The Hateful Wait: Spoilers, Speculation and Obsession as Mainstream

“Tarantino's cancelled movie: 5 things we learned from The Hateful Eight script

The screenplay for ‘The Hateful Eight’ has now leaked online, but what would his Western have been like?”


'Hey, isn't Tarantino a dickhead?'

'I don't know. I've only ever seen his films – they're alright.'

Jesus, we're a million miles away from that now, if we were ever there. I can't imagine how geeky and obsessed and sad we would look to the lay audience of the '90s and earlier. They saw finished products, and maybe a couple of short interview clips with one or two cast members that made it onto TV around the release date. It was sickeningly polished PR, but it was brief – acknowledged and moved on from. That general audience took home only relatively small (house-able) VHS tape collections, and sans special features. Movie, album, show, career... spotlight goes on – the production, the final edit – spotlight goes off. Sensationalist/prurient media coverage of the famous personnel involved notwithstanding.

Finished products... Today we know that a film that wasn't even going to be in production for over a year has been ditched for now. It's not even that; it's that we can read verbatim, time and time again, everything Tarantino said about it in all his interviews, stretching the hissy fit blips out into infinity. Because so-and-so must have given the script to his agent who then leaked it to friggin' Hollywood because he's a douche and has spoiled it for everyone. And the agent's company's got a track record for this shit, as you know.

As you know, indeed. People don't bother to find this stuff out – it is no bother. It's just there, all the time. Specific, in-industry notoriety or observed traits and tropes get shared with everyone. Everything from litigious directors and artists to unfortunate newspaper layouts to John McAfee's opinion of his software under Intel to Morrissey's instant Penguin Classic deal to Google +'s existential crisis to the red shirt survival chances of a Sean Bean character. Even the lay audience is exposed to this stuff. Footnote material gets its own article – gets its own PR. Pithy comic headlines knowingly position the content as being both specific and anal and yet ripe for everyone to lap it up because it's still appealing or funny. It's actually funnier because it's obsessively specific. 15 Very Unique Ryan Gosling Items You Can Buy On Etsy, anyone?

Once this was something for fans, for people who 'bought in.' Now it's viral... clickbait. The ordinary viewers like to get the reference – they are expected to be able to. Namechecking an actor in a particular context in an interview, movie or series shoots a circle of recognition round an audience who've all seen the rant, funny dance, captioned screenshot or whatever being referenced (how about a little figure of Sad Keanu?). We're like a creepy friend-by-association-by-research, who knows about and can nod along to everything related by an actor or director: 'oh yes, this is going to be your anecdote about...' But we don't have to stalk; it's broadcast to us – the more specific the information or gag the better. It's the specific as general, on general release. In-jokes that everyone's expected to get – obliterating the dictionary definition.

It's played beautifully, too, by a lot of famous people in the various industries. Acknowledging – whether in polished productions or through their own social media channels – popular perceptions/misconceptions of themselves, references to themselves on Twitter or Instagram or in fan-made videos, or joining in with memes, or maybe those surrounding other celebrities... The result is a kind of peer to peer humour, even if this makes Stephen Fry or Joss Whedon or Dave Grohl or Nick Grimshaw or Barack Obama your 'peer' in the humour.

Of course 'behind the scenes' is funny – pitched perfectly by cast, crew and/or marketing and still feeling genuinely personal to you as the the eager audience. Of course when you're waiting months for a movie or a series to come out you want to see Benedict Cumberbatch's hand on his morning coffee or X-Men director and cast fooling around or whatever's appearing with a wink from the set or recording studio or wherever and go all to jelly. But then what about a ditched movie, a failure? What about this 'gather round me, my fans' thing when it's forwarding, en masse, the unguarded, heat of the moment stuff: '"I gave it to three motherfucking actors. We met in a place, and I put it in their hands. It's got to be either the agents of Dern or Madsen. Please name names."'

Immortalizing a director or any personality when they're pissed off, immortalizing a short-lived mood and the opinions it created – obviously it's still captivating and amusing on some levels, whether you're giggling with or at. But it does start to feel like all concerned, producers and consumers (cynical or otherwise), have fallen into a YouTube comments section, unselfconsciously rising above the morons by... arguing with them and adding the last word every few seconds. I mean, getting to the end of a movie that did something to you and then connecting actors' or directors' names forever with that feeling, that reassurance that your mind can find inspiration and mirrors out there – that's quite nice. Feeling you have to defend or attack famous strangers after they've had an episode of being a whiny little bitch – really?

There's something about showing all of the production process, and about having our cultural producers accustomed to having to show all of that process, that can go wrong. Look what happens when you give people the time and space to think too much about a delayed project, a void – freed from any information that might rain on their speculations:

“...Ben Affleck has pulled out of directing Fox’s high profile drama project, The Middle Man, because of scheduling issues with Batman vs. Superman. While Warner Bros recently pushed the release date from 2015 to 2016 […]

With Ant-Man taking Batman vs. Superman’s old date, does this mean that Batman vs. Superman will be reclaiming it’s [sic] old date or does this mean that Batman vs. Superman and Justice League is indeed filming back-to-back? There are so many questions and what ifs involved with this movie that it’s starting to become a little unsettling.”

I bet you felt the earth shudder, waking up this morning in such a state of flux, right?

And fan forums are great, for the fans. Delayed albums and films and changes of plan and trailers and cliffhangers and posters and rumours and leaked/fan-gained images of whatever it is can create months... years of scrolling speculation. It bubbles up and down between rage and rationality. The specifics of the speculation too, like the girl who knows the firm that's making the DVD cover and how, since they changed their ink supplier last month, I think we can expect that season four of Blah won't be out until third quarter at least... Or the guy who's done some work with the cameras that Blah is using for the location shots on Blah: Blah, who knows that if they try and do the kind of scenes they did in the first movie with those cameras it will look BAD – I'm not even planning on going to the theatre to see it if they do that. Now, whether you're salivating or recoiling in horror at this sort of conversation, it's fine when it's there. What happens now is that pithier versions end up on your FB feed. You might even crack a smile for some of it and click on the Like, or at least empathize with the humour of the specific material the jokes and the rants are constructed out of.

For God's sake, I hadn't even seen the movie, hadn't ever even googled it, and I knew there was too much lens flare in Star Trek. I knew that it was popularly known that there was too much lens flare in Star Trek. I saw JOKES, galleries of comedy Photoshopped images, about how there was too much lens flare in Star Trek. If I travelled back to the '90s and said that to myself... Despite little me having a bedroom that had been sellotaped into a crap cardboard bridge of the Enterprise, he would have said: “get a life, dad” – before one or both of us went up in a puff of paradoxical smoke.

Period Drama and Prejudice

“Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,” one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September.

Erik Eckholm, ‘In Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda,’ New York Times, 6 November, 2010.

In Britain and America we live in societies where homophobic, racist, sexist and similar discriminatory abuse is believed to be defeated, or at least it’s generally professed as being so. All of these kinds of abuse are clearly wrong and despicable, out of date, the acts of dinosaur comedians and why the ‘70s were bad. This is suggested in the way that any examples of homophobic, racial or sexist abuse/violence reported in the media are presented as departures from the tolerant norm and as thoroughly shocking – particularly when celebrities and politicians are involved. The daily, street ubiquity of all these types of abuse is denied, or at least largely invisible on TV and in the media generally.

When Alan Davies gave us a tour of his teenage years a couple of months ago he admitted to the racism of his past, and that of Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s. He met with the Pakistani shopkeeper that he and his school friends had jeered at and shoplifted from, and later talked with an ex skinhead, who discussed racism and Paki bashing, again in the past tense. While the programme called for them to be talking only about their pasts, there is also a suggestion that ‘it’ doesn’t happen like that anymore. In dramas, BBC-safe ensemble casts of straight, LGBT, female, male, black and white characters all get on without batting an eyelid in the portrayed present – or maybe with a few lovely ‘ironic’ examples of knowing abuse. Any actual arguments they might have are strictly non race, gender or sexuality – that could be a Saturday night show. It’s only when such a mix of characters inhabits Life on Mars, Downton Abbey or Agatha Christieland that they will get nasty with each other’s identities – period drama and prejudice. ‘The days before political correctness’ – how’s that for nauseating understatement? Mad Men can show racial abuse because it’s set in the ‘60s, and that’s when people were racist.

Time travelling Doctor Who is good for this, or at least the 2005 onwards incarnation is. When set in the present or future, a character might make some remark about having ‘struggled through the ranks’ or some similar allusion to having had a hard time because of their gender, sexuality or colour. It is only when the stories are set safely in the past that descriptions and experiences of discrimination are more explicit, such as responses to homosexuality ‘1926, it’s more like the Dark Ages’ (The Unicorn and the Wasp, 2008) and racial abuse ‘with hands like those, how can you tell when something’s clean?’ (Human Nature, 2007).

If people do discriminate in the televisual present - and this is true for British and American shows - they are shown to be abnormal in some way. Desperate Housewives’ Bree Van de Kamp might have wanted to ‘correct’ her son’s homosexuality, but then she’s presented in a context of neurosis and comically exaggerated small c conservatism (from Live Alone and Like It, 2005). In The Bill the only people who had problems with the black and female police officers were the criminals, particularly those of the nasty, sell their own grandmother, psycho-thug kind.

This combination of down playing and fencing off discrimination and abuse owes either to media and political ignorance/wishful thinking, or else it’s some attempt to deny it into extinction – if we are told that no one is racist anymore, then we will stop being racist, or homophobic or sexist or…

The focus on successful, established diversity is not necessarily wrong of course, but it does create an offshoot problem, asides from the false Mission Accomplished assumption. The problem with this common mantra of diversity - that homosexuality isn’t wrong or something to be ashamed of, that men and women of all colours and cultures are equal, that people are tolerant, that employers are tolerant - is that people tend to get ‘sick of it’, imagining that they are putting some level of effort into all of this tolerance. Then they will say things like: yes, sure, gays are fine, they make their choices and I accept that, BUT….

It’s all right to be a little homophobic, sexist and racist in a society that’s defeated sexism, racism and homophobia. There’s a sense that people are no longer kicking these groups when they are down – not now that legislation and tolerance is on ‘their side.’ Now they have got want they wanted we can re-introduce some common sense. It’s a neatly polarised assumption that the violence and discrimination of the past – the past of lynching, the past of the AIDS (cures gays) scare/celebration, the past of the un-voting and housebound little woman - is incommensurable with today. Today there is ‘none of that’ and there are certainly no modern parallels. Any groups or persons continuing to suggest otherwise are wearing a bit thin.

Somehow the same people who profess a tolerance of homosexuals can still criticise things for ‘promoting acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.’ Homosexuality isn’t wrong? Fine, but accepting it as normal, as a valid alternative, is wrong. There is a contradiction there that people don’t like to have to deal with. I suppose the level of tolerance we have achieved, barring examples of intolerance and violent intolerance out there, is one that says: being black, gay or a woman is fine and I won’t judge you for it - you can’t help it. But for Chrissakes let’s not encourage any more of them. For gender, race and sexuality there are similar sets of ideas and voices that say we can take equality too far. Cutting to it: I still don’t think you’re normal - homosexuals, black people and black culture, women who work in industries that surprise me - but I won’t attack you because of that. That’s unless you start attacking the things I like and claiming that they suppress you and your sort. The things that I like are all part of what I view as normal.

So the parameters and definitions of tolerance remain in flux, malleable whether in politics, media, the workplace or in individuals’ lives and consciences. As America sees the debates surrounding don’t ask, don’t tell go on, the right of openly gay troops to serve remains a controversial possibility. The BBC continues to fight its own sexist and ageist demons, and depending on which paper you read, Britain’s most popular boy’s name is either the sum total of various spellings of Mohammed (Mail, Express, Telegraph) or Oliver (Guardian, Sun, Times, Independent). Who knows, perhaps in twenty or thirty years we’ll be watching the future’s equivalent of those BBC Four productions – historical biopics that will look back at today’s shows and their stars and reveal the discrimination and human dramas underlying the onscreen diversity of the 2000s and 2010s.