Hype

[sartorias]

This will be somewhat incoherent--am still a tad tired. Last week was not good, but ended really well, with a school visit to Chadwick Academy in Rancho Palos Verdes.. The school is just as beautiful as it looks--it was first established as a posh boarding school many years ago. I went up there once as a fifth grader, when a friend and I (going

Comments

[kalimac]

What interests me is not so much the question of hype. Some people who hated Harry Potter thought the whole phenomenon was hype, but it's historically clear that love for the first book came first, and that hype on that level couldn't have been maintained without continuing love.

What interests me is the question of surprise and anticipation in the reading/watching experience. If you were reading HP as it came out, you genuinely didn't know what was going to happen next - there were rumors that Harry would die at the end, you may recall - but it's very hard to read them now without having the surprises spoiled. I saw Star Wars on its first release, but how does it look different to people who know from the start that Vader didn't kill Luke's father, he is Luke's father? (Even though I don't believe - whatever he may say now - that Lucas had that in mind when the first film was made.) That some critical surprises are no longer surprises to anybody - like the cryptic "Rosebud" at the start of "Citizen Kane" - is a standing joke in

[sartorias]

Yes! With respect to Potter, it seemed clear to me that he'd win in the end--the structure adhered too closely to established patterns--but if I'd been a kid? I would have been tense as heck, and would have spent happy hours combing the text for clues and speculating for hours, just as so many kids I know did.

[asakiyume]

What's funny is how long some things can remain surprises. I saw The Sixth Sense on DVD, ages after it came out, and yet somehow, no one had spoiled the ending for me, so I was completely surprised.

And with "Rosebud," too, if you get a young person who doesn't come from a classic-film-watching family, I bet it could still be a surprise.

Harry Potter and Star Wars, though, probably not a surprise for anybody who's currently a kid...

[sartorias]

Yeah . . .

[rosaleeluann]

The thing about The Sixth Sense was, for me, that I knew there was a twist. Nobody told me what it was, ("I won't tell you what it is, but there is a really awesome twist in the plot...") but simply being aware that there was one made it very easy to pick up on.

So even by trying to avoid giving spoilers things can be spoiled.

[asakiyume]

I agree about those sorts of statements--they get you thinking in ways you wouldn't about something you hadn't heard anything about. In my case, I must have been in a coma or something--I knew the famous "I see dead people" line, but that was it! But in general, yeah: if you stop to think about what can possibly be the plot twist in a movie like that, you're likely to be able to guess.