If there's one thing
I decry, it's the loss of the process. We don't appreciate it. We have fucking lost
it. Again and again I'm reminded of the 'orgasmatron' in Woody Allen's
brilliant Sleeper; you enter this box
with a person of opposite sex and walk out seconds later experiencing orgasm.
At some point Allen's character, a man from the past, revolts against the
machinery and the lack of something that is basically the whole point. The
process. Or, as he calls it, the romance.
But in a world
revolving around outcome and result, people tend to stack process at the
back of their mind. And hence they scream blue murder every time someone gives
away the ending or the plotline. 'Spoilers!' they say, genuinely freaked out.
'Spoilers!'
Well, bloody hell.
I myself enjoy being
ensconced in an Agatha Christie novel on a cozy evening in late November. Would
I like to know who killed Roger Ackroyd and who set The Mousetrap? No, I wouldn't, but that's a detective story, and in
a detective story the ending is all there is to it. The problem is that these
days people are no longer able to watch Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men without lamenting the fact that they know where it all
goes.
Forgetting that it's
not about WHERE you get. It's about HOW you get there.
It seems the future
so grotesquely predicted by Woody Allen is coming soon. Physical pleasures not
so much, but mental pleasures we no longer have time for and so the middle part
has to be cut out. Enjoyment for the joy of it is longer an option. It's boring
and it's time-consuming. Enjoyment seems to have acquired its hefty price tag,
and it's somebody else who has to pay. All you have to do is act all hurt each
time a trailer shows that a character dies.
Well, people die, for
Christ's sake. Have I now spoilt it for you?..
