It’s become a widely-accepted view that spoilers are a Bad Thing and should be avoided at all costs. Even if you’re the sort who enjoys them, you’re probably characterized as transgressive; even mean-spirited, trying to cheat the system or ruin it for everyone else. This perception originated as a perfectly reasonable notion — that people should be allowed to experience stories as they please, without having all the surprises and twists given away beforehand — but it has ballooned into a messy problem in its own right.
Allow me to explain. The concept of a spoiler seems fairly straightforward at first glance: something that reveals an unexpected element from the story, hence “spoiling” the experience of encountering it at its natural point in the narrative. We can all name the famous twists from our favorite movies, like Luke Skywalker’s parentage or the status of Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense (odd, isn’t it, that we all seem to know the twist but have trouble remembering the guy’s name? It’s Malcolm Crowe, in case you were wondering). And we can recall the moment when a twist is revealed — the startled gasps, the world flipping upside-down, that instant of total shock that can never be re-captured once you know the truth. It’s not fair to deprive someone of that experience; what motivation could there be other than pure mean-spiritedness?
Actually, there are other motives, but I’ll get to that in a moment. First I want to explore how the definition of a “spoiler” has expanded far beyond the occasional twist ending. With the Internet age, entire movies can be leaked before their release, and details about its plot will proliferate. Piracy is an entirely separate issue that I won’t address here, but it’s certainly complicated the attitude of movie studios toward their audiences. Avoiding spoilers is no longer just a matter of common courtesy. It has become an all-encompassing policy of absolute secrecy, to the point of legally-binding agreements. The studios aren’t being courteous. They’re terrified of losing money. If the whole movie plot has been leaked, no one will bother seeing it, right?
That’s absurd. This is a false equivalency between knowing the details of a story and actually experiencing the movie or book itself. First off, does anyone really debate whether to watch a film, or simply read its Wikipedia entry and consider it just as good an experience? That’s absurd on the very face of it. Secondly, a movie’s value is often measured in how re-watchable it is. That means that whatever twists it might contain are not going to carry the same effect as the first time, and yet people will happily watch The Empire Strikes Back more than once. (I suspect I’ve seen it more than fifty times myself. Never gets old.) I’m not particularly interested in a story whose only strength lies in the shock value of its twist.
The release of Avengers: Endgame was an enormous event; certainly one of the biggest I’ve observed in my lifetime. A whole series of posters highlighting each character and whether they were lost at the end of the previous film or not; promos all over the Internet; huge anticipation about the mere teaser trailer, let alone the film itself. And the trailers showed us…almost nothing. Barely a hint of the film’s plot, just tantalizing flashes carefully arranged to give away nothing that could possibly be construed as a spoiler.
I found it downright silly that they shied away from even the most basic features that a trailer can offer. Much of the film, as we finally discovered upon its release, took the form of time-travel capers. Which I believe would have been a perfectly acceptable detail to include in the promos. It doesn’t ruin the film; it doesn’t give away huge shocking spoilers. It just presents the framework of the story’s plot, like you might read on the back of a book when you’re trying to decide whether to buy it or not.
Now of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an extreme example, a franchise so popular that it hardly needs any promotional material at all. Slap a title on the screen, nothing more, and fans go wild. But I dislike the notion that such obviously manipulative marketing has been presented under the guise of “no spoilers!” when it’s really the overwrought precautions of a juggernaut studio’s legal team, looking to pack as many people into theater seats as possible. Perhaps the current quarantine, preventing such crowds, will lead to a significant change in the landscape of movie releases. Maybe we’ll finally let go of this ridiculous conception of “spoilers” that includes everything from the opening line to the cast list.
I am not advocating for the willy-nilly proliferation of spoilers. I do think there are plenty of trolls who delight in ruining for others the experience of watching a movie for the first time. However, there are some situations wherein an audience member might actually prefer to know the surprises beforehand. It all depends on our personal preferences. For some, the tension and suspense of a taut thriller is part of the fun; that constant edge-of-your seat uncertainty at what might be lurking around the next corner. For others, that’s a good recipe for a full-blown anxiety attack. In that case, there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking up the surprises beforehand. Why not, if reducing your anxiety actually improves your movie-watching experience? If the film is good enough, it can stand up even to a viewer who knows what’s coming.
I have no memory of being shocked about the ending of The Empire Strikes Back. I was born a year after it was released, and by the time I had any awareness of the Star Wars films (they were everywhere during my childhood, as any ’80s kid could tell you) it was common knowledge; a line that people quoted constantly. Did that ruin the film for me? Of course not. Sure, I like to imagine how I would have reacted if I had been old enough to experience it in 1980. But I don’t feel I’ve been deprived of some fundamental, essential element of the story. It’s more than a just a teetering tower of twists, sure to topple if you pull out one of them.
Not to mention that a hyper-awareness of spoilers can actually run counter to their intended purpose. Before 1980, no one was expecting shocking parentage twists in space opera sci-fi/fantasy films. Now it’s becoming something of a cliché, to the point that we’re all expecting something, even if we don’t know the details. The reason Luke’s shock is so impactful is because he, like all of us, had no question that he already knew his parentage. It wasn’t a deep dark secret that his mentors ominously promised to reveal to him someday. We weren’t anticipating anything, and that’s why the revelation was such a punch in the gut. And that’s why every attempt that Disney has made to recapture that shock has been a clumsy failure. I’ve never seen more hamfisted, clumsy attempts to draw interest in the Mysterious Hidden Secret Something. What a mess.
So I suppose my overall conclusion is that we need to take our stories just a little less seriously, and trust audiences to handle surprises according to their personal preferences. Shakespeare’s audiences all knew what was coming at the end of his tragedies, but they still happily watched them. And so we experience the best stories over and over and over again, not because of what happens in the story, but because of how well it’s told.
cynthiaailshie 