Charles Schulz spoiled “Rosebud” for me — Linus is watching Citizen Kane, which he’s never seen before, and as Lucy’s walking away she says “Rosebud was his

SPOILER

sled.” At the time I was like, “Why is that funny?” Eventually I realized that it was because Lucy had given away the mystery, and I was annoyed. Though one of my colleagues says that anything that’s worth reading/watching should be worth reading/watching even after you know the spoiler — which is I think true, but knowing spoilers can be bad.

Still, as someone said about The Sixth Sense, “You watch it once for the surprise, then a second time to see how they set up the surprise, then a third time to realize it stinks.” I said that I’d had it spoiled but that I figured that just meant I could watch it the first time for the second time, and he said, “Yeah, that’s two hours saved from your life.”

Ben, what you’re describing seems related to, but different from, the Problem/Law of Crappy Sequels discussed here and here; more like the Larry David time travel problem.

I’m not actually sure that late U2 is any more pompous than early U2. Isn’t Achtung Baby! their least pompous album?

It’s only a matter of time before the fans manage to evade Lucas’s copyright police and produce recut versions to suit their own tastes and orthodoxies (this has already been done to eliminate the annoying Jamaican guy, I believe).

The Star Wars prequels are perhaps the best example of my theory of retroreader response criticism, or retrospective cultural market correction. An artist’s subsequent creations actually influence his or her previous work. While that may seem like a timeline violation, it is not in the framework of reader response theory. The later Star Wars movies, for many people (I haven’t seen them, but I heard the complaints! And even the trailers were pretty yuck) disappoint expectations raised by the “classic” movies (original canon). I am claiming, further, that the prequel movies actually amplify and extend hackish tendencies in the originals, and that the originals are permanently devalued because one can no longer write off their not lovably-cheesy, but just bad-cheesy, aspects.

There are plenty of other examples. For ex, the breakout novels of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, devalued by their later work. Late U2 reminds you that even early U2 was, ya know, a little pompous. This is not just the common fact that an artist’s work just goes downhill or fails to recapture later heights. Everybody thinks F. Scott Fitzgerald’s late work doesn’t reach the heights of Gatsby, but nobody seriously reads the late books and decides that Gatsby is just warmed-over John O’Hara.