I pit Spoiler Warnings

[GorillaMan]

OK, fair enough, you've seen a film or TV series that is yet to receive general worldwide release......or people may have videoed it and still be waiting to watch it.....

But a five-year-old film? Or a musical from god-knows-when (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...hreadid=232967)?

What next? Macbeth (spoliers).....The Resurrection spoilers.......grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[NoClueBoy]

I have an ex-GF who still hasn't seen Casablanca.

[Berkut]

It's not like spoiler boxes cost anything. There are some people who are behind on the movie watching. A little common courtesy goes a long way.

P.S. It's a cookbook.

[NoClueBoy]

The butler is Luke's father.

They blew it up.

She's a guy.

On the third day, He rose again.

[jackelope]

This is incredibly stupid. There's a first time for every movie you see.

Believe it or not, there are people who haven't seen every single film ever made. I, for example, haven't seen Treasure of the Sierra Madre, even though I'm a huge film nut and I consider a good weekend to be one during which I watch at least four movies. Does the fact that a film is old somehow lessen the impact of a surprise ending?

Or is it that you figure everyone's been exposed to spoilers elsewhere so there's no point in warning people here? This line of reasoning seems akin to "Everyone's going to die sooner or later, so murder is not wrong." (Though on an admittedly smaller scale.)

Sheesh.

And P.S.: I haven't seen South Pacific either; think we could have had a spoiler warning on that link?

[GorillaMan]

Lady Macbeth is a GUY?!?!??! WOW!!!!!

[eli_the_fanatic]

SPOILER:

Gollum bites the ring off his finger. Rosebud is a sled. They score the tying TD but miss the extra point. Eventually Rhet gets sick of her crap and leaves her. The crazy groundskeeper blows up the golf course, but the good guys win the tournament. He gets killed but comes back to life and flies off into the heavens. The butler did it.

[NoClueBoy]

Originally posted by eli_the_fanatic

SPOILER:

.... He gets killed but comes back to life and flies off into the heavens...

SPOILER:

Was that about Jesus or ET?

[jayjay]

The boat hits an iceberg and sinks.

[JeffB]

Originally posted by jayjay
The boat hits an iceberg and sinks.

Oh, great! I was going to buy the complete Love Boat series. Way to ruin it.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Bruce Willis is a ghost.

She has a dick.

She thinks he's really dead and he kills himself then he wakes up and sees her and he kills himself for real.

The killer is the little girl and the ring is the top of the well.

She dies at the end.

[eli_the_fanatic]

It's all a dream.

[KGS]

Beowulf dies.

I win.

[Captain Carrot]

She's not dead.

[jmizzou]

He dies. The neighbor did it.
He dies. The kid from earlier did it.
He dies. The General did it.
He dies. The Emporer did it.
He dies. The English did it.
He dies. The Germans did it.
He dies. The Russians did it.
He dies. The South did it.
She dies. He did it.

[eli_the_fanatic]

He doesn't die, but the other guy pretends he's him and dies in his place. The French did it.

[emekthian]

Beowulf dies.

You !@#$%! I freakin' learned Anglo-Saxon so I could read Beowulf, and now you spoil it by giving away the ending while I was halfway through.

On the third day, He rose again.

What!? I didn't even know He dies! I'm still on Matthew 5:7!

[shijinn]

they married and lived happily ever after..

[Crowbar of Irony +3]

Originally posted by jayjay
The boat hits an iceberg and sinks.

Poor Frodo! So much for passing into the west...

[CanvasShoes]

Well, my little sister still hasn't seen ET, and I hadn't seen "It's a Wonderful Life" until just a few years ago (I'm 44).

[Siege]

I should have known better than to open this thread. You see, I borrowed a videotape of Gone With the Wind from the library yesterday because I haven't seen it yet. Then I had to go and open eli_the_fanatic's spoiler box.

Oh, and because I can't resist:

Originally posted by shijinn
they married and lived happily ever after..

SPOILER:

. . . but not to each other.

CJ

[Already in Use]

The secret to Soylent's amazing sales figures and high regard among industry insiders? It's people. People make our company what it is and what it has been for the last five generations. So when your customers ask you what the secret to Soylent Green's rich flavor and hearty texture is, you'll know what to tell them.

Soylent Green is people.

[The Great Unwashed]

Did anybody see the one where the dog sacrifices its life to save its master from the zombie with the magic ring that can take our hero back in time to email the woman he is destined to fall in love with, but what he doesn't know is that everyone's been dead all along and only he can see them. And that's why the Nazis stole the diamonds to focus their laser beams on the alien invasion from the planet Zygote but it turns out the aliens are merely being friendly and had only popped by to see if anyone needed anything, like a cure for AIDS, or a cup of sugar, or maybe we hadn't invented perpetual ice-cubes yet?

Anyway, it turns out it was all a dream.

[Alma]

Wait, if you haven't yet watched South Pacific and were really, really keen on the suspenseful storyline, why would you open that thread anyway? Shouldn't there be a point after which a film works its way into public consumption that the onus is on you to not find out how it ends?

I guess I just don't fully understand the concept of the spoiler anyway. If finding out how a movie ends ruins the whole damn thing, then how good a movie could it be anyway? I knew Rosebud was a sled but I still found even the mystery in Citizen Kane fascinating.

[Alma]

Originally posted by jackelope
This line of reasoning seems akin to "Everyone's going to die sooner or later, so murder is not wrong." (Though on an admittedly smaller scale.)

And this is just silly. It's more akin to keeping Santa Claus a secret for children. I can see how it adds to their enjoyment of Christmas, but after a point, don't they have to grow up?

[John Mace]

Spoilers! Get yer Spoilers here!

[zephyrine]

There are no spoilers in real life. Anyone who finds out the unexpected ending from lack of spoilers on a message board is spending waaaaay too much time on the internet!

People talk about movies I've never seen all the time. I've read most of the book-of-the-movies anyway, so I know who did it. I don't watch movies to be surprised by the story, I watch them for the acting, the action... everything that makes a movie a MOVIE and not anything else. It's the same with books: if I'm reading it to find out what happens next, rather than to enjoy the writing, then I'm reading the wrong book.

I do find spoiler boxes incredibly seductive, though.

[fushj00mang]

She has a dick.

Please, please, please tell me this isn't Ace Ventura...

[Tusculan]

No, it's When Harry met Sally.

[Koffing]

Gilgamesh fails to rescue Enkidu from the underworld, returns to Uruk, realizes that the city itself is his immortality, and dies in peace.

[Governor Quinn]

The Gods come, preventing the suitors' relatives from avenging themselves.

[Cervaise]

The good guy kills the bad guy.

[NoClueBoy]

It's full of stars.

[Black Train Song]

Way to spoil the universe for me pal!

[Black Train Song]

Spoilers are cool. I feel extra cool when I read one.

They're good too because a particular thread (with a spoiler) might entice a person to see a movie they otherwise might not have. Ever think of that? huh? Well, did ya punk?

Of course that hasn't happened to me yet but I'm ignorant.

[Fish]

Yeah, it's all bein' nice and stuff to put spoiler boxes up, I gotta agree, but...

...sheesh.

I had people complaining when I would talk about Lord of the Rings back before the first film came out. Fuck, the book has been out for fifty years, if you haven't got around to reading it by now it's your own fault.

[jackelope]

Fish, are you aware that there are young people in the world who haven't read Lord of the Rings?

Originally posted by Alma
And this is just silly. It's more akin to keeping Santa Claus a secret for children. I can see how it adds to their enjoyment of Christmas, but after a point, don't they have to grow up?

What the hell kind of idiotic analogy is that? Are you saying that learning the Big Secret in Citizen Kane is some kind of "growing up" experience, and that people will figure it out on their own if no one tells them first?

People go to the movies to suspend disbelief for a couple hours. They want to see the film without prior knowledge of how it's going to end, because watching the story unfold is so much more enjoyable when they don't know what's coming up next. Granted, they know that the film is prewritten and the ending is predetermined, but that's the point of suspending disbelief: you allow yourself to pretend that it's actually happening right now, and you allow yourself to be surprised by what happens.

If people want to know ahead of time how the movie ends, fine; they can go find out. But you don't go walking around shouting plot spoilers to people who are standing in line about to see the movie--the technical term for people who do this is "assholes."

I've seen variations on this thread come up many times on the SDMB; why do so many people have such a fucking problem with basic courtesy to others? If you're going to give away a spoiler to a movie/book/whatever, just fucking say so ahead of time, so that people who don't want to know won't have to.

And by the way, the South Pacific link I mentioned earlier was the one in the OP, which doesn't identify what it's a link to.

[Lobsang]

I spit woolier porn-kings.

[Mangetout]

Originally posted by NoClueBoy

SPOILER:

Was that about Jesus or ET?

SPOILER:

Neo

[Max Torque]

Originally posted by jackelope
Fish, are you aware that there are young people in the world who haven't read Lord of the Rings?

I had someone bitch me out on this very board for saying "Gandalf lives" before The Two Towers was released, even though (as I pointed out to him) Gandalf was shown prominently in the promotional materials for the film. Evidently, he felt that Ian McKellan has nothing better to do than to go on talk shows and discuss how he isn't in an upcoming movie. How do you argue with a person like that?

[NoClueBoy]

Originally posted by Max Torque
How do you argue with a person like that?

Stick your hand under a faucet and turn the water on.

[Alma]

Originally posted by jackelope
Are you saying that learning the Big Secret in Citizen Kane is some kind of "growing up" experience, and that people will figure it out on their own if no one tells them first?

Forget it. You're so right, comparing spoilers to murder makes much more sense.

[jackelope]

Oh, please. I meant that spoilers are similar to murder only in that they both end something needlessly. Sorry if the logic flew too high.

[Alma]

Oh, it was "logic". Gotcha.

[Cervaise]

Originally posted by jackelope
They want to see the film without prior knowledge of how it's going to end

I'm going to nitpick this, in service of a larger goal.

People go to the movies (and see plays, and read novels, and watch television, and consume storytelling in general) for complex reasons. Certainly, it's true that a great ending can be a thrilling experience for an audience that isn't expecting it. Planet of the Apes, say, or Sixth Sense.

But from a much more abstract point of view, people do want to know how the story ends before they go into it. As my post above is meant to suggest, every action thriller ends with the good guy victorious and the bad guy dead. Every romantic comedy ends with the couple smooching happily ever after. Every courtroom suspenser ends with a stunning revelation before the jury. And so on. If they ended otherwise — if, say, the big fat Greeks held a wedding, and then the groom put cyanide in the bride's Tab in order to collect the insurance — sure, it would be a "twist" ending, but the audience would hate it as a violation of their expectations.

That's why Robert Zemeckis put the scenes of Tom Hanks having escaped the island in the last forty minutes of Cast Away into the trailers. He knew the audience wouldn't show up if they thought there was a risk this guy would die alone and abandoned on that little heap of sand. The audience for that movie went with the advance knowledge that it would be in some way comforting at the climax, and not a gratuitous dope slap.

To name another example, The Usual Suspects has a reputation based on its wild ending, but look at the way the movie is constructed (I know I've described this before on at least one other message board, but I'm not sure if I've explained it here, so if this is familiar, you can skim). In the first five minutes, we see what appears to be the aftermath of violence on a boat. A guy is lying wounded. Another guy approaches him. The first guy looks up, and responds with a defeated yet wry chuckle. The second guy sets off an explosion and flees. And all the while, there's an inexplicable cutaway to a pile of gear on the pier, from which somebody is apparently watching. The movie announces immediately what the audience can expect from its conclusion: It'll explain who these two people are, how they got on the boat, what happened on the boat, why the first guy laughs, why the second guy kills the first guy, and who's watching from the pier. And then it proceeds to do exactly that, deliberately and methodically, and winds up by answering all of the questions it establishes in the first couple of minutes. And then it goes past that point, after the audience thinks it's done. It fulfills everybody's expectations, and then it offers an extra zinger.

That's good structure, because it operates on a comprehensive and expert understanding of what the audience wants out of a movie: The audience wants to know what the ending will be. For example, we want to know that Good Guy will fight mano-a-mano with Bad Guy (and of course Good Guy will win). We may not know whether said fight will happen at the top of an oil derrick, or in the back of a speeding truck, or danging from the teats of a forty-story cow. The detail is irrelevant. The function of the scene as a resolution of the ultimate conflict, however, is obligatory.

What you're getting at with "letting the story unfold" is about those details, but you're missing the forest for the trees. If you are told in advance that The Fugitive will confront the power behind the One-Armed Man at a medical conference, and that by that time the Marshal will be on The Fugitive's side, having figured everything out, though The Fugitive doesn't know it yet, you could conceivably make a case for that as a Bad Spoiler (though I would argue with you; more in a moment). But if you are told that The Fugitive will confront his enemy and convince the authorities of his innocence and win his freedom, well — that's not just an Obvious Spoiler, one would have to be an idiot not to expect that from the trailers.

That's what I'm trying to make a distinction about: Audiences do not necessarily want to know the precise detail in how a story ends, but absolutely they want to know in general terms how it all winds up, so they feel comfortable that this will be a story they can enjoy. Note that I'm referring here to mainstream audiences, the sort of people who go to Armageddon knowing before they've even seen the movie that the good guys will blow up the asteroid at the end. Can you imagine how people would have reacted if the nuke had somehow failed to go off or do the job, and the big rock had creamed the planet, leaving a dozen guys in a space shuttle to stare at each other while they slowly suffocated to death? I might have thought that was a ballsy decision, because I've seen so many goddamn movies I can plot out the whole story after the first three or four minutes, and I enjoy being legitimately surprised. Most people, by contrast, do not enjoy this kind of surprise. The only surprise most people can tolerate is the answer to "how the good guy will win." They do not like being truly in doubt about whether the good guy will win.

Which brings me to my second, more important point: If it were true that the pleasure of a story is in watching it unfold without knowing where it's going, then nobody would ever watch a movie twice.

Clearly, this is emphatically not the case. Good movies draw viewers back for a second or a third viewing, sometimes in the cinema, more often on home video. Hell, the Lord of the Rings movies are earning some of their most devoted repeat audiences from people who have read the freakin' books and know exactly how everything comes out. Me, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark eight or nine times in the cinema back when I was eleven years old. I had every line practically memorized. What could I have been getting out of it?

And what do you get out of your favorite story? You know, the Jane Austen novel you re-read every year, or the movie you stop and watch whenever you happen across it on a cable channel, or that you put in the VCR or DVD player when you have a couple of hours to kill and need a pick-me-up. Maybe your favorite movie is a modern action classic, like Aliens. Maybe it's a drop-dead-funny comedy, like A Fish Called Wanda. Maybe it's a famous older movie, like Casablanca or City Lights, or something a little less well known, like Gunga Din. Whatever it is, you've seen it, more than once. You already know where the monster jumps out, or what the punchline is, or what the hero says before he surprises the apparently victorious villain with a last-second reversal.

And yet the story works anyway.

Why?

The pleasure, I believe, is not in experiencing a story for the first time. It's experiencing a good story, period. The first time or the fiftieth time, a good story is like magic. It draws us in and tricks us into following along as if we don't know anything, even though we do. Come on: think about how you'll ask one of your good friends to "tell that one you tell so well, you know, where the dog eats the entire pillow, it's such a good story." Doesn't matter that you know how it goes. You just want to hear a good story, again.

That's why the really good movies earn their longevity: not because they have good endings, necessarily, but because they're good stories. Sixth Sense has a killer ending, but it's worth looking at a second or a third time because there's more to it than just the wickedly clever twist (presuming you're not one of the increasing number of people to claim "oh yeah, I saw that coming a mile away"). It's a story about loss, about acceptance of grief, about how denying emotional injuries can trap someone in a vicious circle. For comparison, look at something like Basic, that military thriller from last year with Travolta in the lead. It's all about twists and keeping the audience off balance, but it doesn't have anything else to offer and in consequence it is a failure, both artistically and commercially. You can't just fool the audience. You have to tell a good story at the same time.

I am firmly of the belief that I could choose an obscure movie I know you haven't seen, one with an excellent story, and talk you through it in some detail, and then immediately show you the movie — and it would work for you despite the story being "spoiled." I could pick something like, say, Fitzcarraldo, a cult-fave movie not very many people have seen. I could lay out the whole plot, about the guy who wants to bring opera to the jungle and conceives a wild plan to drag a gigantic boat over a mountain. I could give you all the plot points, all of the setbacks and triumphs and, yes, even the ending. And then I would show it to you, and you'd be just as engaged by the movie as if you'd never seen it, and you'd be on the edge of your seat as the boat spirals out of control down the raging river at the end. I could show you Hal Hartley's Flirt, which tells a good story not just once but three times in succession in three different settings, with slight variations in each. I could even give you that story beforehand and the movie would still work as it does, pulling apart the storytelling experience for the audience such that you begin to understand just what it is you go to a story for.

Why have Shakespeare's plays retained their popularity for hundreds of years? Hell, why have the Greek plays survived for thousands? Go to any reasonably-sized city in the summer, and you will find a theater company doing one of these classics, or Harvey or An Inspector Calls or The Importance of Being Earnest or The Foreigner or any of a dozen other familiar cash-cow productions. No opera company in the world would try to put together a season of newly composed productions (assuming they could even find four or five full-length new operas composed in a single year). No, they have to mostly perform Tosca or Don Giovanni or Aida or freakin' La Boheme for the hundred-and-ninety-bazillionth time, just in order to schedule one halfway risky piece like Pelleas et Melisande or maybe Britten's Peter Grimes or something like that, a production they're doing for artistic fulfillment even though they know they're going to wind up with half-empty houses most of the time.

The point of all this is simple: I don't think people experience and enjoy storytelling for the reason you assert. I don't think spoilers are that big a deal. Good stories work because they're good stories. Movies that require ignorance on the part of the audience to work just one time (c.f. this past summer's Identity) aren't worth sitting through, in my opinion. I respect people's wishes to remain pristine, and I don't give away plot details when I discuss films or write my reviews; but at the same time I will not let an unfounded assertion about stories working primarily because they are unknown pass by without emphatic effort at refuting the idea.

(Postscript: I apologize for singling you out for this enormously long rant; I didn't mean to do that. This has been building up for many weeks, now, and your post was just the trigger. This missive is intended for a much wider audience than just you, so I'm sorry if it seems like I targeted you unfairly.)

[Black Train Song]

Can you imagine how people would have reacted if the nuke had somehow failed to go off or do the job, and the big rock had creamed the planet, leaving a dozen guys in a space shuttle to stare at each other while they slowly suffocated to death?

...That would have been a great ending. I mean that honestly. I love when an ending pisses people off.

Point well taken BUT watching Sixth sense for the second or third time is so much fun, partly because you have new knowledge that you didn't have the first time and get to go back and see the opportunities you missed the first time around. You get to piece together why you let yourself get duped for two hours.

Cast away , to me does have a twist at the end. Getting off the island wasn't the end of the story.

All that being said, I agree but if I hadn't seen Sixth sense or Castaway I'd appreciate having spoilers. That's just me.

Also, it's not as if you need some special can opener to read a spoiler. It's optional.

[Fish]

Originally posted by jackelope
Fish, are you aware that there are young people in the world who haven't read Lord of the Rings?What the hell kind of idiotic analogy is that?

Call it what you like, but when I've tried for years to engage that particular complainer's interest in LOTR, because he says he doesn't like those books and can't read them and they're boring and badly written, then he complains about spoilers simply because his lazy ass can watch them on video, yes, I have a problem with needing a spoiler box for that. This person was not a helpless four-year-old, either, who had only recently learned the miracle of the printed page; he was a mid-twenties college student who had read numerous other works in the same genre but never tackled LOTR because he didn't like it.

[Bosstone]

I just wanted to note how accurate Cervaise's post is. People definitely have preconceived ideas about movies; they don't necessarily watch for a good ending, they watch to be entertained, and much of the entertainment is in the details. I thought of this thread after watching The Princess Bride today for the millionth time. Not only do I adore that movie and never tire of watching it despite knowing the script word for word, but it itself acknowledges those preconceptions during the scenes with the grandfather and boy. I'd go into detail, but I'll err on the side of caution for those who haven't seen that movie yet.