This is just too sad

I am so incapable of dealing with suspense. It’s tragic. Remember that thing I said about The Prestige, that at one point it was so suspenseful that I had to be physically restrained from looking up what happened on the internet? That may have sounded like it was an unusual circumstance, and it was, in that usually I don’t allowed myself to be restrained but just continue with the looking up of the ending. I do it in books too. I read enough of the beginning to have a sense of who the characters are, and then I skip to the end to see what’s going to happen to them. I hate it when the end contains characters I’ve never heard of before; it puts me out of temper with the latecomer characters and I never give them a chance to be loved.

When I watched The Sixth Sense for the first time, I rang up my sister to demand that she tell me what the twist was, because I couldn’t stand not knowing. When I watched Superman Returns — and we know he has to be okay at the end because he’s Superman! — I was chewing on my nails for the last thirty minutes of the flim, and Steve kept taking my hands away from me so that I couldn’t do it anymore. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve paused a TV show or a movie to beat a fellow viewer with pillows until they tell me what’s going to happen, I’d have LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of nickels. The first time I watched Moulin Rouge, even though I knew that Ewan McGregor HAD to survive because he is the one narrating the story and typing it on his typewriter, I was still squealing with anxiety because I feared that he would be shot by the bald gun guy.

So yeah. I like knowing the ends. With some books I try to hold out — very rarely, for instance, do I read the ends of mystery novels or the Harry Potter books, although I sometimes glance at the very last page to see who’s still alive. In the case of the sixth Harry Potter book, I wanted to see whether Ginny made it out okay, and I happened to glance down at a sentence that let me know who wasn’t okay; and that was an accident but it was really better in the end because I didn’t worry about anything for the whole rest of the book.

Well, I was prompted to mention this publicly because just now I was watching an episode of Sex and the City, and I went online to find out — this is true, I swear to God — whether the sex was ever going to get better with Carrie and Ron Livingstone. I used Wikipedia to aid me in my search to discover information about the sex lives of two totally fictional characters. That is too, too tragic.

(In my defense, however, they get along famously! and the only problem is they don’t have good sex! so it’d be a shame if that problem persisted when everything else is in their favor! and I can’t watch every episode in series 6 tonight, so I might as well find out now as not know for several more days!)

And yes, the sex was going to get better. It did at the end of the very episode I paused during to find this out. So I guess I could have saved the time. However, since I looked on Wikipedia I also discovered that Ron Livingstone is going to break up with her via Post-It note, so now I know not to get invested in their relationship. See? See how good it is to know the endings of things? All right.