Man, Nathan Lee is ON FIRE. My new critical hero, who previously wowed with his gaga reviews of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Black Snake Moan (sample quote: “[Christina Ricci's] the white-hot focal point of Brewer’s loud, brash, encompassing vision of the soul’s dark night survived, peering into the dawn. That’s right, haters, I said ‘vision.’) hit another home run this weekend, with this New York Times op-ed on spoilers. It’s so good that it’s hard to pick just one section to blockquote, so here’s an attempt to condense some of the best stuff:
I wouldn’t dare unmask the secrets in the movie A History of Violence out of respect for the artistry of David Cronenberg and the integrity of his booby-trapped plot, but there isn’t a single frame of The Number 23 I wouldn’t mock in great, guiltless detail for the simple reason that I find it extremely silly. A spoiler requires something to spoil and someone to take offense at the spoiling, and I’m confident that my readership does not include humorless scholars of the Joel Schumacher oeuvre.
Our obsession with spoilers has a diminishing effect, reducing popular criticism to a kind of glorified consumer reporting and the audience to babies. People outraged by spoilers should avoid all reviews before going to the movies or reading the book they’ve waited so long for, because the fact is all criticism spoils, no matter how scrupulous.
My stance on spoilers is similar to Lee’s, but that’s been documented sufficiently. So let’s do something else. Everyone’s talking about Lee’s op-ed, up to and including Brian Lehrer, my local NPR morning talk host, who invited Slate’s Dana Stevens on the show this morning to chew over Lee’s piece (Lee, apparently, didn’t return Lehrer’s calls). At one point on this morning’s segment, Lehrer asked Stevens if critics in ye olden days had taken care not to spoil major plot twists, such as those within Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Stevens said she didn’t know. I then spent 45 minutes on the internet attempting to answer that question.
I could only find three reviews of the original Psycho on the internet, but I think they represent a decent cross-section of methods, opinions and outlets. Of note: two out of the three reviews note that critics have been asked not to reveal the film’s ending. One of these the reveals the kinds of plot details that could get a contemporary critic scalped. The third review, by Bosley Crowthers of the New York Times, is at once the most respectful of the film’s secrets (he reveals the identity of the killer as Norman’s mother, but refrains from revealing the identity of the mother, and the least impressed (”his denouement falls quite flat for us,” sniffs the master of the royal first-person plural.)
Variety and the San Francisco Chronicle were less careful. A review attributed to Paine Knickerbocker spends several paragraphs detailing plot points (Marion meets with her lover, Marion steals the money, Marion buys a used car) before exercising restraint: “No more of the action may be disclosed here. But violence follows, and then a skillfully paced interrogation by Martin Balsam as an affable but determined private eye.” Is it less of a crime to tick off each menial plot pint than to reveal the really good stuff?
Finally, Variety. A review attributed only to “Variety Staff” pledges not to expose spoilers, and then totally does anyway:
Hitchcock uses the old plea that nobody give out the ending — “It’s the only one we have.” This will be abided by here, but it must be said that the central force throughout the feature is a mother who is a homicidal maniac. This is unusual because she happens to be physically defunct, has been for some years. But she lives on in the person of her son.
I’ve always hated spoiler alerts with a passion. But jesus christ — to say you’re *not* going to reveal a plot secret, and then immediately reveal the plot secret? That’s just dirty play.
In a podcast conversation with Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door, the group blog whose Blogger URL contains his name, Matt Zoller Seitz has announced that he’s giving up writing print criticism. This formal declaration comes two weeks after Seitz made some critical comments about the conflict between print and web criticism at the Moving Image Institute; two weeks before that, Seitz writes in the podcast’s comments, he gave notice that he was leaving his post as back-up critic for the New York Times, meaning his piece on the jazz in film series at MoMA will be his last for that publication. In the same comment, Seitz says he’ll be replaced by Nathan Lee, who intimated in last week’s Rotten Tomatoes interview that all those Saturday afternoons devoted to sex and Madame Bovary had paid off in a new position at a major publication.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two days––and or, don’t read many film blogs, which is the likelier of the two scenarios––you’ll know that Nathan Lee was laid off from his position as second film critic at the Village Voice this week, due to unspecified “economic reasons.” That makes Lee the fourth full-time New York based critic to get pink slipped in the past month, and it’s not hard to see his firing as a sign that, as Lee himself put it in an email to colleagues widely circulated on blogs, “staff film critic…jobs no longer appear to exist.”
