People are still talking about Star Trek Into Darkness which is both good and bad news for Paramount. Good because it’s still rattling around in people’s brains after they see it, instead of sliding off their frontal lobe like a fried egg from a teflon-coated pan. Bad because some are still talking because the writer and director let their gross, oogy sides spill onto the screen just a little bit.
A lot of the discussion is happening in hushed film-geek huddles, because of the spoilers, secrets, and twists. Darkness hinges on two different “gotcha” moments; one that wasn’t even mentioned at all in the marketing, and one that was the main focal point, like a tablecloth tossed over an elephant, with J.J. Abrams stopping short of wearing a candy-striped jacket and straw hat, shouting through a road-cone, “Hey, pay your $12.50 to take a guess at what this elephant-shaped thing might be!”
I did not have to play that game, because I’d had the “mystery” spoiled for me. And I wasn’t all that mad about it – but the people who knew I’d been spoiled were. A similar gasping sadness occurred during a conversation about the movie Seven, a film I love, but a film I consider responsible (along with The Usual Suspects) for kicking off an era of film in which scripts lived or died by whether it contained The Twist.
(Eventually, the king of that era, M. Night Shyamalan, ineptly murdered The Twist as the most viable form of cinematic storytelling, but not before a large number of moviegoers were trained to watch movies as a competition first and foremost, a contest to see if you could outsmart the movie or vice versa. One of the more poisonous side-effects of this short-lived era was the rise of spoilerphobia as we currently know it.)
Anyway, we started talking about the phenomena of The Twist, and this guy brought up Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense after I brought up Usual Suspects. We compared how all these films were constructed, how meticulous the storytelling was – you know, all the stuff people talk about after a life of substituting legitimate emotional growth and experience for renting tapes at Videoland. I mentioned that I knew The Twist before seeing Sixth Sense. Dude seemed genuinely upset for me, gave me a sad look, and was like “Man, I’m sorry.”
I was confused. It’s not like knowing ruined the movie for me. There’s a study from 2011 suggesting I wasn’t even all that weird to feel that way. (Warning – that link has a huge spoiler for Harry Potter in it). In fact, my appreciation of the film and his were, so far as I could tell, roughly the same; I might have actually liked it a little bit better. The only difference was that I knew about the twist heading in.
So how big is that difference, for you?
Obviously, for me, it’s not a huge gulf, because I still really enjoyed and appreciated the movie. But for him, he seemed unable to understand how I could still like it if I knew what was going to happen before it happened.
I guess for me, it’s because a movie is way more than it’s plot. Here’s the best way I can put it:
How > Why > What
How things happen is a little more important than why it happened, which is way more important than what happened. That’s just how my head is wired to consume stories. Character and character motivation is more important than plotting. Setting and world-building is more important than story progression.
I’m not saying any of those aspects are unimportant. They’re all very much important. Would I have liked Usual Suspects less if I’d known about its twist? It’s possible. But I loved the movie on the second watch, not the first. So I’m not sure if being spoiled would have REALLY hurt the movie for me, because being spoiled wouldn’t have changed how well made it was, how well acted it was, how fine tuned the pacing was. All those things can be appreciated even if you know exactly where the plot is going.
Here’s another example: I’ve never read the Song of Ice and Fire books by George R.R. Martin. My only knowledge of that universe is coming via Game of Thrones. And about 3 weeks ago, through no fault of my own, I learned what a Red Wedding is. I think I’m supposed to be disappointed and angered by this revelation, but I’m not, really. In fact, it might be increasing my anticipation. But telling friends who read the books that this detail was spoiled resulted in a reaction more appropriate to hearing someone had run over the family pug.
These are some of the movies that I’ve had spoiled for me before I saw them, not counting literary adaptations of books I’d already read:
Chinatown
The Sixth Sense
Fight Club
Twelve Monkeys
Citizen Kane
Brazil
I love pretty much every single movie on that list, and have since my first viewing of them.
That’s not to say there aren’t times I’ve had a movie spoiled and gone “C’mon, man!” Especially when it comes to movies (say, Memento) whose entire structure is to be a puzzle box: When the plotting is 100% the main focus of the story, having that aspect spoiled will probably diminish that first viewing. And don’t mistake me for advocating that people toss spoilers in a conversation like a bunch of ’50s-era juvenile delinquents chucking piss-filled water balloons at your anticipation levels.
But if I’m being honest, I can’t think of a single time where knowing what was going to happen in the movie has actually affected my enjoyment of the movie. For me, the sanctity of the first viewing is a phenomenon that kind of slides off me. It’s important – but it’s not that important. Not in the face of all the other aspects of storytelling beside just the plot. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if people’s (over) reactions to potentially being “spoiled” are even really examined, or if it’s just accepted as axiomatic. I guess when it gets down to it, I don’t value the initial thrill of the surprise as much as I do the more lasting satisfaction of well-tuned machinations that make the surprise possible. Surprise is a bonus for me, it’s never the primary concern in the storytelling.
But that’s me. What about you? You’ve been spoiled; everyone has. Did it cause you to dislike a movie you would have otherwise liked? What order do you put your Why, How, and What? When did that order fall into place for you, and why did you come to consume your stories the way you do?
I hope to god that one day people will stop filling with rage when they hear a spoiler. I know The Twist going into 50% of the things I see and it has absolutely no bearing on my enjoyment of any given film.
I feel that if your enjoyment of a movie or film or any other piece of media is predicated mostly on whether or not its plot details are spoiled, then that’s indicative of much bigger problems in the first place. If a story doesn’t resonate unless it has to surprise me, then I can’t imagine it was well-told in the first place. Personally I don’t think spoilers really matter. I don’t actively seek out spoilers, but I don’t try to claw my own eyes out if I run into them. I can respect peoples’ wishes to not have things spoiled for them though.
A+, good read, Bobby.
I basically feel the same as you but I’m far less articulate.
The only “spoiler” I can’t deal with is when a movie is made out of a book I love (say, The Golden Compass) and I have to go out of my way to avoid everything associated with the film version. I don’t want those images to replace the wonderful ones I have in my head, that I experienced reading the book. Because they really do seem to take over in your brain — Frodo will always be Elijah Woods now.
I try to avoid spoilers for the most part, but it’s not really that big of a deal if they do happen. I found out the twist to The Crying Game before seeing it, and it didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the story. If anything, it gave me something to anticipate, which might have actually heightened my enjoyment. Plus, I’ll bet some people saw the twist as soon as they saw the character, so there’s that, too – the aspect of figuring out the twist ahead of time. Maybe that’s what people don’t want spoiled – they want to be able to say they saw it coming all on their own (a bit of media hubris).
The definitive answer would be “it depends”. The Crying game is a perfect example of a film that would be fantastic even without the twist, so having it spoiled doesn’t matter. When Karl Penn’s character left House, not having it spoiled made it a far more powerful and memorable moment (although you could certainly make the case that House wasn’t particularly good by then, and that being spoiled by knowing a spoiler is indicative of lower quality).
On the other hand, I don’t know of any movies / shows that have been improved by knowing the spoiler. So if there’s potential downside of telling people what’s going to happen, and there’s no conceivable upside, why would you do it?
I feel not being “spoiled” is incredibly important to me. I get what people are saying in that if a movie’s any good, it will hold up on repeat viewings, even after you know the twists. But you only ever have the first experience once. You only find out who Kaiser Soze, the Killer from Scream, or Benedict Cumberbatch is once. And, for me, that’s such a fun moment! Especially in a theater, when a sizable collection of people are reaching these same conclusions simultaneously.
Look, much to my dismay, I had a certain important death and perpetrator in Harry Potter spoiled for me. And I’m still very much a Harry Potter fan and very much enjoyed the book. But I was robbed of that “Is this really going to happen?!” moment, you know, that moment where you get chills and put the book down just to savor the moment and let the anticipation build. And I guess that’s what it boils down to. Anticipation, why would we rob ourselves of this very important aspect of storytelling? Would Christmas morning be half as exciting if all the presents were wrapped in cellophane?
And as a filmmaker myself, I feel it’s almost disrespectful to the creative team behind a movie who have spent (hopefully) a considerable amount of time fine tuning the reveals of their movie, to just not care and actively seek out spoilers.
I mean, if the “what” is so unimportant that it doesn’t matter if we know the outcome of a story before watching/reading/hearing it, why do we even both coming up with new stories? Let’s just keep pumping out remakes.
Most people who were paying attention had more or less accepted the inevitibility of the Khan reveal, even if it was never explicitly spoiled. Still, I didn’t appreciate The Mercury’s casual spoilage, I hadn’t yet seen the film and still wasn’t 100% there would really be an inevitable Khan reveal.
Movie “spoilers” never bother me. What does? When buttholes with special cable packages watch an east coast feed of a TV show then start tweeting about it a good few hours before it airs on this side of the country. It’s not the spoilers that rankle me so much as the ridiculous selfishness of their twitter performance.
I don’t care for seeing or hearing about plot elements before I view a film. Also if a trailer plays for a movie I am already sold on (Man of Steel for example), I just distract myself with my phone. As does the wife.
A good film should be a series of surprises. They can come in several forms, such as jokes we didn’t see coming, character choices we didn’t expect, clever battle strategy, intellectual insights, or surprising developments in the narrative. Either way, on watching a film, we should not know what will come next, not precisely. Each little surprise in a movie is a moment that absorbs us that much more: when a character unexpectedly does the right (or wrong) thing, we learn that much more about the character and that our preconceptions may have even been wrong; or when a character in a thriller is unexpectedly killed, we realize this cinematic world is more dangerous than we expected. Shoot, I think the Joker in The Dark Knight is such a great character because of all of his little surprises. These little moments make a film more absorbing.
I think the reason that spoilers for major events are not terribly devastating to most film goers is because they only spoil one or two of the surprises held in the plot. Things that are not generally spoiled are the arc of the characters, clever quotes, cool action scenes, or small but pivotal actions. Since any good film (hopefully) has several surprises, it can afford to lose one or two of them, because the rest of the narrative should still be surprising enough to be absorbing.
That said, I despise spoilers. The big twist or surprising development that everyone felt the need to reveal was intended by the filmmakers to communicate an extremely important message within the context of the film. By spoiling that major event outside of the film’s context, it seems to remove any invitation to consider the meaning of it. For example, finding out that Darth Vader is Luke’s father shatters Luke’s (and our’s) notion that Luke is absolutely good and infallible. We see that the potential for Luke to turn to the dark side is inside of him (as well as the potential for Vader to turn to the light side). This detail was spoiled for me long before I saw SW:ESB, and it was only recently that I reflected on what the scene meant in the context of what came before and after. I have often found that when a major scene is spoiled for me, I am removed from the narrative of the film and shocked back to reality as I recognize what was spoiled prior. This seems to disrupt my flow of the context of the film and I see the scene outside of the events, and it’s later that I have to go back and figure out what the scene is meant to convey (and not just feel shocked by it).
TL;DR: a good film should be a series of surprises. Although any good film should be able to hold up as an absorbing film with one or two of its large surprises spoiled, we are being robbed of the delivery of an important message within the context of the film.
If you don’t care whether you already know what’s going to happen in a film you’re about to see for the first time, your soul may already be dead.
Most of the movies I’ve grown to love have been put there not because of the twist, the the big reveal, or the climax, but for the subtle framework of hints and foreshadowing and just plain good build-up to that climax. I can appreciate that more and see the intricacy once I know what it’s leading to. The first viewing of a movie can be a different experience, but it certainly isn’t the definitive one.
I try to avoid reading reviews too carefully – just see if they like it, or how they rate it, then stop.
I prefer not to know anything, or as much of nothing as possible, going into a film.
Sure, the Twist is a gimmick in there, often blunt or stupid, but I think the film-maker would prefer would like you to see it fresh too.