2002-03-19 - 20:36
does anyone else feel like they've been keyser soze'd?

Warning: This entry contains hella spoilers for Citizen Kane and season two of Buffy:The Vampire Slayer; it also at least flirts with spoilers for the entirety of the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street. The second part may be difficult to understand without some familiarity with the latter show, anyway.

We (by "we," I mean the English-speaking movie-watching public; I can speak for no others in this context) have come to fetishize spoilers especially in the past several years; what's much worse, we have become enamored of the "surprise ending" to a worry extent. Everything has to have a Big Twist now, whether it makes sense or not. (Anyone see Scream 3--or any recent popular movie or TV show[1] in which there was mystery surrounding a killer? The killer is no longer permitted to be anyone whom the audience is expected even to consider as a suspect until the big reveal. This requires that the writer either be very clever or introduce meaningless and inconsistent plot elements in order to keep up the "surprise." Guess which is more common.)

I recently watched Citizen Kane for the first time. I saw it with a couple friends who'd seen it and a couple who hadn't. We were watching it because one of the friends who hadn't also happened to be unspoiled for the movie's Big Secret. Finding such a rare individual, we felt it was our sociological duty of sorts to make sure she watched the movie before someone told her the Big Secret. We protected her diligently from any mention of it.

Upon reflection, we made far too big a deal about it. My friend was raised on modern movies, on your Blair Witch Projects and Sixth Senses and Usual Suspectses[2], on the big reveal on which everything depends, that is withheld until the climax and explains everything. That's what she was looking for when we watched Citizen Kane. She said in the car that she bet everyone would be looking at her for her reaction as the movie got near the end. When, she implied, the big mystery would be revealed. In our zeal to protect her from spoilers and amazement that she *didn't* know how it ended, we misled her about the nature of the movie.

Citizen Kane is not a movie about a sled.

We're so used to movies building up to one moment. Citizen Kane is about all of its moments; that is an important part of its greatness. It's about a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. This movie was made back when storytellers didn't feel that they had to hit you over the head with every single psychological detail. Plenty of people offer insights into Kane's character, but what they offer is their character's personal perspective, and no narrator is perfectly trustworthy. It helps that Orson Welles was exceptionally good at storytelling. He knew how to develop a character--not just the star, but everyone in his story's world. And he assembled a pitch-perfect cast to help him do it.

One of the movie's many old taglines: "I hate him! I love him! He's a scoundrel! He's a saint! He's crazy! He's a genius!" That's what it's about. The story is indeed the jigsaw referenced at the end. Each scene gives us a piece. By the final scene, we have every piece but one. That's plenty; without the last piece, we still have no trouble seeing what picture is made by the puzzle. When we get the last piece, the picture is finally complete, but the piece is not the picture. It is one last thing, and it gives us a greater understanding of the rest of the story, but it isn't the only thing. I don't know how much knowing the ending affected my experience watching the movie, aside from some mild surprise that Rosebud's appearance in flashback was not more prominent; I'd forgotten that a) this was not a lesser movie where they have to hit you over the head with every damn thing and b) this is not a movie about a sled.

The above-linked author, Andrew Rilstone, contends that something that can really be rendered less enjoyable by knowing its ending was "pretty well spoiled in the first place." While I didn't come to agree completely, watching Citizen Kane did incline me towards his position. If anything, I would have enjoyed the movie less if I'd spent it obsessing over "What's Rosebud? What's Rosebud? That's what the whole thing is about, right?" as I'm fairly sure my friend did.

On the other hand.

A few years back, a couple of my friends were constantly talking about this great show called Homicide. They encouraged me to watch it. It was off the air by the time I got really curious about it, and I couldn't get CourtTV at the time to watch the reruns, but as it happened, I saw some promos for the final installment of the series, the movie-length Homicide: Life Everlasting. Well, I thought, let's see what all the fuss is about. I only half-watched it--I think X-Files was on at the same time, or something--but I saw all the important bits. Most of it didn't make much sense to me--who are all these people? Isn't he on a different show? Are those two guys in love? ...and so on. But I could see there was something there worth looking into.

I filed the show under "Fandoms to pursue when I get the chance." A while later, I found that Joey in fact had the first five episodes of the series on tape, so I borrowed them from him.

Holy shit.

I recognized some people from the movie; others were new to me. The show was really, really good. It was the best damn TV show I'd ever seen. I could hardly believe, though, that the characters I'd seen in the movie were even the same people. They were all so young. And Bayliss, that broken, desperate lost soul, old beyond his years, begging for an impossible absolution... Now he was the new guy. So... innocent. Pure. Confused. Bumping into stuff. Trying to make a good impression. What the hell happened in those seven years?

Around then I got CourtTV, so I started catching up. I still haven't seen the whole series--I'm missing big chunks of the later seasons. The whole show has taken on the air of Greek tragedy for me, though. I know who's doomed, who's leaving, who's dying. For a while I couldn't look at Gee without thinking about the end that I'd watched him meet when I first saw him. Every interaction I saw between Frank and Tim from the beginning was colored by the knowledge of what would happen when they spoke for the last time in the series on the roof of the station, as I saw them do before I knew who either one was or why I should care.

Watching it this way has its appeal. The series wasn't planned out from the beginning, but it seems like it was. Events take on a new significance. Joey told me of re-watching the first episode with other friends who'd seen the whole series from the start, and when the phone rang at the end, everyone yelling, "No, Tim, no! Don't answer the phone! You're going to ruin your life!"

I'm making little sense to people who aren't familiar with the show. I apologize. Point is, at the end of the day, I wish I didn't know all that I know. There's plenty of time to watch the early shows and develop an appreciation for the character arcs *after* seeing the series in order. I'd like to have had the opportunity to see everyone as they were seen when the show was new, when fates were not yet sealed, when all the original partnerships were not yet doomed, or at least not as far as the viewers knew.

Some things just work best when you don't see them coming. The scene in Buffy's second season when Miss Calendar's body was found was a masterfully created shock, and the experience would have been completely different if I'd been told beforehand that Robia La Morte hadn't renewed her contract. If I hadn't known which Homicide characters were kicking around in the afterlife/coffee room in the end, their deaths would have shocked me just as profoundly. Wait, he's dead? But he can't be dead, he's a main character. Can he? When you don't know what's coming, you feel a little of what the characters do. You don't feel the desperate confusion over what's happened to a detective that you know for a fact killed himself and took the reason to his grave.

I don't actually have a tidy conclusion to this, and I realize I'm being fairly obscure this evening. I don't know who my intended audience is (besides Joey, who's already heard most of this ^_^ ). I may revisit this subject at some point and attempt to be more accessible. (That usually means [spoilers follow] I won't.)

[1] Besides Gosford Park, which classily ignored this silly trope.

[2] Mind, I thought all three of these movies were excellent, but for each of those there are dozens of others who think that because such good, successful movies had Shocker Endings, they must have them too.

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