To spoil or not to spoil?

As you would know from this post, I have recently begun reading Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, a sort-of memoir in which he mostly just talks about a dozen films from the 1970s that he saw when he was too young and loved, though more as he would analyze them now than much of the experience of seeing them then. Okay I guess there was one from 1968, as he starts with Bullitt.

The first three of these I had seen. After Bullitt he talks about Dirty Harry and Deliverance. 

But then the next was Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, another Steve McQueen movie and a blind spot for me. I decided to watch it before I read the chapter on it, in a way similar to how you watch a movie when you know it's going to be discussed on a film podcast. I'd certainly get a lot more out of the chapter if the text were known to me, like it was with the other three, but even more than that if it were fresh. Dirty Harry is the most recent of those other three I've seen, and it's been seven years.

The viewing of The Getaway, which I liked but which has some parts about it that have aged very poorly -- Sally Struthers' whole character is incredibly problematic -- did give me a lot more than the previous three chapters. But I quickly realized that movies I had not seen would be the norm for the rest of the book, and I don't know if it's sustainable to keep watching these 1970s movies I haven't seen in order to keep getting the most out of Tarantino's book.

Then again, if I read his soup-to-nuts discussion without seeing the movie, I'll spoil any future attempt to see the movie, assuming I remember any of what he talked about.

I'll give you an idea of what I'm up against. The next chapter -- which I am now ready to start -- is about John Flynn's 1973 film The Outfit, previously unseen by me. After that I get a little break for some mid-book essays, but when those essays are over, we resume with a bunch of others I haven't seen: Sisters (1973), Rolling Thunder (1977), Paradise Alley (1978), Escape from Alcatraz (1979) and The Funhouse (1981). (Okay so there's one from the 1980s too.) In fact, the only remaining film in the book I've actually seen is Taxi Driver (1976), which I've seen twice. 

So my choices seem to be:

1) Watch a half-dozen film from the 1970s (and one from the 1980s) during a time of year that I am usually focused on collecting up films to rank from the current year, jammed together in a short period of time if I want to keep reading the book at a decent clip, or

2) Find out who lives and dies and who gets killed in creative ways that made an impression of Quentin Tarantino when he was a kid in a half-dozen movies I might like to see one day under friendlier circumstances.

Tough choice.

Some people would solve the problem by reading a second book alongside Cinema Speculation, but that's not how I roll. I like to dedicate myself to one book at a time. I guess you can call me a literary serial monogamist. (With apologies to Richard Curtis for borrowing his line from Four Weddings and a Funeral.) 

The decision on The Outfit, of course, will be due first. 

One way to think about it is that I can buy myself a little time by skipping The Outfit, knowing I then have another couple chapters that are extended essays rather than focuses on a single film. So when I resume with Sisters, at least it won't have just been a few days earlier that I watched The Getaway. Then again, I could think of that the reverse way as well -- all I have to do is see The Outfit and then I'll have earned myself a break, and I can keep alive the possibility of taking a completist approach to the films discussed in Cinema Speculation.

Of course, the freewheeling nature of Tarantinto's writing -- which sounds basically exactly like you've heard him talking in interviews, abundant with enthusiasm -- means that he's already touched on plenty of other films, possibly even revealing spoilers about them. And there was no warning for those discussions in the form of chapter headings.

Then there's the fact that memory is poor. Even if I hear Tarantino spoil the shit out of The Outfit, what are the chances I remember what he says when I get to the movie organically, maybe 15 years from now, or maybe never? 

Well, I won't have to make the decision tonight. I've already decided I'm going to watch a Greek film, She Loved Blossoms More, that I was eyeballing at MIFF 2024 but didn't get a chance to catch then. Since it was only released in the U.S. in 2025, it counts for this year.

So I'll kick the can down the road on the great Cinema Speculation spoiler debate by at least one more day.