Not A Fan Of Speculation - Anyone Else?

I am an incredibly visual person.
That phrase gets thrown around a lot, so I'll describe what I mean a bit.

When I think on an astrophysics concept or equation, I render (for lack of a better way to put this) something like 3D models in my head and play things out in motion.
When I work on an analytical problem, I see it in visual form, something akin to shapes which characterize each concept and work through it as if I'm looking through the parts of a machine that's cranking along.
If the issue I'm working on involves an end user, I see the person sitting there using it and everything on the screen.

I draw my ideas down more than I write words. When I write music in my pocketbook, I draw the music as either boxes in a grid, or lines with wave behaviors representing how I'm thinking of the sound and movement of it. I can write music via notes on staff paper, but I don't think that way intuitively so I don't tend to write that way.

When I read, I read pretty slowly; I read in my head about the same speed as if I were to read out loud.
This isn't because I'm bad at reading, but because I'm visualizing the everything that I'm reading as if I'm watching a film. I see potholes in the road, even if they weren't directly described, but implied as part of the description of the area. Basically I see whole movies play out in front of my mind's eye, complete with cinematography and camera movement.

That's for fiction, anyway. With non-fiction, I tend to do the same if the subject is about someone - I tend to see a biopic rolling along in my head. If it's informational, like that AT&T laid the first trans-Atlantic coaxial cable in 1956, and laid the first coaxial network in 1936 in New York, then I see the objects and their environment, and if it's something like signals via such content, I see my model of an electrical current (which looks something like a wave of water, but if you freely flowed water in space in one direction and it was spinning around its axis while it waved forward, but not in perfect uniform motion and with bits scattering off here and there like ocean spray.

So when I see a film, it's burned into my mind.
I don't watch most movies or shows more than once.
If I want to see it again, I just think about it.

There are a few exceptions, such as a couple of Star Trek films, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones.
Mostly just those, really. They were a pretty big part of my childhood, so there's an emotional attachment that runs deep with those.
The only film in recent history that's not related to one of those that I have wanted to watch repeatedly is Dr. Strange. I can't really explain it; I just love the hell out of that film. The way that magic is shown is just something that sap up every time I watch it.

But mostly, I don't need to see films more than once. After that, I'll find the movie boring.
I loath rewatching films.
My wife enjoys rewatching films quite a bit, and it took her a while to come to terms with my absolute boredom and displeasure with watching something a second time in 99% of cases, and it took me a while to get used to rewatching some things sometimes just to do it together.

The degree of my cinematic visual acuity and memory is pretty frustrating at times.
I really liked Poirot, but I'd nail the guilty party within the first five to ten minutes of most shows because I'd notice the 4th wall's treatment of them, or I'd notice the physical nature of the actor/actress, inherently understand the casting reason when mixed with the presentation of them, and know that's the one.
That all happens in my head in a few seconds.
So I liked the show, but I couldn't work on figuring it out because my eye was too quickly picking up the staging of the characters.

Another example is that I have this pretty common habit, without thinking about it much, of walking back in from the kitchen (for example, or just getting home) and my wife has something queued up to watch and so there's one frame paused.
I'll see it and say, "Ah, watching Splash?"
I'm not looking at a screen hold of Tom Hanks; it'll be a paused screen of a beach and rocks.

I've done the same with Murder She Wrote just by seeing a frame of a city bay - I just recognize the footage like someone recognizes animal prints for species.


This SOUNDS cool, and it sounds like I'm bragging about something, but I'm actually not.
This actually sucks in some ways, and one of them is when a film is coming.

If I see a trailer, I don't need to see the movie. I know what it looks like, I know what kind of tone it will have, how it's going to move, the feel of it, and the parts that I just saw are now burned into my head, so when they happen in the film it's FAR less impacting - and I'm pretty damn good at picking up on subtext and foreshadow, so it really sucks when a trailer puts in portions of that without the "answer" to the question that it begs because I can't actually stop from immediately seeing where that basically goes.
The only thing watching the film does at this point is act as the fine print - filling in the pedantic details...which makes it more boring.

If I see a poster or picture of something that's in the film, then my mind immediatley stamps that in - dammit, now I know what the guards look like in the next Star Wars - which means there's a throne room, which means light saber in the throne room - Kylo, Rey, that means Snoke...no...no, no, no, no GAHHH! Now I know what that's basically going to look like before I've even seen the damn film!

If I had seen BB-8 before TFA, even a portion on a pillow design, I would be able to draw you the basic design template that was most likely going to be seen on the screen for the sets and costumes (since films match their styles).

When it comes to Star Wars time - that is, when a film is close to release - here's what everyone has to put up with around the house.
Firstly, I never watch previews so everyone knows if we can fast forward, I won't look at the screen and look up after a few moments when it should be over. If we can't fast forward, then I turn off the TV screen while the ad plays.

When it's near release, since there's always merchandise and advertising pictures everywhere in stores, I literally spend a couple of months looking at the floor of shopping markets, and cursing cereal boxes for having pictures on them of Star Wars.

I post a notice as my banner on Facebook every year a Star Wars movie comes close (a couple months before, and at least a month before), which lets everyone know that I won't be on Facebook until after the film comes out. I've had it happen too often in the past where someone's post flows up in my feed and BAM, there's something on the new Star Wars; preview, game review, just a picture...whatever.

I also stop coming and hanging around here, or any community group related to Star Wars.
Why?
Because one of the things that fans as a community like to do is speculate and discuss ideas.

When ideas burn into your head like images in a film, and having more images of a film burned into your mind before seeing the film reduces how exciting it is, it really sucks to read speculation - even a title on a thread sucks.
I literally try NOT to think about ANYTHING before I see a Star Wars; no knowledge, no assumptions, no preconceived ideas - that's what I try to accomplish each time.

(Yes, this means as we get near Solo, I'll be dropping off until it releases)

This is why, when sometimes it happens that people ask me what I think will happen in an upcoming Star Wars film I lean towards VERY broad concepts and try to instead describe where my imagination goes, but I really try to NOT imagine what it really will be as much as possible, and I usually state that I don't like trying to guess what's going to happen along with it.

Sometimes I'll just flat out say that I don't know and can't imagine what will happen.
By can't, I'm meaning - it's beyond my ability to sit through imagining where things are going....I can't do that to myself. That ruins it for later.

I really understand folks enjoy speculation, but to me, it just clips the wings off of a chance to see the virgin flight of an exotic bird for the first time.
It deadens the sensation of wonder, and wonder is probably my most cherished emotion.


So...that was a pretty long way of saying that I don't like to speculate, or read other speculations.
Anyone else out there not a huge fan of speculation because it acts more like a spoiler?

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Thank you for the conversation!

I agree, for the most part.
I do consider why they chose what they chose, and consider how things could have gone differently, but when I'm doing this, it's not because I think they did a bad job.
It's more a way that I learn - I'm a critic.
What I mean by that is that I learn by deconstruction, and most of what I've learned, I've learned on my own by studying what already is and tearing it apart to see how it was put together.
Back in the day, that was how we all taught ourselves the craft of film, since there wasn't a local film school anywhere near (Alaska isn't really a hotbed of film studios or schools...go figure!).

I've rewritten ANH a couple of times just to see the ramifications of changes, which in turn teaches me why what was done was done.

But then again, I'm an odd duck because I'm the film version of the guy who played football in high school and never made it to the NFL, so I still study and think about film as if I am in the industry, but I've got about as much of a chance of that idea as a cockroach has of getting to Mars...actually the cockroach probably has a better chance.

It's more just a pleasurable hobby at this point to analyze films - I don't get to do it as much as I would like since I'm not in my early 20's with no responsibilities anymore, but I enjoy it whenever I do get some time to spend on it, and Star Wars is always fun to do it with.

I actually just gave my oldest daughter (who's following in my ilk of being a comic-style artist) to use a composition template overlay and watch films with it so that she can see how they framed the shots geometrically and to pay attention to the why of it given the context of the scene and the relationships between shots.
She's assigned this so that she can turn around and use that knowledge when drawing her comic panels, and not just plop characters smack in the middle of every panel, but to think about the framing as if it's a camera, and think about how the geometric placement and juxtaposition of related frames/panels' influences the sense of motion and narrative direction in the images.

But rarely will I ever analyze a film from a position of thinking they did a terrible job and this is how it should have been done.
Once in a blue moon I'll do that, but that's usually when something is good, but just scraping my metaphorical ears...like watching a brilliant race car being driven in first gear down the track and you just hear the engine pleading for proper use.

Again, though...that's very rare, and usually means that I absolutely loved the concept behind what was there, but not the execution direction.
A good example of this is Grimm, the TV show - I loved the idea of it, it had such a cool atmosphere and the notion was very capable of being a sort of Blade style vigilante monster warrior show, but because the show wanted to focus on keeping the protagonist a police officer way beyond the point where it was aiding the flexibility of the show, and because they were hyperfocused on the relationship dramas between the protagonist's wife and himself - who was hardly a well developed character beyond mostly being an ignorant fumbling whiny mess in most uses...just used to make things stressful on the protagonist really, with no real self character arc of her own, I did think of things in this case that I would have done differently (chiefly, I wouldn't have kept him on the police force, but moved him to a Batman style relationships with the force so he could you know...focus on the monsters a bit more than just getting thrown police case after police case that somehow just all happened to be monster related and no one on the force ever caught on...eh...it's like watching Conan go through an entire movie with a nerf sword).

But yeah, generally if I don't like something, I just shrug and move on without thinking much beyond that; I don't usually tend to come up with things that should have been done.

Cheers,
Jayson