on the necessity of spoilers in reviews

Someone recently criticized a review of a book I wrote because it contained spoilers, particularly about the ending. I won’t mention the book because, frankly, it doesn’t deserve any more of my attention, but I wondered whether I had been wrong about posting information within the review that might have “spoiled” the ending for others.

Then I thought, No, I wasn’t wrong.

What was “wrong” was that the person didn’t want to read a review they weren’t prepared to agree with, or at the very least consider my arguments.

Of course, I wouldn’t have wanted people, say, telling me what the big “twist” in “The Sixth Sense” was about, but when I went to see it (after many friends gushed about what a huge surprise it was) I was disappointed more to have guessed the twist in the first ten minutes of the film. Had I been warned that the entire film was based on a premise that the audience wouldn’t be smart enough to guess the twist in those first ten minutes I would have been more entertained, because, honestly, I felt the fuss over that film had more to do with how easily people could be fooled by a simple lack of visual literacy than it did some great narrative surprise. You want a real spoiler? Go into a deep philosophical discussion about the meaning of the ending in “Inception.”

Here’s where I find many people wrong about the notion of spoilers: What they want is to be reassured the book/play/movie is going to meet their expectations without being told how. By this very reasoning, it is impossible to write a critical (i.e. negative) review of any narrative form because a reviewer would need to discuss specifics in order to explain and justify their point. What is spoiler to some is a critical examination to others, and thus we come to the great truth about media reviews:

You should be reading them AFTER you’ve seen/read/experienced the thing in question if you don’t want spoilers, because who knows exactly WHAT is going to be a spoiler for any given individual?

People use reviews online to help them make decisions, and with a service like Amazon, reviews and their subsequent ratings (another topic, a question of pure evil) can determine the success of a product.

For example, earlier this summer I bought a car-top carrier for our family vacation and of all the warnings I read, all the positive and negative reviews, NO ONE mentioned this top-rated item had a zipper that was not properly stress rated for this design. It isn’t really a “spoiler” to say “There are design problems” or “I had problems with the zipper” but if someone had said “I have pants with stronger zippers than on this item” I would not have bought it, I would have been “spoiled” from making a purchase that in the end upset me.

So if I’m reading a book with an ending that is full of problems, and I simply say it was “weak” and “didn’t meet my expectations” you would not get as full a sense of my criticism as if I’d said “There are serious errors in human behavior that, in the real world, would have made this happy ending implausible, if not impossible” followed by a brief outline of the issues at hand. Does it reveal too much to be thorough? For some people, perhaps, but there’s still a larger issue here, one i came to many years ago when i began reviewing movies for radio.

See and read everything that interests you, and judge for yourself.

Don’t let a reviewer or a critic ruin anything, simply go out into the world and read the reviews AFTERWARD. If you felt cheated by the story, angered by the implausible, or otherwise burned by the experience, you have performed a very valuable service for yourself: You have gained insight into what does or does not appeal to you, and you have gained the insight without the aid of being told what to think by others.

And in light of recent concerns over reviewers accepting pay for positive reviews, perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing.

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the kindle, e-books, and the future

So it looks like the Kindle is making people in the book industry a bit uneasy. You’ve got hand-wringing and even ol’ Ray Bradbury himself declaring that e-books smell like burned fuel.  Yup, that’s what he said.

There’s always a bit of a disconnect when a technology introduces itself in a threatening way.  The problem is that most of the time people are looking at the wrong things.  Movies took a hit when television was introduced and there was much hand-wringing in Hollywood, but ultimately they came through by delivering the type of spectacle television couldn’t.  The reality was that television wiped out radio.  And I remember when pocket calculators becomes small enough and cheap enough that everyone could own one, but the math classes resisted because there was a fear that it would make students lazy and they wouldn’t learn the processes.  Turns out that the calculator liberated students to accelerate their studies and focus more on complex processes. If there was a downside to calculators in schools I haven’t heard it.

The fear of the e-book replacing regular books seems absurd to me.  You can drop and step on a book with no fear of ruining the contents.  I have dropped books in massive puddles in the rain and, with the exception of page bloating, still been able to access what’s inside.  A book doesn’t require batteries, recharging, a clear wi-fi signal, blah blah blah.  Can you imagine a picture book on a Kindle?  Are libraries and classrooms going to install large screens for storytime, with their artificial page-turns complete with sound effects to mimic books?  Does anything feel as satisfying as the heft (or portability) of a book?

No, what the e-book readers represent, however, is an opportunity for smart publishers to figure out how to best manage this new technology.  Rather than worrying about how Amazon’s going to use their sales figures to leverage against their profits, how about biting back and finding a way to undercut the Kindle?  If the device is proprietary then maybe the publishing industry should use its muscle to fight for universal access devices.  Amazon is only trying to back a market into their servitude, why should the publishers allow that to happen to their product?  Does anyone really want Amazon to control access to content (and why does this sound so much like Microsoft to me)?

What Amazon is attempting to do, as I see it, is create the iPod of books.  The idea of the e-book isn’t new, just as MP3 players existed before Apple jumped in the market. And the idea that you can take music you already own and upload it to the iPod became a huge jump in the way we listen to music.  The technology of the MP3 made it portable, iPod makes it cool, and the music industry eventually came around. I say eventually because Steve Jobs had a difficult time getting some music company heads to understand that “ripping” didn’t mean “stealing” and they’d still get money from these downloads at iTunes.

But the reason it worked out so well for the iPod is because of how it addressed the experience of the end user.  If there was a way for me to upload the books I already own without having to buy new, or even trade them in for digital versions, then maybe we’ve got something.  But what the Kindle and other readers want me to do is buy their device and pay for the privilege of loading something I can get for free at the library in printed form?  See, that’s the problem.  The flexibility between media doesn’t work and all Amazon wants me to do is give them money, not enhance my experience as a reader.

Let’s assume that books will always be around, but that down the road there will be two formats side by side, the book and the e-book.  Publishing houses could continue to make and distribute books as they always have, but why not set up distribution of e-book direct from their own sites, available in an open-source format that undercuts Amazon and sends the money directly to them?  If an industry can unify on just this much then there’s no need for them to ever have to deal with Amazon again.  Instead of worrying about how the e-book is going to eat their profits why aren’t they secretly meeting to figure out how to eat Amazon?  Stop letting the tail wag the dog.

If publishers are worried, and if they still possess any of the good sense they occasionally display in providing quality content, then they need to move extremely fast if they wish to stay in business.

Growing up, my dad used to tell me that computers were the future and that one day everyone would own one.  Seeing as a computer back then took up the entire floor of an office building and required thousands of programming cards to execute a simple calendar with Snoopy on it, I was doubtful.
I’ve never been a big fan of early, unquestioned adoption of technology without fully understanding the ramifications; televisions and computers in the classrooms I don’t think have ever been studied for true efficacy, and in fact our schools appear to be performing worse than ever. So for me the jury is still out on the e-book.

Although if someone wanted to give me a Kindle with free content…

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riding the train of thought

Last night Suze and I checked out Tin Man, the Sci-Fi channel’s “re-imagining” of The Wizard of Oz. Underwhelmed might be a good way to describe where I’m at with it (and what’s with the lame title, guys? The Tin Man’s not the story’s focal point!). It comes across as one of those things where it probably sounded good on paper but neither the writers nor the director have a feel for pacing or character development. You need a way to sneak into Central City — Boom! There’s you’re plot contrivance.

The project has “potential” written all over it, not the least of which is the casting of Zoey Deschanel as “D.G.” the modern day Dorothy. The plot’s not worth rehashing, the point is that on the surface Zoey makes a cute canvas to any character; the problem is she cannot (or does not) act. After you’ve seen her in one film you know all her mannerisms, all her vocal tics and movements. She doesn’t act so much as show up, and for a while she stands out because there is something a little off-kilter about the way she presents. Then it wears off and you get the feeling she’s coasting.

Talking about it earlier with Suze I tossed out the idea that I think she works better as a character actor, a bit of quirky spice in the mix and not one to hold down the anchor for an entire movie. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I think the same of Bill Murry who, except for a couple of standout performances, works better when he can riff on a minor character. For Murry that would be the shyster strip mall lawyer in Wild Things. For Deschanel it would be the big sister in Almost Famous.

So now I’m thinking about the movie Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s biographical re-imagining of his own early teen years, and I’m remembering that Crowe married one of the Wilson sisters from the band Heart. Together they wrote some of the songs of the fictitious band in the film Stillwater, and didn’t I hear that they were eventually going to release the original music as a commercial compact disc?

Now I’m on Wikipedia doing research, and then I’m on Amazon. Yes, I use Amazon as a research site. Between their listings, reviews, and customer brown-nosing I can usually find what I need to know and then continue to buy, research or follow-up elsewhere. Why buy from Amazon when there’s an Internet out there full of proof that they aren’t all that and a bag of chips?

Anyway, I hit pay dirt: The director’s cut of Almost Famous — baring the film’s original title Untitled — contains a third disc that contains the unreleased Stillwater music. Well, I can now put that into my mental wish-list hopper and keep an eye out for it the next time I’m bored and trolling Half.com.

But what’s this? Here are two reviews, an Amazon review — which is, what, ever going to be critical and kill sales, or give you anything substantial? — and one from The New Yorker‘s David Denby who, despite being from New York, has slightly more cred when it comes to reviewing. I’m scanning the Denby review and it’s full of the usual hyphenates that are a critic’s shorthand for description — “stand-in,” “freckle-faced,” “real-life,” “mid-level,” “danger-morally”… huh, what? Oh, that last one was an editing error. One of those en-dash em-dash problems that I wouldn’t expect anyone “copy-editing” at Amazon (are there such people?) to catch.

Wait, what is Denby saying?

Much of the movie plays easily and well as a record of good times, but there’s no particular point to it. William is never put in enough danger-morally, spiritually, sexually, or any other way-to become a hero for us, and the music of Stillwater is not meant to be great. What’s at stake?

Ooo, so many places to take offense! Let’s keep it clear: Crowe couldn’t have made the film using the real names of bands and people because (a) he didn’t want to get sued (b) he didn’t want to hurt the feelings of friends and (c) occasionally, and especially outside of strict documentary, you need to condense information to fit a narrative flow; William/Crowe isn’t put through any unnecessary danger to support a false narrative structure, but for a fifteen-year-old traveling with drugged out 1970s bands he encounters probably more than Denby has ever seen in his life; William/Crowe isn’t supposed to be a hero, he’s a window (or a mirror) into the times he experienced, too young to fully comprehend the history surrounding him but undeniably a part of that history; Stillwater isn’t supposed to be a great band — the point of the movie is also it’s title ALMOST Famous — that the voyage is the destination, and that for all the greats surrounding them there are countless others struggling to make it anywhere among the Pantheon.

Why does this irk me so? Because it’s clear that either Denby has no kids, knows no kids, or at the very least doesn’t have a clue about young adult life. To that end I have to conclude that he’s never read a YA title and would presume that his knowledge of YA stories is limited to what gets adapted into Hollywood’s cinematic format, and by extrapolation, this film doesn’t work for him — “What’s at stake?” — because he can’t imagine that what’s at stake isn’t the kind of thing that is easily captured in a happy Hollywood ending. That Crowe is able to fashion a coherent narrative from his experiences that fits into a traditional movie format is not a feat to be taken lightly, though I do need to point out that the film is far from High Art.

I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen Almost Famous since it was released, since I have decided to write for a YA audience. I occurs to me that there might be more clues within this movie about the possibilities of YA storytelling than I ever previously considered. I might be totally off base, but I’ve been on the hunt for stories that include boys, would play to a general audience, and don’t necessarily feel the need to include gratuitous hero-making danger.

With that, our train has pulled into the depot.

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