Talk:Bye Bye Braverman
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I write here to explain my reversion of MovieMadness' edit removing all of my changes without discussion, including my entire section on literary allusions, on the grounds that it is "POV" and about the book rather than the movie. There is no prohibition on Wikipedia against articles being written with a point of view -- indeed, it is impossible to see how they could be written without one -- as long as the point of view is neutral. Since the movie is hardly controversial, I believe that the appropriate standard for inclusion in the article is whether understanding of the movie is significantly aided. This is an encyclopedia article about the movie, not a movie review.
The book is far less well known than the movie, and the book has no separate article. Without the movie, the book quite probably would be entirely forgotten. All of the removed sections about the book specifically noted only the important differences between the book and the movie, which are more appropriate for the article about the movie in any case. The movie does closely follow the book, but this removed passage is about a key difference: "The character Leslie Braverman never actually appears in the movie, by flashback or otherwise, and is known only through descriptions and references to him by other characters. (Braverman's coffin is shown briefly, with him presumably inside, at the cemetery.) While Braverman is dead from the outset in both the book and the movie, there are occasions in the book but not the movie where his own words are quoted, often at considerable length as from a letter."
It's ridiculous, in my opinion, to remove on POV grounds an observation that the running discussion among the characters takes place while "maintaining a strongly Jewish comedic tone emphasizing irony and sarcasm." The characters say that they are Jewish, they attend a Jewish funeral where the rabbi is played by iconic Jewish comedian Alan King, they repeatedly discuss being Jewish, they use Yiddish vocabulary, and they constantly introspect about all of this. Jewishness is a central and emphatic theme here.
Literary allusions are the core of Bye Bye Braverman. The relationship to the works of James Joyce is essential to understanding either the book or the movie. The removed passages about connections with Joyce and Isaac Rosenfeld are correctly cited and sourced, and should remain in the article. While subject to dispute like any substantive academic question, the proper way to handle disagreement would be to cite opposing views if they could be found (although I don't know of any), not to hide legitimate matters from the reader of an encyclopedic article.
One minor edit to my passage that the characters agree to meet "at Sheridan Square, a Greenwich Village landmark," which was changed to just "in Greenwich Village." The meeting place in the movie is the clearly recognizable and distinct Christopher Park, the accessible triangular park space whose most prominent feature is a statue of General Philip Sheridan, bounded by Christopher Street, Grove Street, and West 4th Street. Sheridan Square is the street that runs southeast from the Grove Street and West 4th Street corner of the park. The meeting place in the book is explicitly stated to be "Sheridan Square," which in the 1960s period would have been universally understood to mean Christopher Park. The Sheridan Square Public Viewing Garden, which is also triangular, is certainly not what is shown in the movie, as there are no gates in its fence.
If there is disagreement about these issues, please comment here in the discussion page and we can try to hash things out amicably.
