Spoilers

Authors: Marie Buck & Matthew Walker

Publisher: Golias Books (2024)

Marie Buck and Matthew Walker’s Spoilers is a book about movies: about watching movies and talking about movies, about being in the dark, alone and together, and about life as a movie and movies as ways of understanding life. Set against the early days of the pandemic, Spoilers charts the growing intimacy of its two speakers, using movies as aids to memory and as ways of marking time—“Near the beginning, we begin to discuss movies.” The speakers rediscover and relate formative experiences in the feel of a VHS cassette and the mystery of the projection booth, in the frustrations of digital playback glitches and the solitude of solo screenings.

Through both glancing references and longer meditations, Spoilersengages an expansive array of filmmakers and films—among them Béla Tarr, William Greaves, Mary Poppins, The Exorcist, Jean Painlevé, Claire Denis, The Notebook—that underscore moments in the narrators’ lives both transformative and mundane. Past and present movie viewings constellate into an experimental, braided memoir preoccupied with sociality and isolation, memory and loss, God and death. At the project’s center is a consideration of the act of witnessing: movies as witness; relationships as witnessing and being witnessed by another person; the impossibility of ever fully knowing another’s embodied experience. By turns confessional, epistolary, dreamlike, and didactic—often funny and always kind—Spoilers affords us new ways of thinking about how we use works of art to be together even when we’re alone.