#14: Reading the Wikipedia synopsis
Don't just read the Wikipedia synopsis for a movie you haven't seen. Read the whole thing.
Oscar noms dropped. Tough competition this year. I especially liked Poor Things. My favorite part was probably when the leads “embark on a grand journey, starting in Lisbon, where the two engage in frequent sex.”
Did I fool you? (No? Was it the quotes? The post title?) I haven’t seen Poor Things, and I don’t know if I will. I didn’t see The Holdovers, and to be honest I didn’t even hear about The Zone of Interest. Sad sacks like me have just one recourse: catch up by reading plot summaries on Wikipedia.
Film buffs get frisky when someone suggests reading the plot of a movie instead of seeing it — and they’re right, of course. Reading a film’s Wikipedia synopsis is no replacement for actually seeing it. But the solution isn’t to stop reading: it’s to keep reading. We shouldn’t be stopping at the plot synopsis. If we really loved movies, we’d read the whole page.
I’ve written elsewhere that spoilers — which, for a lot of people, are what Wikipedia synopses amount to — represent a way for viewers to take control of their experience with a work.
To those who care a lot about authorial control (or its twin, “intended experience”), this is a baffling kind of theft: it steals more from the thief than it does from the target. It robs you of an unblemished first viewing. But just look at who seeks out synopses, and it’s clear that this isn’t some assault on movie magic. It’s people who want to appreciate horror movies, but who aren’t inclined to callous their psyche in order to sit through one without scouting it out first. It’s people who need fair warning.
Tools like Does the Dog Die and RunPee can fill these niches better: They laser cut relevant warnings out of the main plot without compromising suspense. But if you don’t ever plan on watching the movie yourself, Wikipedia represents a kind of slash-and-burn approach. It exposes you to the entire ecology of an artwork.
In an age, as Oscar Wilde put it, “that reads so much it has no time to admire, and writes so much that it has no time to think” (or as this frankly unreadable BuzzFeed article puts it, an age of “Too Much Culture”), this is exactly the appeal. Wikipedia keeps us in the conversation about popular artwork in less time.
Here is where synopsis readers can illuminate the value of Wikipedia for the rest of us, but not because they’re right. Or it may be more accurate to say, they’re absolutely right, but not for the reasons trotted out in think pieces and Reddit threads.
For understanding the value of synopses, the actual guidelines provided by Wikipedia for how to write a plot summary are a treasure trove. It offers editors advice both practical (“Having written a concise plot summary, authors must be wary of excessive attachment to their golden prose”) and philosophical (“Michelangelo is said to have created David by ‘taking a block of marble and cutting away everything that was not David’”).
Above all, it warns: “Do not attempt to re-create the emotional impact of the work through the plot summary. Wikipedia is not a substitute for the original.”
By design, synopses gut everything that makes a movie impactful — the suspense and vertigo and empathy and humor. Editors are even encouraged to excise experimental flourishes, for example in a film like Memento that plays with time.
Wikipedia synopses aren’t better than nothing, or good in a pinch: they are abominable replacements for our experiences with art. They explain and contextualize, not recreate. And yet, people use Wikipedia synopses as replacement art — when they don’t want to see a movie, but they want to have seen it. More importantly they get away with it. What exactly are we dealing with here?
For this, we can take a page from the literati. How does someone become “cultured” in a medium that stretches back a thousand years? Pierre Bayard grapples with this question in How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, which is as much a manifesto on reading as it is a practical guide for avoiding embarrassment.
He argues the line between “reading” and “not reading” isn’t a line at all, if only because we start to forget what we read as soon as we’ve read it. How many of us have turned to Wikipedia to refresh ourselves on the details of a work we know we’ve experienced?
Our opinions about any book are colored by what we remember, what associations we draw with other works, our impressions of the author or title, the reviews on the dust jacket, with everything it reminds us of. We judge books by their covers.
Not only that, our assumptions about art are actually pretty good. Art rarely surprises us — like, really, actually surprises us. Even for famously twisty directors like M. Night Shyamalan, you know some kind of twist is coming. Doki Doki Literature Club, a famous genre-bending game, is tagged as “psychological horror” on its store page.
A book’s content, the actual text and the experience of reading it, differs from what Bayard calls its location. A book’s location refers to where it lives in the universe of books. In the philosophy of science, it’s the difference between knowledge and understanding: the apprehension of a particular fact versus the connections between facts.
Our knowledge of art is personal. By definition, it exists only in our heads. Understanding, on the other hand, lives out in the world. It requires fluid motion between facts and opinions, history and conjecture. The best test of understanding is a Turing test: Can you hold a conversation about it?
Synopsis readers may lack firsthand knowledge of a movie, but are perfectly capable of holding their own in conversations about it. Conversely, it’s possible to experience a work firsthand, but completely flounder in a critical discussion. Imagine seeing the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet with no knowledge of Shakespeare. Imagine seeing it with no knowledge of Leonardo DiCaprio.
People who criticize others for replacing knowledge with understanding, I think, assume they can replace understanding with knowledge. Do you know who directed your favorite movie? Do you know who wrote it, or what it made at the box office? Do you know what inspired the filmmaker? Infinite viewings will not answer these questions. One trip to Wikipedia will.
Wikipedia is a tool for understanding, not knowing. It locates art. In fact — because the site is as yet unspoiled by generative AI, and because its volunteer editors are motivated largely by passion — I think it’s fair to consider a film’s Wikipedia page to be art in its own right.
Knowing this, how do we talk about a movie when we’ve only read the Wikipedia page? Bayard suggests as a golden rule that you should never attempt to learn whether someone has read a book, or just skimmed it. I would go just a little further: Assume that everyone has read the Wikipedia synopsis. In a perfect world, we all would.
Thanks for reading!
Here’s the Godzilla Minus One crew reacting to their nomination for Best VFX. Note the little Godzillas watching on the table.
DR
living for the runpee shoutout
Brb, I'm going to go finish the criterion collection in an hour.