Spoilers Ahead, Full Speed!

I'm with you in the rant about spoilers.

But, dude, there aren't any unicorns in LotR. You are gunna lose street cred as a geek.

Here's the thing about spoilers: It's not the final outcome that matters, it's how you get there. If someone tells you, 'the cool part of the movie is when the Millenium Falcon flies into an asteroid only it's not an asteroid it's a GIANT SPACE WORM!' when you watch the movie you're not experiencing it as it happens, you're thinking, 'I'll bet this is where they fly into the giant space worm.' It's about the process of discovery and revealation. That might not be so important for Charlie's Angels 2, but it's important if you have something invested in the movie.

The ancient Greeks would regularly see "Oedipus Rex" and every time would think to themselves "I wonder what could cause such pestilence?" and "I wonder who killed his father?" and "I wonder who slept with his mother?" and then were shocked (shocked!) each time they found out. I think there's a difference between people who enjoy the trip and those who don't.

One could claim that your theory holds true for Hollywood mainstream movies but not always for indies from everywhere.

I was watching this cartoon late on Christmas Day (I guess it was for grown-ups because it was so late) where this old English gardner chap had no heart or will to say nay to abusing local mill owner who got the gardner to slave him. Which got the poor gardner to die (stormy night, lost boot and swampy moor had their share). And that's how it ended. Even though I had hoped with all my heart some revenge for the gardner and punishment for the stupid mill owner. Nope. Good guys lost.

Preach it, brother. Here's some desperately sought approval, right here. I can't stand the spoiler queens, because they insist on being virgin queens.

yeah, HWheel beat me to it. If a story is well written you will enjoy it regardless of whether you know the ending or not.

I would love to forward this to my boss who's a big time spoiler queen...but I won't.

What about a movie like Sixth Sense? That movie had me fooled the entire time, and I can't watch it a second time now because I know exactly the twist at the end. If someone had told me about the twist before I saw it for the first time, I'd be bummed. Having the sort of mind tweaking revelation unfold as those who made the movie intended was pretty fun.

Also, when it comes to Survivor, if you tell me who gets voted off before I've watched it on my TiVo, seriously, I'll punch you in the stomach.

For the most part, you're right. Indies may be a different story, but I rarely care if I know the gist of the story.

Surprised you're not getting any flack for the LOTR reality check -- y'know, the color-coding BS.

I'm an unabashed spoiler queen. I recently took someone (lovingly, he's a friend) to task for revealing a minor element of a movie soundtrack that I may or may not have noticed while watching the movie, even.

Owen has it right though. How do I live my life? By not knowing what's going to happen next in exacting detail. Yeah, I'm going to kick off some day, but how I reach the point of kicking off is what's enjoyable about life.

I'm big on experience and prefer to have my experiences as unsullied as possible so I can interpret them myself. I like the desconstruction and the conversation and they Hey, that part was great but that part sucked conversations, but I don't want to have someone else's interpretation colouring my view.

I know lots of people who like to know as much as they can about something (a book, movie, whatever) before experiencing it themselves, the added colour of other interpretations increases their enjoyment. Us spoiler queens, we just enjoy things differently.

"A movie is not what its about, but how it is about it." - Roger Ebert

Anil: It's interesting that the conclusion you reach about yourself ("enjoying the trip") is almost exactly the opposite of the one I would draw from this rant. To me, the piece comes off bored and petulant, the outburst of someone who views "surprise" as an intellectual failure and "experience" as a commodity.

If you really want the bad guys to win, then French film is your bag. Try, for instance, The Piano Player or Merci pour le Chocolat. I have been left scratching my head more times than I can count.

Did NYC invent spoiler queens? ;)

I love a good rant, though. I was laughing insanely while reading it. :D

Right ant wrong about Cold Mountain. Bad guys win, good guys lose, Bad Southerners get done in by good Southerners, Bad Yankees(all Yankees) are done in by good Southerners. What's so bad about slavery.

As a graduate of a prestigious film and television production department, where I was forced to be mentally tortured by failed screenwriters who taught the compulsory screenwriting courses all of us film majors had to take, I can attest to the fact that spoiler queens are just retards who have no concept of how the classic western narrative structure functions.

I'm sorry, but three act structure, story arc, archetypes (hero, villian, mentor), etc. are as old as greek tragedy and just as lame. Not only do the good guys always win, but they always have to leave the comfortable confines of their familiar life; learn or be given the tools they need to succeed by their mentor; suffer and succeed through a series of trials; finally do battle with the nemesis that has been dispatched by the villian to foil their quest; question their hopes and dreams for success in a moment of doubt; finally defeat the villain; encounter more trials of the body and spirit on the journey home and finally return to safety after having grown as a person. Only the names, faces and places change.

Anybody who thinks that Hollywood would take a $100 million chance on something else would be a naif who thinks that whatever movie their friends are talking about is somehow new and different, that it might break this mold and truly take them by surprise. Remember, Hollywood movies are primarily written by Angelinos - not the sharpest tools in the shed. To them, conformity is a measure of success.

Check out any book on screenwriting at your library and you'll see what I had to suffer through as an intellectual trying to join an idiot's club. Also, rent Adaptation, which comically tried to buck this trend only to embrace it at the end (which is probably why the movie did so badly amongst critics and theatergoers).

Anil Dash = Andy Rooney for the 21st Century.

Counterexamples (films with interesting enough turns and twists to not want them ruined by some smartass):

The Crying Game, No Way Out, Planet of the Apes, Citizen Kane, The Empire Strikes Back, The Ice Storm, Presumed Innocent, Chinatown, 12 Monkeys

There's at least one site devoted to ruining movies with endings interesting enough to not want to be spoiled: moviepooper.com.

And here's The Spoilers Game.

I couldn't have said it any better myself. I'll be trackbacking this entry because it deserves to be read by as many people as possible. Especially for LOTR fans who were freaking out about "spoilers" when the books have already been read more times than they can remember.

Anyone stating that they have a problem with spoil queens is way, way to full of him/herself.

Funny that you used Cold Mountain as an example. Spoiler: The "good guy" dies in the end, and he's a Southerner.

i kind of like knowing how movies end. i just saw cold mountain- i knew how it ended, and i liked it anyway. and this movie had a sad ending- i knew that, still enjoyed it a lot. knowing made the ending a lot less upsetting. and yeah, spoiler queens are irritating as hell- especially when the movie's based on a book.

You said:
Don't get me started on the fact that the "bad guys" are the brown people from the East who are riding elephants, carrying scimitars, and wearing turbans. The books were written by a British guy, let's not forget.

I say:
This is way off-topic but THANK YOU! I am sooooo hyper-aware of race that I thought that the meaning of the muck people was all in my imagination. Man, talk about one of the most racist comments I've seen thus far about war-mongering. Yeah, Tolkien could be figuratively speaking of the lower classes but that does not even help. These dirt people are lower class, breed easily and are well, dirt. Actually, in this story they're more like muck. It reminds me of the origin of the The N-word. It was originally used to describe the Irish, the original muck people of England, not the colored masses they were so fond of conquering. But if using dirt or to tack qualifiers as low to describe poor people is bad, to add the ethnic and then the racial element over that is, well, worse.

OK, now y'all go back on topic.

A correction on your post -- you are wrong about Cold Mountain.

For the Civil War, yes, the good guys win (obviously, b/c even tho Hollywood rewrites history, there are some things that just can't be rewritten unless it's a sci-fi or alt-hist movie).

However, in Cold Mountain, the good guys don't really win. The ending is actually really sad. And (surprise of the century) the movie apparently follows the book (so says my parents, who read the book a few years ago).

True, "spoiler queens" are a pain. And movies are often predictable. But, really, do you just not go to mainstream movies at all if you don't want anything predictable? Can't you just enjoy some of these things for what they're worth and not be a pretentious intellectual clod? I agree with your rant about spoiler queens regarding movies that have already been written and integrated into popular culture. However, there are some movies that I don't want to know the ending to before I see it (ie Sixth Sense). Sometimes, even mainstream movies are well-written and -directed.

Murder mysteries are the prototypical exception to the rule.
When 'Basic Instinct' was released, members of the gay community who objected to the film's portrayal of lesbians as sex-crazed ice-pick killers (because, let's face it, there are lesbians who are not sex-crazed) picketed cinemas revealing 'whodunnit' to cinemagoers. That was a bit of a nasty trick. OTOH, a movie that loses its charm if you know the ending isn't much of a movie anyway.

Still, I often wonder if I wouldn't have enjoyed The Truman Show much more if I hadn't known the Big Secret in advance. So I guess I am a bit of a spoiler queen.

My tip for spoiler queens (including myself): go see the bloody movie already, otherwise you have only yourself to blame.

I can attest to the fact that spoiler queens are just retards who have no concept of how the classic western narrative structure functions.

As has been said by a few people before your post (although the number of people telling Anil about Cold Mountain suggests most can't be bothered to read other comments, so I suppose you should be excused) it isn't the narrative spoiler queens are concerned with having ruined, it's the execution of that narrative.

Trust me, spoiler queens are just as aware of the 3-act archetype as anyone else. It may suprise you, but you don't actually need to go to film school to be aware of a theme that's repeated everyone. We're also aware of classic hero archetypes; it's obvious that for any would-be saviour with loved ones (families, mentors, close friends) those loved ones must die (Gladiator, Star Wars, The Road Warrior) to release the hero from external responsibilities.

It's obvious that in any romantic comedy A will meet B, A will do something stupid and lost B. A will do something sweet/charming to redeem him or herself with A. A and B live together happily.

It's not the structure that we care about being spoiled, it's the execution of the structure.

With regards specifically to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, this is a series of books that people have waited decades to see translated into film. Yes, we've all read the books, but where is Tom Bombadiel? When the fuck did Arwen become such a major player? What happened to all the songs and verse? Wasn't Gimli more than a one-line spewing orc-chopping machine?

Obviously certain elements of the story must be changed to work on film, and which changes are made dramatically affects our experience.

As a filmmaker yourself, what sort of audience would you prefer? One who wants to see the film the way you pieced it together, who wants to see YOUR message uncoloured by other peoples' interpretations, or would you rather have a group of people who have been told ahead of time that one of your actors is a little bit cardboardy in the 3rd act, or that because of some edits you made the story feels a little too disjointed in the first?

Having a good movie spoiled on any level, or even having seen it before doesn't necessarily detract greatly from enjoying the film and in fact I often enjoy movies the second time more because I'm able to pay more attention to the technical aspects.

It is, however, an entirely different experience than walking into a movie without knowing in too much detail how the classic narrative archetypes are going to be used.

Sometimes the good guys win, but in a way that you would hardly expect or believe. Sometimes "win" is not all wine and roses. Speaking of which, "American Beauty"...

while i fully understand the "classic western narrative structure" and blah blah blah, there are certain times when seeing the trailer to a specific movie or reading any reviews of an upcoming album can taint or discolor what could otherwise be a magical experience.

for the film Lost in Translation, for instance, i avoided reading any reviews or interviews with anyone involved, or watching any clips from the actual film because I knew I would be interested in seeing it. there are certain scenes and pieces of dialogue that should be experienced within the movie, as they happen in the narrative, and when you see these clips in the trailer or anywhere outside the film, completely out of context, while they are still clever they totally lose their full impact. and what a magnificent experience to witness these pieces of dialogue for the first time as they unfold in the actual narrative, and not "oh, this is where he says that clever thing."

as for music, i like listening to new albums with completely virgin ears, primarily because my reaction is usually so personal. and when i do read a review i have a hard time feeling or experiencing the music without waiting for the part on track 4 that the guy from Pitchfork totally hated. i like knowing that I really love an album because when i heard it for the first time my heart totally flip-flopped, not because I'm supposed to like it in order to be cool.

i suppose this makes me an annoying, ignorant American, but at least this way i can still get chills from time to time in a movie theater.

Amen. If all you care about is being surprised at the ending, you probably don't like movies very much, because you're totally missing the point. Also, most of the exceptions people are coming up with don't exactly fit the major Hollywood release mold (American Beauty? Started in the art house. Ditto Crying Game, The Ice Storm, etc.)
I knew the ending of Citizen Kane when I saw it. It's part of pop culture, of course I knew it. Same with Empire Strikes Back. And Chinatown for that matter. It didn't make any of them not worth watching. You know how many times I've seen Citizen Kane?

I may not agree with everything that you said but I will tell you that is WAS funny and got me to have a good giggle. ;)

I enjoy Horatio Alger's novels, even though they're as subtle as an episode of Scooby Doo.

I still haven't watched the Sixth Sense, but after reading about the "shocking ending", a dozen times, I figured it out. The meta-spoilers (excessive warnings about spoilers put out by spoiler queens) on the net gave it away - the shrink was dead all along (yawn).

Although I sometimes wish that the bad guys would win (or the good guys would lose), I feel awful when it actually happens. After watching The Perfect Storm it, felt like I was kicked in the gut when the boat sank at the end, taking the good guys down.

A movie is a present to myself. I don't unwrap my presents beforehand and inspect them, I enjoy them when I open them. I don't pay $8 to see something and ruin the experience by knowing what's going to happen beforehand. Yes, the good guys win: if I wanted to bother thinking the movie through beforehand, there might be even more detail I could figure out on my own. That's not fun. Being angry at people for the mere crime of not appreciating a movie in the same way you do is silly.

In the words of Triumph the insult comic dog,
"You want a spoiler? Here's a spoiler, you will die alone!"

And I don't want to pay 8 *pounds* (about $14) to see a film that I've heard much about. That's why I see films as soon as they are released and preferably at a film festival before anyone has seen them. I also usually don't like to talk about a film until I've had time to let it settle in my system. My question to you Anil: Do you go to many non-mainstream films? Have you ever been to film festival? Do you have friends in the film industry? In NY, it's not hard to do any of these.

After I saw the first Lord Of The Rings film, I asked my (British blue-eyed devil) wife, "Where were the colored people in the film?" She replied, well, I guess the Orcs could be considered "colored" and there are other people who figure prominently in the last book (a reference to the elephants-riding, scimitar-carrying turban-headed bad guys in the third film).

I had a problem with this. There were no races of goodguy people in this Middle Earth who were darkskinned? Even in the horrible Kevin Costner version of Robin Hood we had Morgan Freeman playing an enlightened Moor.

I had my heart set on the so called good guys being aided by some type of dark-skinned army from the east riding on flying carpets or dargon boats or something.

Oh well, at least I can look forward to two Indian characters (Parvati & Padma)- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/3338827.stm - to be introduced in the next Harry Potter film!

HWheel Not true not true about the Greeks. Every Greek who watched these plays were very aware of every plot and answer. These were not dramas in the way we currently use it. These plays were rituals. They were shared by the community in ways we do not understand. It might be helpful to think of Greek plays like the movie Titanic. It was a huge hit and was a world wide phenom. If there were only, in ancient Greek culture, a few dramas like that and they were done every year over and over in specific festivals with no other movies produced, at all, then you might see some similarity to the Greek experience in those plays.

Think of it like if the only movies ever in existance were Star Wars, Titanic, The Life of Brian, & Fried Green Tomatos. The only time you could see them was a few times a year. And you got really dresssed up and spent a lot of time, money, & energy in seeing them.

"I had my heart set on the so called good guys being aided by some type of dark-skinned army from the east riding on flying carpets or dargon boats or something."

Dude, the dark-skinned army was the undead! They were like, representing the ghost of slavery an racism n all that and Aragorn like, freed them from their bondage after they kicked Sauron's ass, right? He's all Abraham Lincoln on them, "You're free, dudes."

filchyboy, Thanks for the feedback on the Greek/Oedipus/classic drama/festival situation. You say that "[The dramas] were shared by the community in ways we do not understand." Any idea how I can get my mind around what they were thinking? Is it like my blindly going to see any version of "King Lear" or "Wozzeck"? I go just to see how they're going to do it, but I don't think this is what they're thinking.

Hey, just like porno! where every time, every single time, the actors and actresses... well, you know.

This is one of the reasons why Merchant of Four Seasons was so swell (at least in the theatre, the stupid DVD package gives away the ending). The same thing goes for Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A.

And when you buy a book, is the first thing you do is to flip to the last pages to see how it ends?

You're the guy who makes the movie trailers that give away every detail in the movie, aren't you?

Sorry, I just hate people like that. The best way to experience any kind of entertainment is as 'untainted' as possible, IMSFHO. :)

Thanks Anil for a great read and a bunch of chuckles! Sounds like some of your readers have gotten their panties in a ruffle over reading your words. Sheesh. Loosen up!

Anyway, I loved your post. . . but I do have to blame AOL for being a HUGE spoiler . . .you see, AOL thinks EVERYONE is on East Coast time what with their "LATEST NEWSBREAKS!" I've grown darn tired of reading about the future before it occurs here on the W. coast (I'm specifically referring to those reality bits: The Bachelor, Survivor etc!)

Oh gosh, what a foolish post. I've been reading such good things about you for so long that I finally came to check out some of your writing. And then this silly juvenile shit?

You're right, Hollywood movies are predictable a great deal of the time - what an acute observation. However, just as people read books in a start-to-end manner, most people like to see movies in the same manner. It's a very simple concept... if you view higher quality movies this process is more rewarding. Maybe your selection is poor?

Regarding the LOTR, the books are different than the movies, you see there are moving pictures - so it's a wholly different experience. And since the movies are an adaptation, there's a difference between the two. If you didn't appreciate the movies, or the books, then spit that, but don't whine when someone wishes to have a virginal experience with a movie. It's most enjoyable that way for some of us. Very simple and respectable concept.

There - my panties are all unruffled Ms. Leslie.

hey... I thought in star wars. *insert nerd noise here*, the good guys lost. I mean, in part 4, the empire is lording it over everyone. And they are the BAD guys. I don't know how they are gonna go from not lording it over everyone to lording it over everyone unless the bad guys win. YaY. Go bad guys. And what about Primal Fear. it has Edward Norton, Richard Gere and breasts. And you know what. The BAD guy wins. The usual suspects. Kevin Spacey, other guys who I recognise, explosions and you know who wins? Kosta soya or whatever his name was. The BIG EVIL BAD GUY.

Thanks for bringing up the point about the turban-wearing-scimitar-bearing-elephant-riding bad guys. I just saw the movie and that scene made me uncomfortable... I don't expect most people to understand why...they will say it's just a movie...and that's precisely what makes me sad.

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