LITTLE VALENTINE

Before. After.

Another sick little masterpiece from the good folks at Pakula-Mulligan.

BANZAI!!

To use a John Milius metaphor:

The public's attention is one of Nimitz's strike forces, a phantom, position unknown, and a blockbuster is a kamikaze attack -- in other words, a move of beautiful desperation.

Between them is the whole ocean.

Asked about the soul of Hollywood,
I would say
That it is
Like wild cherry blossoms
glowing in the morning sun.

THE SPOILER TABOO

Anxiety gnaws at my insides. Sweat dribbles off my nose. I’m trapped in a Dostoyevsky novel. Why? I have a vague terror that somebody (is it my Double…??) is going to reveal some crucial plot point of some cultural artifact that I have yet only a peripheral awareness of, thus de-spoiling my potential pleasure – robbing me of some undefined future “experience” that might bring me joy. There is no question. Spoilers defile me.

Wait a minute. Uh…

Nobody should actually give a shit about spoilers, but as many an entertainment journalist in the age of the internet has discovered – There will be Blood when the spoiler taboo is not properly observed.  Spoilers shouldn’t be anything -- but they represent an interesting psychological, political, erotic, and economic phenomenon.

First of all, spoiler etiquette implies a basic charity towards a childlike mode of being where one’s authority figures are taking care that you, the unspoiled, don’t stumble over the sadistic power differential in your knowledge-power relations. It’s a come-on. They are servicing your ignorance, while stoking your desire, hypocrites lecteurs!

The “innocent” – or perhaps we should call them the pre-initiated, are begging not to be told something that they long to discover. It’s probably not too much of a [SPOILER] here to suggest that this is an Oedipal scenario par excellence.

When reviewers must avoid spoilers, they immediately mystify the banal – empowering the factual “she’s got a dick!” with some kind of fetish power. This kind of writing is quasi-religious –writing these real absences never fails to make something more interesting than it inevitably is. Willfully obscuring, we might say teasing, language – that is language designed to hide something, is inevitably propagandistic. But also erotic, in that it delays and expands the masochistic anxiety inherent in NOT KNOWING.