My Take on Spoilers

These days, when social media have connected us, given each of us an opportunity to share our opinions or news we've discovered (this blog being an example,) there's a lot of discourse on the nature of "spoilers."

Stories having twists and turns is a device as old as stories themselves. Humans have always wanted to find some new clever spin on an existing structure, and so reversals gave birth to the true twist. But even if you don't have the kind of twist that recontextualizes everything that came before it, the fact is that stories, even those where we know roughly how they will end, can still surprise us. We might know how something is going to go but not want it to be a certainty until we've seen it for ourselves.

I still haven't seen Avengers: Endgame.

In all honesty, I think I'm less spoiler-conscious than a lot of people. I think part of the reason for this is that I get very emotionally invested in the stories I see/read/hear. If, for example, a character who we begin very much liking in a movie is revealed to be an evil villain all along, it can sometimes allow us to create a bit of a defense against that sort of betrayal. Similarly, if a major character is going to die, knowing ahead of time allows us to create a bit of emotional distance from the situation so that when it happens, we can feel less shocked and hurt.

Of course, the point of art (well, that's a huge subject of debate, but here's my take) is to evoke an emotional response. Yes, none of the people we've seen killed on Game of Thrones has actually died (or at least didn't die that way, I know there are at least a couple members of the cast who have died either of old age or cancer) but the exercise of engaging with a piece of art is to invest emotionally as if the characters were real. There's no real guy named Jon Snow (actually, there almost certainly is, but he's probably not anything like the character Kit Harrington plays) and yet we can worry for the Jon Snow who grew up as a bastard in Winterfell in the same way we'd worry for a cousin who's been shipped off to Iraq.

There is safety, of course, in fiction. Indeed, the concept of catharsis as a reason for watching drama (particularly tragedy) is that we get to experience that visceral, emotional pain but then leave the pain behind on the seat in the theater or between the covers of the book we just read.

The point, then, of these last few paragraphs, is to say that art can evoke very strong emotions, and sometimes those emotions get very intense. (I should also point out that they can trigger memories of real-life emotional pain sometimes as well. After my mom died in 2017, a few months later I was feeling sad and decided to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, a famously fun movie, only to forget that the very first scene is of its main character watching his mother die of cancer. To be honest, the absurdity of how on-the-nose that was for what I was dealing with made me laugh.)

Because that emotional response can be intense, sometimes spoilers can make it easier to watch a movie. Frankly, I felt I could enjoy Get Out more knowing the twists, because I was able to intellectualize it a bit more and admire the craftsmanship - which, as I said earlier in this blog, was masterful.

Indeed, Bertolt Brecht came up with a philosophy of drama that intentionally alienated the audience from the emotional aspects of his characters, drawing attention to the artifice of the work.

But a lot of people do not like spoilers. And I will defend that point of view as well.

The way I see it, a work of art need not be ephemeral. Yes, some people view the ephemeral as having value - liking works that you can only experience once, or that change each time you view it. Indeed, I would argue that each time you see a movie, for example, the experience is somewhat different, both because of external factors as well as the fact that you've seen the movie before.

I'd further suggest that if you watch a movie several times, each time the experience is less different than the one before it. Watching Star Wars with my sister (who had somehow not seen the original movies) I was shocked to find that, even over a decade since I last watched them, I could basically say every line before it was spoken, as I had seen them so many times as a kid (I didn't, of course, because that would have been incredibly annoying.)

What this means, then, is that the first time you see any movie, it's a unique experience. Frankly, even with spoilers, you'll still be seeing shots and scenes you've heard about and now actually be able to understand their nature for the first time (and even with a lot of spoilers, you're probably not going to know every beat of every scene.)

That first viewing is not necessarily going to be your best viewing (though obviously, most movies you're probably only going to see once) but it is a unique one. And even if you'll enjoy a movie more after you already know what the big twists and turns it's building to are, the viewing of that movie in which you don't know them is a unique experience.

So I do not begrudge viewers who want to get that first experience of the movie fresh.

Now, when it comes specifically to Endgame (can you tell I'm thinking about it a lot knowing I don't get to see it until Thursday?) it's kind of funny, because there are some spoilers that are just in the nature of knowing what a movie like this demands.

Infinity War's ending, in a vacuum, was incredibly bleak, but the fact that the MCU is such a massive and continuing franchise, and the fact that we already know new Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Spiderman, and I think Doctor Strange movies are coming, not to mention that I could never imagine Disney (or Marvel) to allow such a dark ending to remain in effect, suggests that Endgame has to find a way to reverse what happened. That's before we get to the heavy foreshadowing that this is all part of the plan - the fact that Doctor Strange claimed he saw only one version of events in which they succeeded and then gave the Time Stone to save a single person's life: you knew that this had to be part of that version.

The question is what we lose along the way. Basically, which of these characters with whom we've spent the last eleven years is going to wind up paying the ultimate price to save the universe.

I have my theories, but even though I think this is going to be one of those movies where knowing its trajectory might make it more fun, I do actually want to have that unique, first viewing experience.

So far, I haven't gotten any really firm spoilers. So let's try to keep it up.