Roger Ebert is a dick. Is, in death, still a dick. Back in 1989, he reviewed, among other things, The Association of Dead Poets. He gave it two stars—But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of them all is: “The father was a strict taskmaster, not resilient, and the son, lacking the will to defy his father, committed suicide.” Suicide? When I read that as a child, eager for a school screening the next day, I assured myself that I would commit suicide at the beginning of the film. Mistake. Said son, Neil, committed suicide near the end. So I spent most of the class knowing that it would – wait for it to happen – happen. I never forgave Ebert for it was unforgivable, as we now call it, spoil.
I, like everyone else, hate perverts. They are a particularly crushing type of soul. You do everything you can to avoid them, only to fall victim to a misguided tweet, a loaded headline, an overzealous Wikipedia editor. Or, sometimes, a diabolical joke. On the day the last Harry Potter book came out — July 21, 2007 — someone called my cell phone at 3am. For whatever reason, I answered. There was a gasp, and then two sickly distorted words: “Hermione is dead.” Click. Psychologists would call this Formation trauma. To this day, I don’t know who it was.
Of course Hermione wasn’t dead. She is very much alive, and continues to stalk Ron until an unspoken, presumably distant death causes them to part. But how do I know that? I have read them all Deathly Hallows convinced that this — no, this—Wait, it’s coming — definitely right now! —Probably the part where Hermione would finally sniff it. It was the agony before the burial. The spoilers loom like shadows in a story, dimming the light of possibility, each announcing, like Thanos, their terrible certainty.
There is only one tool in that war against darkness, and you know it well: SPOILER WARNING! The phrase dates back to the ’80s, when early computer enthusiasts went online and realized some of their novice colleagues had watched more Star Trek and read more comic books than they had. In order to protect themselves from unwanted knowledge — like the possible inevitability of Thanos — they asked to officially warn the vandals. Nearly half a century later, this practice has become too common in most film, book, and television articles to create uniformity. encode Reference to Feasibility The main plot point is to push the social network into attack mode. In other words, we’re all living in the shadow of some teenage nerd kid.
Yeah, now I think I hate spoiler warnings.
The obvious question the spoiler alert raises is: What’s so scary about knowing what’s going on? About knowing, in the end, how does it end? No one hesitated about the beginning. Actually, that’s not true. Starting to make people nervous for different reasons. Think of artists, they are always uncertain about how to begin their work that is sure to become great. A song’s intro, a movie’s opening scene, a journalist’s lead — you can practically see blood running down their temples as they struggle to get down this or that path. other way. Fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss went through 40 drafts of the first page of his book The name of the wind. Janet Malcolm did a version of the same thing when she painted profiles for artist David Salle. In the end, that’s all she is published in New Yorkers: “Forty-one false starts.” We are a society obsessed with stories of origins, of beginnings.
