Give it away now

The professor of a class I reluctantly took on the poetics of Greek tragedy told us that the ancient Greek audience already knew the stories that Aeschylus and Sophocles and the like were telling, so the goal of the playwright was to make the journey from known beginning to known end as interesting as possible. Many Georgians take that philosophy to heart.

What brings this up is that right now I'm either working or playing solitaire while my family watches Latin American soap operas. While Emiliano lies on the brink between life and death, my host family remains unperturbed. They're too busy guessing how Paulo is going to be killed on his wedding day.

Every week, there's a Georgian newspaper that publishes what's going to happen on that week's set of soap operas. Admittedly, these series aired years earlier in their countries of origin so it can't be that difficult to get spoilers, but I cannot bring myself to understand why you would want to completely erase all the surprises from a TV show. Sure, I used to get my spoilers from alt.tv.x-files, but after the letdown I felt in watching the 6th season episode "The Unnatural" while already knowing that Mulder would teach Scully how to play baseball at the end, I gave up spoilers for good.

It's not just TV shows, either. My host sister was flipping through the bootleg copy of "I am Legend" that I gave her on her computer, getting a peek at about every twenty minutes of the movie, even the end. I stared as long as was polite, and then a little more, and asked her what in God's name she was doing. She said that she can't get into a movie unless she knows what's going to happen. I told her that Americans would think that's very strange. She shrugged the same shrug that she gave last July when I tried to make her understand why I didn't want her to tell me whether Harry Potter dies in the seventh book, and resumed her viewing.

It made watching Lost with the neighbors last year a real treat. Desmond spaces out, having another one of his visions where Charlie dies. My neighbor Keti asks, "Is Charlie really going to die?" It sounds like the kind of rhetorical question you ask when you're wrapped up in the drama of a series; I laughed to myself and kept watching. Then I realized that Keti was still staring at me, waiting for an answer. I told her I wouldn't tell her, which is what I say when watching movies with that person who always asks questions about the plot. She scowled. I think she was really upset with me. I told her that if she were an American and I told her the plot, she would kill me. This confused Keti, which was at least better than having her sitting there thinking about what a stingy ingrate I was.

I can figure out no way to reconcile myself with this strange aspect of Georgian culture, which is probably not the type of culture gap that the ancients had in mind when they set out to new lands, but it's just as maddening. Or funny. Or both.

I dedicate this post to that chick who was three people ahead of me in line to see Titanic at the movie theater when it came out, and who said to her friend, "It's so sad that Jack dies at the end." Also to my roommate's boyfriend who came in the room while I was watching Braveheart and asked, "Has he been killed yet?" Also to Kim Zitnick who has given away the ending to almost every movie she's ever seen.