Talk:The Offence

Plot summary Revisions Discussion
I'm sorry that my plot summary was totally revoked last year. I only just noticed. This is a complex film and there is very little other good information online to help people navigate it.

My work on plot, June 2 2012, garnered +4,643, while Mighty Antar's revocation "Reinstated original concise plot summary from November" 8 days later June 10, got -7,274.

I hear that WP doesn't want blow by blow summaries, but this film is so full of ambiguity, that the reinstated short version again loses that. For example, IMHO The film leaves open the possibility that Johnson is the actual perpetrator, unknown even to himself until the closing sequence, when his horror could signal his realization of that, not the killing of Baxter. "He knew. I had to kill him". So that's the problem with a short summary of this film - the plot is very short on concrete facts about "the offence", and the short summaries easily box this film into conclusions. I also think there is benefit to the details in a work like this. I was editing an already long synopsis. I can try to rework mine down to being less wordy, but I don't agree with losing all that was added in good faith. Please advise. 100.42.169.9 (talk) 21:01, 11 July 2013 (UTC) (talk) 21:56, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

I think we would both agree on the significance of this film, and I am confident there has to be a large body of scholarly, published work in the area of Film Studies that discusses or relates to it and the inclusion of which would greatly benefit the article. That is the work you should research and reference to help expand the article. Hope this helps. Mighty Antar (talk) 23:26, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The +4,643 and -7,274 isn't any kind of score, it's simply the difference in byte size of the page before and after the revisions. The problem with your work on the plot is the same as the example you give above, it is your opinion, your ideas or your interpretation. Including this in the article would be completely contrary to one of Wikipedia's core policies - see WP:OR.

Plot summary
I've reinstated the OR tag - it would be nice if someone could find a referenced source. This is a deliberately ambigious film where the conclusions (other than that Johnson gravely injures Baxter) are largely left up to the viewer, the previous plot summary suggested something cut and dried, completely different to any version I've seen. A brilliant performance by Connery. Mighty Antar (talk) 20:50, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Scholarly article
It may be notable that the film has become the subject of a scholarly research article in a peer-reviewed academic journal: Schober, Adrian (2007). "The Thoughts in Your Head": The Pedophile as ‘Other’ in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 35(2007): 134-142. (Also see Whiteness studies and Critical race theory for the general background that the concept of the Other derives from; in short, it may be translated as, "Everything that we as members of hegemonical, ethnocentric Western culture can't admit about ourselves and hence project upon marginalized minorites", also see In-group favoritism.) That source may also finally resolve the edit war that has ravaged the article here for years (resulting in constant, ongoing deletion of the film's ending in the plot section as being "speculative OR") and that the above section on this talkpage relates to.

Yet another scholarly research article (Janssen, Diederik F., MD (2010). Requiem for a Blue-Balled Predator) referencing the above source calls "Sidney Lumet's 1972 film The Offence [...] a visionary parable warning that the escalating sense of legitimacy in mocking, hunting down, sentencing, incarcerating, exiling, putting-on-registries, and searching-by-zip-code may be symptomatic of a deep-seated necessity of imaging outside what otherwise would have had to be feared to rage within". --87.151.31.171 (talk) 02:55, 3 July 2012 (UTC)