I recently saw a tweet in favor of spoilers that said the following:
I'm extremely pro-spoilers, personally. If my enjoyment of a thing hinges on a twist, I generally doubt I'll like it much afterward. If I know what's coming but getting there is the best part, that's the good stuff. Tell me how it ends.
…and I, respectfully, dissent.
I hate spoilers and avoid them like the plague - but I have a more expansive view of what constitutes a “spoiler” than the author of this tweet.
Pay close attention to the part that says “ If my enjoyment of a thing hinges on a twist” - which comes close to equating the concept of a spoiler with the concept of a “twist.” For me, a “twist,” in and of itself, is a risky storytelling move, and should be deployed only with assurance and mastery. I agree with the view that any story that hinges on a “twist” is generally something I doubt I’ll enjoy. Most twists fail to surprise.
Take, for example, the contemporary storyteller most associated with “twist endings” - M. Night Shyamalan. As he’s demonstrated, time and again, if the only virtue of a film is to attempt to surprise you with a twist - then most of the time, that experience is going to be hollow. Structuring an entire work around one big surprise is a huge risk - one often doomed to failure.
But “twists” aren’t the only thing that can be spoiled.
Everything in a story is a potential spoiler.
Storytelling itself is the anti-spoiler art form. Storytelling, essentially, is the selective and purposeful conveying of information in a specific sequence. Those pieces of information were designed to be conveyed at a precise moment for a reason. Once those choices are taken from the storyteller and instead conveyed by Joe Marketer or Random Audience Guy, the heart of the work itself is placed in peril - sometimes mortally so.
That’s why storytellers should be as involved with advertising campaigns as possible. There’s a fundamental tension between the need to attract a potential audience member but the artist’s need to control the level of knowledge going in - and far too often, the storytelling is sacrificed on the altar of marketing.
When I enter the world of a story, I want as little information as possible. “Twists” aren’t the only storytelling choices that can diminish an experience. Does a work play into genre tropes or intentionally subvert them? How is it structured? Does this work include a cameo? If there is a twist, is it merely a spin on an audience expectation, or is it something that radically alters ones’ viewing experience?
Spoiler Type 1: Fundamental alterations of perception
There’ve been a handful of modern stories that have accomplished shocking surprises toward the end of the story that would’ve fundamentally altered an audiences’s perception of the entirety of the events leading up to that moment of revelation, had they been known in advance. Take examples of films like Fight Club, Sixth Sense, Being There - or in comics, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese.
Whether or not a given audience member or reader claims they are above such manipulations by the creators of those works, it is clear that those works are intentionally structured to present one conception of reality and then radically alter that concept, forcing audiences to revisit everything they’ve seen before and experience it from a new perspective. The film Fight Club literally re-caps many of the key moments of the film prior to its big revelation and re-presents them in a new context. The experience of someone who knows the surprise in these kinds of narrative choices beforehand is fundamentally different from an audience member who was in the dark, and, it’s clear that the creators of those works invested great pains to conceal those revelations until a specific moment for maximum impact. Anyone who unfortunately had those films spoiled for them did not see the film that the creators intended. They saw something else.
These are the hardest to pull off and are the most easily ruined - many modern attempts at these kinds of shock-endings are ruined by the trailers advertising the movies. Heck, even knowing that there is a twist in the first place often telegraphs the surprise in advance. To tell someone there’s a big twist, without revealing said twist, is in itself a potential experience-ruiner.
Spoiler Type 1A : a major surprise that you’re invited to solve as a reader or audience member
The previous type is entirely distinct from a well-constructed cumulative surprise revelation that the author has intentionally crafted in ways that could be discovered at several different points with one’s engagement with the material: for example, the true lineage of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. George R.R. Martin not only provided enough clues to give the answer before it was fully revealed - he used that very piece of information to judge whether or not to entrust his material to the television showrunners. He asked them who they thought what character was the answer to that mystery - and they got it right. For that story, it’s not as important to have that fundamental information revealed simultaneous to the character who discovers it - because for that specific moment, one key aspect of the revelation is the drama inherent in witnessing that revelation for that character, from their viewpoint, as their worldview is shattered and remade anew. Whether you figured it out after book one, book two, season one, season five, or right at the moment the majority of the world found out - isn’t important - but the fact that you discovered it yourself, through experiencing the story itself, and not some marketer, reviewer, or 4chan digital douchebag - is the crucial difference. There’s a vast difference between figuring something out and having it confirmed by the text - as opposed to having a theory confirmed by an Internet leak, or worse, a hive-mind deduction pretending to be a leak.
Spoiler Type 2: Genre adherence or subversion
I once read an authoritative analysis of the gangster genre as research for a project, and one of the core truths of the genre, according to this study, is that you cannot encounter the gangster protagonist before they’ve turned against the law. You must always be introduced to them after they’ve chosen the life of crime. This was written before Breaking Bad, obviously, which subverted this trope with excellent results. Knowing in advance that the protagonist is going to become a bad guy is not going to spoil the experience - it’s in the title. But many of the brilliant surprises in the show - what Walter White does to his partner’s girlfriend, what happens when he visits Tuco’s base of operations, the closing note of the episode “Half Measures” - just to name a few - if I’d known them before watching them, those pivotal moments of the series would be vastly diminished with foreknowledge - probably ruined.
Even though it’s in the title, I was among one of the lucky few who saw Breaking Bad from the beginning - and going in, I had no idea that this genre trope was being subverted. For those of us in the dark, the title could’ve just referred to the protagonist’s bad luck streak. All I knew was it was a drama with a pilot with good reviews and an amazing comedic actor in the lead role. That Mr. Chips would become Scarface was a heck of a genre subversion - which was so much more impactful having it experienced fresh without expectations.
Well-crafted surprise endings for episodes or characters aren’t the only things that can be ruined by foreknowledge.
Spoiler Type 3: Deep structural spoilers
Take, for example, a very popular show that’s in the middle of a season right now - . This show is technically part of a “franchise” so there are many known characters, and it takes place in a timeline before other known events. The fates of most of its main characters are already known or implied. But this show has been chosen to be structured in very surprising ways. It’s almost four different shows in one.
First, there’s the obvious angle that 99% of audiences would expect. But then there’s a whole other, deeper backstory, which is explored at length. And then that backstory has a shocking conclusion. It’s not a “twist” but a natural progression of the story’s escalating stakes. Witnessing the longer arc of that backstory’s conclusion was one of the most jaw-dropping, hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck pieces of cinematic entertainment I’ve ever experienced - in film or television. And yet, this event occurs midway through the lifespan of this show. So, what happens next?
It evolves and becomes, essentially, an entirely different show. Then a couple seasons later, another, naturally-progressed seismic shift in the world’s status quo occurs. And so on. Audiences who get to experience these shifts and surprises in the natural course of storytelling have a much richer experience. And then, very recently, that show transmitted an episode that was so audacious and bold - which made a specific creative choice in chronology and format - a choice that was thrilling to behold, but could’ve easily been spoiled in the first half of a sentence of a review. Would the entire episode have been “ruined”? Of course not. But a significant element of its enjoyment, the level of commitment to that bold choice, would’ve been destroyed by foreknowledge. I am so glad I was unspoiled.
And another show - one that’s criminally underrated and doesn’t have the audience it deserves - is run by a head writer who has a lot of experience in the genre of this current show - it’s what they’re known for. But on this show, the surprises come in major structural changes. In the middle of seasons, between episodes or even within episodes - the status quo undergoes a massive change and the show skips ahead a number of years. Years! Actors are aged up, sets changed, dynamics changed, power structures inverted or crushed - all within the blink of an eye. Each time the show has done it has been a brave artistic act - just when they’re firing on all cylinders and everything is culminating to a brilliant moment - instead of lingering, the show just moves on - it has a broader story to tell, and the usual expectations of time, space, sets, actors, relationships, are masterfully set aside in favor of the greater narrative.
Spoiler Type 4: Cameos
Deep structural spoilers are more elusive but huge in impact- what about the near-opposite: the superficial, obvious yet fleeting ones - cameos? Cameo-spoilers are the clearest kind of spoiler to me, because, even though they’re low-impact, the only value of a cameo is its surprise. Once that’s gone, the entire point of having a cameo is negated. They don’t ruin the overall film or tv show, but they totally ruin the cameo itself. Reporting a cameo in advance, or listing it in a review, is a destructive act, providing no value to the landscape of cultural criticism, and robs the only tiny bit of entertainment that choice would bring.
In defense of avoiding spoilers - and praising those creators who craft “un-spoilable” stories
The author of the original tweet that inspired this response is correct in one sense - the more susceptible a given narrative is to being diminished by a spoiler, often, it’s a potentially weaker narrative overall. Taking the modern media ecosystem and the pernicious influence of social media on the experiences of collective cultural entertainment into account when constructing narratives is a useful skill for creators to bring into their storytelling toolkit.
That’s perhaps a major factor in the joys I’ve had in watching films constructed in ways to be spoiler-proof. The films Burning and Drive My Car, both adapted by works from Haruki Murakami, take organic, meandering paths, filled with the unpredictability of life itself. What they choose to focus on, and when they choose to focus those events, is refreshing and thrilling. Every minute of those films had me on the edge of my seat, unable to predict where they were going next. (Some audiences apparently aren’t ready for this: when the credits started rolling at my screening of Burning, a woman seated next to me turned and asked, “what was that?”)
Leos Carax’s films Holy Motors and Annette defy any notion of predictability in its narrative structure. As you are experiencing them, they seem almost anti-structure: intentionally zigging and zagging in ways designed to ensure maximum surprise and originality. Julia Ducournau’s Titane was, from frame the first to frame the last, an unspooling of surprises and shocks. A genuine “what the fuck was that” masterpiece.
And my favorite film of the year thus far, Everything Everywhere All At Once, also has that quality of unpredictability - watching that film was the cinemagoing equivalent of soaring like an eagle -weightless and free, wandering anywhere it wanted to go.
But these films, as well-crafted and original as they are, are not inherently immune to being spoiled because of the brilliance of how they were crafted. Many stories that are easier to spoil, ones which rely heavily on genre tropes and classic elements, are that way because audiences are much experienced with the peaks and valleys of those archetypes. These blindingly original films could’ve been spoiled too: I strongly suspect that had I been given Cliff Notes’ capsule summaries of these recent surprising films, my experience of them would be drained of all the joy of discovery, and turn them into inert objects: less engaging, less immersive, less effective.
The detachment of pro-spoiler audiences
Fundamentally, it comes down to a choice about how one approaches the experience of a narrative. There are those of us who are willing to surrender to a given work - to get wrapped up in it - and let our emotions be played with - and in return for that state of vulnerability, we ask that the storytellers use that power wisely and with care, and that marketers and our fellow audience members let us come to the material on our own terms.
The pro-spoiler pose adopts a stance that suggests I’m above those emotional swings, I’m here perceiving these works from afar, high upon my Olympian perch with my spreadsheet to score this work on a series of objective criteria, so, of course, spoilers aren’t going to affect my omniscient vantage point - I’m just here, with Vulcan detachment, to observe and calculate.
Fuck that. Let me immerse into some place I’ve never been, with people I’ve never met, situations I’ve never encountered, leave my heart and mind open to the element of surprise. And most of all, give me that sense of wonder when those surprises impact in full.