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Sunday, June 9, 2013

The Wonder of Not Being Spoiled

StarGazer



***THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD***
                For the following:

Psycho
Game of Thrones
Iron Man 3

        I hate spoilers with a burning, fiery passion. On a list of things I hate most in the world, spoilers are probably number three, right behind war and bigotry. Okay, well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration (my priorities aren’t that messed up), but let’s just say that I’m the kind of person who’ll cover my ears and start yelling “Lalalala” at the top of my lungs whenever someone starts talking about a movie or TV show episode that I haven’t seen yet.

        In this day and age, though, it’s impossible to avoid spoilers completely, especially if you’re an entertainment junkie like me. Between social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr that allow people to instantly share and dissect information, increasingly pervasive advertising campaigns and the general Internet Age mentality of “Tell me everything!” rather than “Surprise me!”, it has become easier to find out whatever you might want to know about a given movie, TV show, book etc., along with a bunch of stuff you don’t want to know or don’t care about. You can figure out whether something’s supposed to be good weeks – sometimes even months – before actually seeing it, thanks to film festivals and advanced screenings, and the sheer amount of coverage given to nearly every step of a major project’s development process, from casting rumors and tidbits about the plot or characters to publicity stills and on-set photos, has left little room for mystery. If you haven’t seen a movie in its first week of release or the latest TV episode within a day or so of when it first airs, going Internet-free – or at least shunning entertainment and social media websites – would be advisable. Had Hitchcock’s Psycho come out now, it’s hard to imagine that he would’ve been able to keep Janet Leigh’s sudden, first-act demise a secret the way he did when it was released in 1960.

         All of this makes it even more impressive when a piece of art or entertainment does actually manage to surprise audiences. Take, for instance, the penultimate episode in season three of HBO’s Game of Thrones, titled “The Rains of Castamere”. As someone who had devoured the A Song of Ice and Fire books years ago, I was both eagerly anticipating and quietly dreading this episode, which readers of the books knew would contain an event that came to define the series and traumatized nerds everywhere when A Storm of Swords was published in 2000. Known by the moniker “The Red Wedding” in canon, this event is so infamous and demanded so much secrecy that, while filming, the cast and crew referred to it only as the “Scene Which Shall Not Be Named”. What’s more, fans who had already been initiated into the horrors of the Red Wedding displayed some astounding dedication to keeping show-only newbies blissfully unaware of what was in store. Of course, there were exceptions, as has to be expected given that spoilers are a simple Google search away and there are always going to be some people who let a spoiler or two slip to a newbie, either in a deliberate jerk move or unwittingly. Still, the majority of readers played along, minimizing possible hints of the scene to coy winks and smirks.


        Why go through so much effort to keep this scene under wraps? Apart from the chance to feel smug and lord the extra knowledge over the newbies (ingeniously called the Unsullied in this beauty of a Tumblr post) and the collective, sadistic desire to make them suffer the same agonizing emotional gut-punch we readers felt, it’s a scene that really just must be experienced as spoiler-free as possible the first time. It was designed to shock and upend expectations by subverting familiar fantasy genre conventions. We’re so accustomed to these tropes (the traditionally heroic character/protagonist – usually white, male and fighting for a noble cause – must survive and ultimately triumph; weddings are happy celebrations; pivotal events must occur at the end of a story) that when they’re manipulated or completely ignored, it feels like the emotional equivalent of being hit by a bus. Besides, if everyone had even a general idea of what to expect going in, you don’t get reactions as glorious as these and these.

Evil bastard.

        This isn’t to say that the whole thing is utterly ruined if you know what’s going to happen ahead of time. In fact, the show tossed in some changes from the print version that shocked even readers. Besides the surprise factor, the Red Wedding sequence is simply a supremely effective piece of drama, thanks in large part to the slow-burn build-up of tension engineered by the show’s writers and directors and the actors’ masterful performances, particularly those of Michelle Fairley and David Bradley. Yet, there’s nothing quite like the first time. There’s a visceral immediacy to encountering something completely new, whether it’s a new movie or book or even a real-life incident (like, say, when you ride your first roller coaster or visit a new city or country), that fades with repetition and familiarity.

        To go along with the Red Wedding example, the first time I read that scene, I was absolutely floored and, like many others, wanted to toss the book across the room in a heartbroken rage, which I might’ve literally done had I not been on a bus with other people at the time. It seared itself into my brain and memory and changed the way I approach fiction forever, an invisible emotional scar that, to be honest, never fully healed and was only reopened by the TV show. This sounds super melodramatic, but I’m not even kidding. I probably need therapy. When I watched the television version, it still packed a significant emotional punch (let’s just say there were some tears), but I spent less time enjoying the ride, so to speak, and found myself focusing more on how they crafted the episode, on the foreshadowing and the ways they set viewers up for what was coming without giving anything away. What this comes down to is that, later on, you can analyze, dissect and glean more subtle details that you overlooked the first time, but initially, it’s about the pure sensation of what’s happening.

        Which is why spoilers suck so much. They affect not necessarily whether we enjoy something, though that can sometimes be the case, but rather how we enjoy it. For example, one of the best movie theater experiences I’ve ever had was when I first saw Inception. Thanks to trailers that were refreshingly enigmatic for a major blockbuster, I didn’t really know much about the film beyond its basic people-who-can-enter-dreams premise, so it was as close as I’ve ever been to seeing a movie in theaters blind. I’ll never forget the audience’s reaction to Nolan’s ending, the initial groans and gasps of surprise followed by a hearty round of applause, or how giddy I felt walking out afterwards. Although I still love the movie, without that air of mystery, repeat viewings haven’t had quite the same effect, and there are times when I wish I could wipe it from my memory just so that I could experience the whole thing anew. Like with the Red Wedding, the details, construction and flaws became more readily apparent, and it’s more difficult to get immersed in the story. By contrast, when I finally got around to watching The Sixth Sense, the end twist had already been spoiled for me (by an episode of Scrubs, no less). While I still thought it was good, and therefore showing that the movie isn’t completely dependent on the shock of a last-minute reveal the way such stories frequently can be, I never got to have that “Holy shit!” moment. You can only have one first time, and getting spoiled takes that away.

        However, the entertainment industry largely doesn’t seem to understand this. Aside from some rare exceptions like Nolan or J.J. Abrams, who are well-known enough to get away with uber-secrecy and not risk losing their audience, most filmmakers and artists in general can’t afford to not offer glimpses of their project in the hopes that people like what they see and come back for more, and as I theorized in an earlier blog post, the modern-day approach to marketing and advertisement seems to be that it’s best to tell everyone exactly what to expect so that there’s a smaller chance they’ll leave disappointed. Unfortunately, this leads to cases such as Iron Man 3, where a spoiler legitimately hurts the effectiveness of the work. In the trailer for that movie, there’s a shot of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts standing up in front of a wall of fire, her face twisted into an expression of vengeful fury. Perhaps designed to indulge Marvel’s avid base of fangirls (and, I suppose, the fanboys as well, seeing as she’s sporting nothing excepting a sports bra), this shot promises excitement and some righteous, badass girl power, which I always welcome, but in retrospect, considering its context within the movie, including it in the film’s pre-release promotional material was a bad idea. Essentially, the scene occurs at the story’s climax and features Tony Stark/Iron Man being unable to save Pepper from falling into a pit of flames and to her assumed death, but having seen the trailer, we already know that she survives and emerges ready to kick ass. The trailer segment is only a few seconds long, but that’s enough to utterly rob what should’ve been a suspenseful and gut-wrenching moment of any emotional potency.


Me to the ad geniuses stupid enough to include this in the trailer.
Seriously, why the fuck would you do that?

        There’s something wonderful, even magical about watching something unfold and not being able to predict every twist and turn. So, when I say I hate spoilers, it’s not because they inherently diminish the quality of a work or my ability to appreciate it, but rather, because they eliminate that process of discovery, that sense of mixed fear and anticipation that comes with facing the unknown. In that moment, before everything becomes known and thus clear and predictable, it seems as though anything could happen. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.   

                    
                      

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