclysm knocked humans off the top of the pyramid and replaced them with apes.

None of which diminished the impact of the story that followed, with its well thought allegory about race relations and colonization and oppression, but we weren’t surprised!

Likewise, it doesn’t matter if you know what Rosebud is going into Citizen Kane because the characters don’t know. It’s their journey of discovery, not ours, the irony remains just as rich regardless of whether we’re hip to the mystery or not.

And at this late date,
how much of a spoiler is it?

Charles Schulz “spoiled” Citizen Kane in Peanuts at least four times (Dec. 18, 1968; Dec. 6,1973; June 18, 1982; and Feb. 8,1996) not to mention several other times he tossed in a Kane / Rosebud gag without revealing the movie’s last scene.

And some spoilers are justified. Futurama’s send up of the Twilight Zone -- “It’s a cook book! And it’s from Earth! And it was written by Hitler!” -- revealed how some spoilers are just hoary old cliches but like the Shakespeare pastiche in Huckleberry Finn, the bamboozled audience is supposed to go along with the gag and help bamboozle other audiences.

The best plot twists are like those in O. Henry’s short stories; they aren’t really twists at all but 100% inevitable outcomes based on the information in the tale, but the audience has been fed false expectations to make it seem a surprise.

The worst are from the E.C. horror comics school -- and as much as I love E.C. comics, I gotta admit this is true – where the ending is telegraphed almost from the first panel. (Publisher William F. Gaines once rejected a story about a guy who spends all day sharpening pencils getting sharpened by pencils in return, but he admitted the writer knew his formula!)

Another spoiler example will also help us segue into the next stretch of this circle.

I don’t watch M. Night Shyamalan movies because the few I did see relied so heavily on the shock surprise twist that I was able to figure out the twist from just watching the trailers.

There is no point to seeing that kind of a movie.

It’s a one note plot point; once ya got it, move on.

When The Crying Game came out, everybody told us we had to see it, that it had one of the greatest plot twists ever.

So Soon-ok and I went, and we watched, and we waited…and waited…and waited…and no plot twist.

We asked someone who recommended the movie where the plot twist was.

They said, “When X was revealed to be Y.”

We said, “We knew X was Y the first time they were shown onscreen.” *

This and Planet Of The Apes brings us into the Facebook discussion about audiences who can’t figure out what is going on Unless. It. Is. Spelled. Out. Very. Clearly.

Citizen Kane has a spoiler that isn’t obviously spelled out; it’s only at the very end that we realize what the mystery was all about and what it all meant.

But a vast hunk of the audience then and now can’t put that together in their heads. They can’t realize C happened because of B, and B because of A.

This is exemplified in the bad sort of writing we see too often on screens big and small:

“Oh, how I wish I was still doing A.”

“Yes, too bad B happened or
you could still be doing A.”

(And even then they need somebody to spell out the link to C.)

Soon-ok and I immediately picked up on what was happening in The Crying Game.

Didn’t lessen out enjoyment of the movie one iota; the story was constructed to make it flow logically even if we already knew the “big secret”.

But it did make me wonder about all the other audience members who didn’t pick up on what to us were obvious clues.

And that brings us around to our third and final point: Audiences that ignore dumb story points.

It took me a long, long time to enjoy Raiders Of The Lost Ark because even though it proudly proclaimed itself to be made in the tradition of old movie serials, it was an A-movie.

I expect more from A-movies.

A lot more.

Cheap B-movies shot on the fly with a shoestring budget are forgiven for any number of cinematic shortcomings, but when you’re putting a major production on the screen, I damn well expect you to cover all bases as expertly as possible.

Raiders lost me when they said the Mayans invented the photoelectric cell.

“What’s that?” you cry. “When did they ever do that?”

Remember when Indy sticks his hand in the shaft of light and an impaled skeleton comes flying out?

How the hell do you do that without a photoelectric cell.

A photoelectric cell that keeps working in a humid jungle setting without any signs of serious maintenance.

A photoelectric cell that resets itself after it’s triggered.

(As someone else pointed out at the time, what happens at night or on cloudy days?)

And then there’s the whole business with the gold idol and pouring sand out and the triggering mechanism sinking down instead of rising and…

I was pretty irritated when I saw the movie in theaters.

Over the years as I’d get exposed to it by chance as others watched it, I gradually came to realize it was really expertly shot and staged.

But it’s still pretty damn stupid.

This is the obverse of the people who Demand. Everything. Be. Spelled. Out.

This is “Wait! Whoa! What the hell was that?!?!? How does that make any damn sense?!?!?”

There’s always the danger of some detail in a movie breaking the spell of the story.

The Roman legionnaire with a Rolex watch.

The jet contrail in the background of a Western.

The all-too-obvious stunt double.

But those are accidents that the film makers would have avoided if they could.

I’m talking about dumbfuckery baked right into the script.

(I’ll be fair, occasionally there are movies that due to circumstances beyond the film makers’ control need to be restructured mid-shoot or in post, but those are rareities.)

In conclusion, allow me to trace the circle once more.