Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I think that's why Shyamalan's later movies are considered so badly.
The "prediction error" point is interesting; I feel cheated when the twist is not so much a twist but hidden information; when one could never have suspected of the truth because not all facts where given. For example, I found the ending of the movie Number 23 to ruin the movie for me, so frustrating it was.
On the other hand, when it makes perfect sense, and facts were there all along, the twist is satisfying. That's why Sixth Sense is so popular.
Also, spoilers aren't always about twists. Telling me the whole plot of a movie robs me the experience of discovering it as it goes. Some of movies I enjoyed watching the most were ones I went in knowing absolutely nothing of what it was about (also some of the ones I disliked the most, but that's another story).
I've always wondered about people who can sit through the same movie several times. If you already know what's going to happen, how can you get any enjoyment out of it?
I say this only half sarcastically. I get bored rewatching movies, except for only my very favorites. Those movies have been spoiled for me, and yet I enjoy them just as much as I did the first time I saw them (maybe a little more).
Remember, the journey is half the fun, even if you know where you are going...
As you say, this only works for movies I like, only for movies that have sequences like that and details.
If something has a surprise, I can enjoy showing it to friends and watching them get caught by the surprise. That adds pleasure.
If something has a surprise, it can make a bigger impact and stick in my memory longer. That adds pleasure.
Sometimes I can guess a surprise. That adds pleasure.
He reads a lot in the genre and he just couldn't take what GRR dished out.
I thought it was a brilliant move and I certainly would have been sad to know it was coming. When an author is reversing tropes and dumbfounding your expectations, when you're suspended between possible outcomes and don't know what's going to happen next, that's the golden time in reading.
Knowing the ending of book 1 definitely changed the way I read it and what I got out of it. Knowing the character was so innocent/hopeless made me feel sorry for him rather than associate with him being the hero.
If I hadn't known what was coming I probably would have been disappointed, confused and annoyed with the book. I also wold have been paying attention to the wrong details.
And even now I'm avoiding spoiling the story.
> I thought it was a brilliant move and I certainly would have been sad to know it was coming. When an author is reversing tropes and dumbfounding your expectations, when you're suspended between possible outcomes and don't know what's going to happen next, that's the golden time in reading.
"My pleasure would have been reduced to know about the spoiler in advance."
For similar reasons I do not hesitate to say "John was walking across the street when he was hit by a car." As it turned out, John was walking to the middle of the street when he was hit by a car, but from his point of view he was engaged in a very different activity.
I have another story on the same lines. About 18 months ago a friend was giving a presentation on a new software module at work. We were waiting for supervisors to arrive and to pass the time, I showed everyone that I had recently seen the entire Star Wars trilogy (IV, V, VI) uploaded to Youtube in ten minute increments.
In the course of this, the friend giving the presentation mentioned he had never seen them. He was from China, but also did university in Canada. He watched a lot of anime but wasn't much into Western media.
Somewhat at a loss, I made him promise to watch them that weekend. He did, but right before he started his talk someone else asked about it and he said, "I am your father."
That, friends, is a real tragedy of spoiling and I defy anyone to defend it.
Postscript, my friend did actually watch all the movies that weekend, but he said they didn't hold up well. He watched an extremely suspect order though, something like 4, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.
Similar to ancient Greek plays and epics, where everyone knows the story, it allows me to focus on the performance and the details of foreshadowing, hinting, and flow.
"Christenfeld and Leavitt conclude the paper by saying that perhaps some of our “other intuitions about suspense may be similarly wrong.”
“Perhaps,” they write, “birthday presents are better when wrapped in cellophane, and engagement rings are better when not concealed in chocolate mousse.”
We might be also well-advised to reconsider surprise parties, Christenfeld said.
But I don't know. Maybe they aren't spoilers, per se, but I know some of my favorite books and movies have me going "Oh! How is this going to end?" or "Oh! How are they going to get out of that!" I'd love to know how much was actually spoiled. Was it, as in the ars article does, "Dumbledore dies on page 596", or like a cliff's notes version of the whole story.
[1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/...
Also, by this point The Sixth Sense is ruined for me, so I'm not sure I'll ever get around to seeing it.
Ah, but you're arguing a counterfactual. The study suggests that you wouldn't have enjoyed it more without the spoiler. Similarly, with The Sixth Sense, you might enjoy seeing how Shyamalan puts the story together and imagining how a naive viewer would try to reconcile things.
Yet I had fun watching it, seeing how Hitchcock let the audience _think_ that the movie was all about Janet Leigh's character, then slamming them into a narrative brick wall with the shower scene.
Spider Robinson once described having read a novel twice, once for the story itself, then again 'to admire the carpentry'. With a spoiler ending 'ruined', I tend to wind up doing that on the first pass.
That doesn't imply that this is true for you personally, nor does it make a value judgement on how people should experience fiction.