Spoilers
Marie Buck & Matthew Walker
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Paperback, 108pp.
ISBN: 979-8-9899698-0-7
Retail Price: $18.00
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Spring 2024
Book Description
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, Spoilers engages 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.
About the Authors
Marie Buck is the author of Unsolved Mysteries (Roof Books, 2020), Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul (Roof Books, 2017), and Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya, 2015). They are a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and they currently work as the managing editor of the journal Social Text and teach writing at NYU as a member of UAW Local 7902.
Matthew Walker is the executive director of Primary Information, a nonprofit publisher of artists' books and writings, and one half of Ex-Official, an imprint and production house for music occupying a liminal space between hard boundaries. He lives and works in Brooklyn.