A yellow-coded media black-out is now in full effect. No Twitter or Instagram; The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vulture, Wired and Polygon are taboo. Friends living in the first world are going to be blocked on WhatsApp.
I will not be taking calls or emails until Sunday morning. We are talking ‘Purge’-level kind of isolation, with the lights off, beans and toilet paper stacked up in the pantry and the basement, shotguns loaded on the table, and medical supplies stockpiled in abundance.
This media black-out will be in effect until I have watched ‘Avengers: Infinity War’.
Why?
Because the internet is, by and large, a savage place. Almost as savage as watching a ‘Fast and Furious’ film on a Tuesday night during the school holidays. Only a fool does that to themselves and their mental health. It is best for me to avoid the internet for a while because someone, somewhere, is bound to spoil it for me.
They will tweet about the plot, they will review it shoddily or they will rave and rant about it and accidentally say what it is that made or broke the film for them.
And this will effectively end my year.
It seems as though people are incapable of talking about anything without ruining it for someone else.
It is not just the average filmgoer who might ruin the whole experience for me. It seems as though writers writing about film or television are equally incapable of writing reviews without giving away clues about key plot points. I do not know how spoilers became a writing style and why they are encouraged by certain publications.
Whatever happened to those neat succinct reviews that used to appear on the television pages of magazines like You and Drum? When did we abandon that and opt to do frame-by-frame reviews of films that just arrived in circuit? Maybe it is because everyone is obsessed with reaction-based reviewing, with GIFs and emojis and all manner for shorthand writing tools.
But even after avoiding the reviews and the tweets and the Instagram videos, getting to the cinema still means fending off the wild animals who come to the cinema. I am talking about the late-comers who spend an eternity finding their damn seats; the talkers and the running commentators who think they are funny; the underage children who ask their parents what is happening; the people with cellphone screens set to solar flare brightness; and the people who huff when you tell them they are in your seat.
So let us make a pact, yeah? You and I. Let us respect each other, let us respect the N$70 we are going to cough up for the film, let us remember that there are other people in the cinema and the world, and let us promise to just be decent human beings for once.
Just until we all watch ‘Infinity War’. After that we can go back to our nasty, brutish and short existence.
