I am reading the Sunday NYTimes. Dowd’s a regular columnist that day. I start reading, and within the first three paragraphs, gives away the basic plot of Gone Girl.
I personally don’t care - I haven’t read the book or seen the movie - but I am aware that the book’s twistiness is part of its appeal.
You can’t really discuss this topic without touching on the spoilage, so you have been warned in the Thread Title, okay?
Dowd runs through the GG plot to make a point: the gone girl, Amy, is from a long line of seductresses who make it clear that rape is not always what it seems - that victims of domestic violence “can’t be trusted.”
Well, I suppose she could have put in a spoiler warning, but the fact is she’s not a movie reviewer or entertainment reporter, she’s a political columnist. I don’t see a big conflict or overlap there. Now the bald one on* Siskel & Ebert* spoiling The Crying Game right on their TV show, that was unforgivable!
It’s not clear if the article you’re linking to is about the book or the movie, so I’m hesitant to click on it (since I’ve only read the book).
Do you think you could have a mod edit the title to let us know which one this is about.
As for the rest of it:
On the one hand, it’s her article, I guess she can do what she wants, but it would be nice if she mentions that she’s going to do it. OTOH, half her readers are going to skip the article so they don’t ruin the movie/book for themselves if she does that.
Having said that, how long do you wait to spoil it? A month? a year? The book’s been out for two years, is that long enough? Should we still not say who Keyser Soze or let people know that Fight Club has a twist ending?
I don’t know the answer? FTR, I still don’t ruin the ending of Fight Club or The Usual Suspects and I probably wouldn’t ruin the ending of a new movie to make a point without telling the readers at the beginning of the column that I’m going to do it.
Also, Jeopardy just ruined the ending of something a few days ago…might have been Gone Girl as well.
I believe it is spoiling both book and movie. I have not heard that the movie varies from the book in significant ways, and the column describes something that would be central to the plot.
Jon Carroll, a columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle, spoiled Crying Game for me, but it was worth it because his piece gave him an excuse to make repeated use of the phrase “penis gasp.”
I saw the movie yesterday without having read anything to spoil the film in advance. But after going, I read the review by Manohla Dargis in the Times and it, too, spoils the film in the context of reviewing it. (First sentence of the last paragraph, “By the movie’s second half, you may wish that Amy would stay gone.”)
A funny conversation I had with my mom (contains spoiler for The Crying Game):[spoiler]When the movie was still in its initial run in theaters…
Me: I’m trying not to hear anything about The Crying Game; I hear it has a surprise ending.
Mom: You mean that the woman turns out to be a man?
Or to quote that great statesman, Mayor ‘Diamond’ Joe Quimby;
Quimby: “Also, the chick from the Crying Game is really a man!”
(the audience boos)
Quimby: “I mean, err, uh, man, is that chick hot!”
(the audience cheers)
Meh. Throwing in a spoiler someplace completely unrelated is bad form, but at some point people ought to be able to talk about a movie. It’s not the whole worlds job to wait for you to get around to watching something before starting a critical discussion.
Well, newspapers tend to run commentary on things that people are talking about currently. There isn’t an enormous market for smart commentary on last season’s movies.
IMHO, capsule reviews and things unrelated to movies should be “safe,” but if you are reading a long form article on a movie, you should expect it to talk about the movie. IMHO, also, if a spoiler actually spoils a movie, it’s probably a pretty bad movie.
Maybe she ate a sliver of pot brownie while reviewing it, and was totally freaking out, man.
The internet, and by I mean including the online editions of major print papers along with “new media,” spoiled the two major Game of Thrones spoilers within minutes of the episodes airing. At best, they titled the articles “major thing involving character A.” Hell, the biggest fan theory is already being spoiled and it hasn’t happened yet, if it will (probably).
Well, having read the article, and knowing the material, I can understand that *Dowd *may have felt that delaying making her point until the film is off theaters would risk allowing the “battle lines” about the interpretation thereof to become cemented, and she wanted to say “stop that”.
Just in case…
[spoiler] Apparently there has arisen a harsh pushback from gender-warriors to the effect that the twists in the plot and the characterizations may give fodder to MRAs and others over the concept of a woman making up crimes against herself to hurt men she feels have wronged her.
Dowd, quoting the works’ creators, questions where does it say every leading female character has to be a PC archetype for womanhood; as well mentioning that part of the problem may be that the character that perpetrates the most grievous crimes does not end the story arc as a punished villain (to which I add: so, many of the audience are left to suspect there may be a real domestic murder in their future).[/spoiler]
In this case it would have been hard to argue against the offenderatti without exposing what was it that caused the offense.
