Real love and spoiling what can't be spoiled

If you started reading this for a substantive analysis of the themes or filmmaking techniques of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I haven’t seen it yet. It doesn’t come out for another couple weeks in Australia.

But even without having seen it, I can tell you that it doesn’t seem like the type of movie that would be discussed on something referred to as a “spoiler special.”

That would be The Slate Spoiler Special, a recurring Slate podcast in which a roundtable of hosts (often featuring film critic Dana Stevens) goes through a recent film or TV show without worrying about keeping its secrets. I hate-listen to this podcast. Every once in a while it yields something I find genuinely useful, but more often than not, it inspires snark in me.

I won’t dredge all that up now because I’ve written about it before, but I often think the show is more appropriately referred to as Slate Plot Synopsis. That’s because the roundtable usually passes around the conch in a kind of tag team recitation of the plot, blow by blow, rarely providing what I would consider to be true analysis.

But the thing that’s annoying me in this case is that rarely does it actually involve spoilers. Oh, they tell you what happens in the plot, but more often than not, the plot is not particularly “spoilery.”

As in, it would seem, Booksmart. Now I understand that they have chosen to call the show this and they aren’t going to adjust the name of the show based on what movie they’re talking about, but I might suggest that it’s not that interesting to talk about a film on this show if it does NOT contain what we would traditionally think of as spoilers. As in, it would seem, Booksmart.

It just makes me laugh when they have this dramatic intro with lines of dialogue from the spoileriffic films The Sixth Sense, Soylent Green, Chinatown, Citizen Kane and Seven, then someone straightforwardly tells you that they’re going to be spoiling a teen romantic comedy that I understand has queer elements to it. (Maybe that’s the spoiler?)

If you’re wondering about the second half of my subject line, well, I’ll get to that now.

I didn’t listen to the Spoiler Special episode on Booksmart because I of course have not seen it yet. I did, however, listen to the segment they did on it on The Slate Culture Gabfest, on which Dana Stevens also serves as a co-host. And in a true case of the two shows cannibalizing each other, making the choice to cover it on Spoiler Special all the more ridiculous, Dana started by saying she thought she was all talked out on the movie after talking about it on the other show.

Dana did say she “really loved” the movie … which is not the same as loving it. (She went on to admit multiple problems with it.)

It made me realize that “really loving” something is kind of a ridiculous phrase.

When you say you “really love” a movie, that should be an instance of amplifying the degree to which you love it. But in reality, it’s a kind of backpedalling. If you really “really love” a movie, you just say you love it.

Which of these statements is stronger?

“I love Booksmart.”

“I really love Booksmart.”

Well, I guess the tone of voice factors in as well. And in Dana’s tone of voice, you could tell that “really loving” it meant being defensive about your affection for it and simultaneously acknowledging the reasons you might need to be defensive.

Love is love, someone wise once said.