Right? Does Hathaway say how Valjean dies? If she does I might sort of agree that it’s a spoiler…sort of. Only sort of because I am genuinely surprised that anyone wouldn’t know that Jean Valjean dies at the end. He is a really famous character from literature. But whatever.
I am still against calling Fantine’s death a spoiler, and have come up with another new analogy:
Fantine’s death is to Le Mis as Uncle Ben’s death is to Spiderman.
Sure, maybe you went to go see the Spiderman movies knowing NOTHING about the character, but if you were told in advance that Ben dies it wouldn’t really ruin anything for you. It’s giving away the start of the movie, not the end.
I think we can come up with all the analogies we want, it’s not going to matter.
I am slightly reminded of some of my classmates in college who hated the literature classes because the professor often required us to read the script of a play before going to see it performed and they felt it spoiled the plot.
I am curious, for Anaamika and the others, how do you decide at what point information about a new-to-you work is a spoiler?
Tragedy in the popular sense of sad maybe, but I don’t think of it as a tragedy in the sense that the moral hero tries and tries and fails anyway. He succeeds and has a wonderful death scene of redemption and future happiness in the afterlife.
When I went to see the movie, at the point that Fantine dies, the old woman behind me blurted out, aghast, “She’s dead?? Already?!?” She also wouldn’t shut up during the rest of the movie, so I take some perverted pleasure in the dismay she had at that point.
Look, it’s a classic work of literature. It’s been made into probably more than a dozen movies already. I had never seen the musical, but I had seen the 1934 movie, the movie with Gerard Depardieu, and the one with Liam Neeson. Grow up about the spoilers already.
Am I not allowed, for instance, to describe someone who is single-mindedly and inflexibly dedicated to the pursuit of a particular outcome as a Javert-like figure?
If I were to say that two people were “star-crossed lovers” a la… you know who, would that be a dick-like move?
Besides which, there’s nothing worth seeing in the present film version after Fantine dies, so you may as well not bother sticking around. Watching the movie, I felt like Elaine on Seinfeld while she was at the theater watching The English Patient, when she yells out “Come on, will you die already?” Boom - double spoilers! Kapow!
I don’t care about spoilers or Les Miserables whatsoever, but i think not spoiling a movie that is currently in theaters is pretty self evident. This is the one time there might be a lot of people out there who are unfamiliar with the story that might like to see it.
Hers doesn’t. Hers dies within an hour of the opening credits (or the picture of the Earth and the Van Allen radiation belts in case it has no opening credits). Her character is the ghost of someone who is nine-year old worm food at the end.It’s not a spoiler unless it’s accurate.
Is is it a spoiler to say that Valjean spends the movie avoiding capture by Javert? Is it a spoiler to say that the movie involves an attempted revolution? Is it a spoiler to say that Fantine has a child or that she loses her job in the factory or that Valjean steals silver from a bishop? Is it a spoiler to say that people sing in the movie?
FWIW, I think the age of the work being spoiled is much less consequential than its status as a classic work.
What I mean is, I could probably list titles of books 500 years old that you, or most everyone, never even heard about (I was into them before they were mainstream, you see :D) let alone have even a rough idea of their plot or what they’re about.
Les Misérables however is not just old, it’s also about as obscure as, I don’t know… Huckleberry Finn, maybe ? Same general era, same international popularity & acclaim ? I’d have said War & Peace, but then nobody actually knows what War & Peace is about, just that A) it’s big and B) there are entirely too many characters
Same goes for cinema - you can’t really spoil Citizen Kane any more, but you certainly can *Dead Men Tell or Back Street *(released the same year)
I don’t think that was a warning, I think it was a joke about the idea that the plot of classic literature can be “spoiled” in the same sense as contemporary fiction.
Yeah, that’s how I saw that too; it was kind of like, “Spoiler alert, Jean Valjean dies. Ha Ha, as if anybody doesn’t already know that!”
Except that I (and a significant percentage of the studio audience, apparently) didn’t know that.
I wasn’t upset about the spoilage per se, and it probably won’t affect my enjoyment of the film if I see it. But I guess somehow the implication that it was my fault if that was really a spoiler was a bit off-putting. Not an outrage, just maybe a bit pretentious and presumptive.
I hadn’t really thought about it that way before just now, but that’s probably why this stuck with me enough to start a thread about it the next day. That Hathaway bitch insulted me!
My sister and I were standing in line to buy tickets for Titanic on opening day. I had been a real Titanic buff from an early age (I read A Night To Remember in fourth grade), so the prospect of seeing the ship so realistically rendered was something I was really looking forward to. I was telling my sister about some of the footage I’d seen on TV, and said something about “when the ship is sinking.” Two teenage girls standing in front of us turned around with stunned expressions on their faces. In perfect unison, they gasped “It sinks?”
Eh, I’ve never read nor seen* Les Mis*, and I couldn’t have told you how it went, nor that there was a “Fantine” in it. I don’t know how much spoilers were the point for Hugo when he was writing. Some writing benefits from having the shadows of both past and future on the page. But once something is in the canon like this, the ship has kind of sailed on spoilers.
I’m pretty keen on people not spoiling things for other people, but I will also draw the line at 150 year old books that have been turned into movies. There comes a point where things are in common knowledge territory.
