Forget it. You’re so right, comparing spoilers to murder makes much more sense.
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.
Oh, it was “logic”. Gotcha.
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.)
…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.
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.
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. 