According to Netflix, I paused the movie with 38:24 left.
Because of the credits, there are probably more like 33 minutes remaining, but I’m setting the remote down. My apprehension has just eclipsed my fascination. I need a breather from the movie.
Sometimes a film will induce an almost tangible sense of dread in me. You know the feeling: it’s not unlike indigestion or those moments when goosebumps surface out of nowhere. It’s eerie; I breathe differently when that feeling seeps in. The best horror films—the ones that cling to me like spilled syrup on a table—all serve as engines of dread, carefully ratcheting up the intensity until the film finally explodes.
Hereditary is my gold standard for this reason: even as bursts of violence and chilling scenes sequence together, the viewer knows something big is coming. Something that has to be worse, in fact, because the horror of the unknown is always terrifyingly worse. Ari Aster is a master of unsettling an audience.
It’s not a horror movie that I’ve paused with 38:24 remaining, though.
And what comes next isn’t unknown.
*****
During the fall of our freshman year of high school in the year 2000, my friend Joey watched Fight Club.
Since the movie was released in 1999, his viewing had to have been at home, meaning he probably rented a video cassette from Blockbuster. That sentence makes me instantly feel both old and extraterrestrial now, but, back then, Joey and his family rented more movies than anyone I knew. Awed by the breadth of his film knowledge, our conversations about movies were typically one-sided.
“Can I tell you how it ends?” he asked me that morning. “Are you ever going to watch it?”
Leave it to a fourteen-year-old to assume the status quo will last forever. The existence of a movie called Fight Club was news to me when he mentioned it, so the odds seemed low that I would ever stumble across such a film, let alone watch it. I was too busy trying to figure out what to write for my Honors English 9 essay to plan out my movie viewing for the next few decades.
I told him no.
He explained its ending.
Now, I hold not even the flimsiest of ill wills towards Joey for the spoilers he shared that day by the LCHS theater. With a little more foresight, I could have stopped him; Joey was a considerate guy, and he had no designs on ruining an eventual classic film for his friend. He had sought my approval to talk about it anyhow. I granted him permission.
He was eager to share—I could tell. The mechanics of Fight Club’s story were whirring in his mind, the buzzing excitement of its subversion still holding him captive. So pure was his enthusiasm for whatever caught his eye that he held a powerful ability to induce enthusiasm in me. He did it with video games; he did it with movies. No truer test of friendship can be administered than whether one friend’s joy blossoms in the other.
Thus, in the shadow of a new millennium, Joey told me the secrets of Fight Club. His rendering was clear and evocative; I hung on every word of his description. When he arrived at the juiciest moment, my jaw dropped, just as his had twelve hours earlier while the family VCR purred.
And that was that. I knew a major element of what made Fight Club interesting. One could even say I admired the movie for what he’d shared, sight unseen. But then we both went to our respective first periods, and I didn’t think about Fight Club for six years.
While shopping at Best Buy one day, I found a DVD copy in the bargain bin for $5.99. I’d never forgotten Joey’s affection for the film while bathed in its afterglow, and his critical endorsement carried tremendous weight still. Additionally, every time I found the title on some list of important films, I told myself I should check it out. This was my chance.
My brother and I sat down to watch it one night. I popped it in the PlayStation and, as he glanced at the DVD case, Tom asked what the movie was about.
The ending Joey had shared was my first thought. That ending was, after all, the film’s defining trait for me. I opened my mouth to level our playing field and relay my friend’s report from half a decade earlier, but I stopped before my tongue was in motion.
I shrugged and reconsidered.
“Joey said that there’s some crazy stuff in here.”
He nodded, and we settled in to watch a good movie.
*****
Seeing a film with its ending already known isn’t an uncommon occurrence for me.
There are films I watch based on media I already know, for one. Drive My Car, West Side Story, and Where the Crawdads Sing all fit this description from 2022. Knowing their source materials meant that watching these films was less about what would happen than what those happenings would look like on screen. In the case of Drive My Car, expanding the Haruki Murakami short story into a three-hour film minimized the one-to-oneness; ditto for West Side Story, which is based on Romeo and Juliet but under entirely separate musical ownership. Crawdads, though—that hews closely to the book (and watching made many of the issues in the book harder to overlook, but I digress).
Likewise, there are times in which spoilers do find their way to me. In the last year-plus, this most commonly occurs when an older film gets discussed on the Grierson & Leitch Podcast’s reboot section. When a film predates me—or belongs to a segment of the great films pantheon—it’s hard to fault anybody but myself for letting it get spoiled. Those guys are super careful about spoilers for newer films but much less so for reboots, and I know this. Their discussions about these films go far beyond simple plot summaries, though, and, even if I know the general ending and plot beats as I did with Body Heat last week, I can still enjoy seeing things play out and work to contrast my response and highlights with theirs.
Still, there’s a third category for spoilers which, I would argue, is impossible to counter without total ignorance. These are the kind that arise from movies with a story constructed around actual events. The characters might or might not be real, and the details might be manufactured to a degree, but the story is going to play out just as it originally happened. Kudos to the Quentin Tarantinos of the world for gleefully reimagining recorded history in their films, but those interjecting bursts of fan fiction don’t actually change the viewing experience.
The thing about spoilers is that they alter the experience of watching. The extra knowledge renders the audience into a clumsy but nonetheless omniscient narrator of sorts: whatever histrionics we see chugging across the screen, we know where those train tracks lead. There’s an inevitability to the experience: even if the facts of the case get changed by a fairy godmother director, there’s no changing how things went down for real. I know Sharon Tate’s murder took place. It was impossible for me not to watch Margot Robbie in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood without that lens in my glasses, no matter how Tarantino chooses to conclude his movie.
In situations like this, the viewer ends up waiting. Anticipating. The audience can see the seams; viewers can spot the mechanism making the rabbit disappear from the top hat. They know where things are going. This doesn’t invalidate a film’s watchability or anything—I’m not saying that. My entire argument is simply that knowing the destination alters how an audience watches the journey play out. It’s impossible for it not to.
After all, they know what’s about to happen.
This explains why my TV has now powered itself down with 38:24 still left in my film.
I know what comes next.
And I don’t want to see it.
*****
When Tom and I watched Fight Club that night, we watched two entirely different movies.
Tom was watching a taut thriller about the creators of the titular organization and the increasingly drastic actions their terror group undertakes.
I, on the other hand, was watching a puzzle box full of filmmaking wizardry setting up among the grandest rug pulls ever executed.
Sure, I was also watching the movie he was in the traditional sense. Joey hadn’t transcribed every line of dialogue and forced me to memorize each; I was seeing the whole thing unfold for the first time. But I also squinted constantly at the corners of the screen in search of secrets. I devoted mental energy toward detective work, listening to exchanges between characters in search of clues rather than development. Hell: I was staring at other characters’ faces and monitoring which characters cast shadows rather than noting the telling expressions on their faces!
My insider knowledge compelled me to watch the film differently. I was engaged by it more than purely enjoying or getting lost in it. Searching for signs cost me catching little things but also big ones: my hyper-focus on the marginalia meant it took me another viewing to catch onto the larger themes of a film that doesn’t exactly hide them from the audience. I finished Fight Club an expert on the execution of its deception…but not on what the film was actually trying to say.
I have that trouble, though. When I get an idea into my head, I fixate on it, and my brain goes into hyperdrive trying to find evidence that supports what I am after. I learned this not a year earlier when, roles reversed, my brother pulled a prank on me while I read the sixth installment of Harry Potter months after he finished the tome.
I begged him to assure me that Ginny Weasley, Harry’s love interest by then, wouldn’t die.
He shook his head with a somber frown.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. His grave tone deflated me.
My remaining read-through was spent tearing up at every scene the two characters spent together. I couldn’t turn a page without imagining the violent ends awaiting Ron’s little sister in the next paragraph.
When I finished the book, I found myself confused and flustered. I reread the final chapters multiple times, trying to figure out what I had missed.
I finally asked him. “I think I missed something. Dumbledore died, but I missed where Ginny did?”
He snickered.
“You shouldn’t have asked me,” he said, a sly grin roosting on his face.
So obsessed with anticipating a fictional character’s demise, it was only after he turned away that I understood his prank.
*****
In third grade, reading comprehension was a point of emphasis for our class.
We had taken the first-ever administration of the CAT-5 test in second grade, the first of a wave of state standardized tests that the class of 2004 would guinea pig before graduation. There’s a small chance that the third-grade team received some longitudinal data that indicated our collective cohort sucked at drawing meaning from text, but in reality, reading comprehension was probably just a focus of the curriculum they used with third graders.
Each week, then, we received a reading comprehension exercise as part of our weekly homework. They all looked the same: pink paper with a several-paragraph passage chased by multiple-choice questions. The ink on them had this bluish tint to it, a remnant of the old duplo machines that copies were still being made on in 1995 schools.
Our assignment was to read the passage and answer the questions. These questions were, to my nine-year-old eyes, usually pretty straightforward. I was good at reading comprehension, it turns out. We would typically score our work together in class the next morning, and I might have missed one or two questions across any one of the trimesters.
Each of these passages relayed an interesting story. My first awareness of Frank Abagnale, the inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Catch Me If You Can (who was recently exposed as an apparent liar about his lying), was in one of those passages. Other entries taught me about famous monuments, natural parks, notably lost pets, and bizarre extinct animals.
I recall the gist of those tasks, but Abagnale’s is one of two specific stories about actual people that I clearly remember. My teacher-brain insists that his is the only one that I actually remember accurately, but I can’t shake the idea that I had one other person’s story from those homework assignments stick.
That person would be Christine Chubbuck, the twenty-nine-year-old morning show host who shot herself on a live television broadcast in 1974.
There’s no way that there was actually a reading comprehension task for third graders about her. Full stop. But also: I swear that there was. Regardless, hers is a story that I have inexplicably known since I was very young.
But this isn’t about an implausibly macabre third-grade reading assessment. This is about my paused movie. You probably know the film that I’ve been avoiding by now:
Christine (2016) starring Rebecca Hall.
Aware of the film’s existence when it was originally released, 2016-me knew better than to seek it out. For one, I knew the story already—whatever its actual origins in my consciousness—and, for another, I knew to be terrified of it. My own self-awareness grew that year, and watching a film about a person who takes her own life under puzzling circumstances felt like a dangerous viewing experience. I can rarely watch a film without getting swept up by the empathy machine’s engine, and I could not risk identifying with Hall’s portrayal of Chubbuck.
The movie stayed on my radar, though. It appeared on Netflix several years ago and was an instant add to my list (alongside several hundred movies I’ll never watch). It was only today that I drummed up the courage to watch what felt as perilous and dangerous as the videotape from The Ring.
Christine follows Chubbuck in the weeks leading up to her death. Director Antonio Campos and writer Craig Shilowich serve up a world for Chubbuck to inhabit that is colorfully dressed in 1970s aesthetic but also strangely confining.
Hall crafts a version of Chubbuck that is brilliant but a chronic over-thinker. She struggles with the rhythms of conversation and comes off alternatively as either too strong or a complete pushover. Living with her mother in Sarasota after what gets called an “episode” and a “funk” that cost her a prime broadcasting job in the massive Boston market, Chubbuck is licking her wounds in a sunny and serene community but aching for something bigger.
When her news station begins to push toward a more sensationalized telecast, Christine’s eccentric interviews and puffier pieces become increasingly discardable right as other aspects of her life begin to crumble.
The Chubbuck Hall puts on film is difficult to watch at times. Ambitious and laser-focused, she nonetheless can’t get out of her own way. She commits social faux pas with regularity, and the others on her team extend olive branches but seem exhausted by continuing to try with her. Her boss Michael (Tracy Letts) admires her intellect but loathes her open hostility toward both him and the new station-wide push for better ratings. The lead anchor George (Michael C. Hall) is the object of her disjointed desire, and he is kind but patronizing toward her. The only person remotely like a friend for her is her producer Jean (Maria Dizzia), a person whom Chubbuck fatigues nevertheless and pushes hard.
Not enough can be said about Hall’s performance. Hall evokes an out-of-sync woman as hard on herself as the world is. She manages to translate forced emotion via unconvincing smiles and unblinking eyes that convey Chubbuck’s struggle to fit in—and her painful awareness of that struggle. With a husky voice that demands to be heard only to shrink away once she is, there’s a tragedy to the character that exists independent of her ultimate fate. I dare anyone to listen to Hall’s emotion-drenched line reading of “Follow your gut” during a late scene with a network exec and not have their heart fracture. That I both cringed and cried is a testament to Hall’s bringing dissatisfaction and mental unhealth to awful life.
Although I struggled to resist that feeling of dread woven into the source material, Campos and Shilowich resist sensationalizing the story. They don’t play this as Chubbuck’s inevitable path toward suicide; it’s far subtler than that. They lend us insight into the situations that coalesce into the awful moment—she does a report on a private gun salesman and holds a revolver; she struggles through a date before another promotion passes her by—but there’s never a heavy hand on the scale. Like a good reporter, the film pursues leads but refuses to editorialize: Chubbuck’s death is a shock out of left field when it happens on screen.
Not that I saw it. I let the tears accompanying the chest-tightening crescendo to that moment excuse me from looking. As Hall’s Chubbuck lifted the gun at the tail end of a morbid and nonsensical announcement, I turned away until I heard that single shot ring out. I didn’t want to see what I had imagined the entire time. The shocking ending I had known was en route for almost thirty years was too much to see fictionalized, even though I felt as though I’d seen it in my head every time the name Christine Chubbuck surfaced.
However intense and shocking that moment was for me as a viewer, I can’t deny that it also doesn’t work. The story of Christine Chubbuck captivates because that moment came without warning. For the few hundred people watching her morning show on a summery Sarasota day in 1974, there was no indication that the host would take her own life. Those viewers could not have experienced dread over their cereal bowls on that terrible morning. They had no idea what was coming.
But I did. Watching Christine now is an exercise in dread management. I watched it the same way I did Fight Club: with a magnifying glass on everything. Such a tool certainly amplifies things, but there’s also an unavoidable distortion that comes along for the ride. No one watching Christine can truly experience the authentic brutality and confusion of her act because inevitability is baked into the viewing experience.
Just as I knew where the film was going, so too did Campos and Stilowich and Hall and, truthfully, probably the vast majority of the viewing public who braved a screening before me. That prophecy recolors the entire film. A story about a momentary explosive tragedy is inherently about the shock it wrecks, but a film defined by an inevitable shock cannot, by definition, be shocking.
It is impossible to experience the film’s brutality if you know anything about Chubbuck’s story.
But would you be watching if you didn’t know anything about Chubbuck’s story?
*****
The top shelf of the bedroom bookcase that Megan, Maia, Morgan, Bria, and Zach built with me features what I consider my favorite books. The Time Traveler’s Wife is there; so are Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and Achy Obejas’ Memory Mambo. So are Alyiah’s first, Faeblood Unbroken, my favorite Murakami works, and each of the Thursday Next novels.
Among the least-known titles alongside them is Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr. In his debut novel, Currie tells the story of Junior, who is born with the knowledge of an impending apocalyptic event. Junior navigates the world with an extraterrestrial voice in his head, effectively counting down to the end of life as we know it.
I won’t spoil the novel—I obviously love and endorse it, even if its premise and story are both utterly bonkers—but the idea it incepted into my head was about inevitability. Junior’s impossible knowledge that the end is nigh reframes how he lives his life. That ticking clock radically alters the course he takes, motivating futile decisions and precluding the sort of bonds that would validate living in the first place. That Junior can’t ever quite ignore the brick wall that is the future helps the powerful, if a bit on the nose, message at the core of Everything Matters! ring true.
Knowing where things lead changes our experience walking along the path. It’s difficult to stop and smell the roses when we know a vicious horde of monsters waits for us one hundred yards beyond the garden. We spend that walk brainstorming survival strategies in much the same way I spent my first viewing of Fight Club looking for clues in a mystery I had long before permitted Joey to solve for me.
This is at once the tragic beauty and ultimate failure of Christine. Watching a film about an ending without tracing the steps toward that ending is impossible. We watch the film in search of insight because we know what is coming. My two-hour pause with 38:24 on the clock wasn’t truly dread but bracing myself for what I knew was inevitable. To watch Christine is to see what is coming.
Such a thought overwhelms me more than watching the film did. Because I so wish even one person in 1974 had seen it coming as audiences do now. If even one person had—one colleague, one friend, one doctor—it strikes me that we would have had nothing to watch.
I’d like that ending far better than the one we got.
I debated trimming this piece down in several spots. It is effectively a movie review—but also a very personal one for obvious reasons. Without writing an entirely new essay about this already substantial one, I decided to keep everything here because those extra tangents reflect the framing device: just as I paused Christine to postpone watching the film’s ending, so too did I keep pulling back from talking about the film and, of course, the tragic story it relays. That I focus on the viewing experience distances me from the empathy I felt while watching. This was a protective measure through and through.
Filing this high-concept movie review away was also a consideration, but I thought it might be interesting. Absent feedback to the contrary, I’ll consider reprising the idea again in the future if a film inspires this much reflection.
In the meantime, my apologies for spoiling Harry Potter 6, but you’re welcome for my very purposefully not spoiling Fight Club despite all my discussion about it.