***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.
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?
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