relationship with spoilers

[mrissa]

I'm not seeing the new Avengers movie this week. I haven't even seen Black Panther yet. And it's not because I'm just too hipster to see the thing that all my friends like, it's because I have a major balance disorder and I have learned my lesson about what I can and can't see in movie theaters. The answer is mostly can't. You don't want to know how many times I was sick in the five days after The Last Jedi--and sure, yes, we later figured out that I probably had either very persistent food poisoning or a stomach bug that I managed to pass on to zero of the people I cooked for that night, but honestly, the first several times? surprised no one. Because balance disorder. Even when the balance disorder is well under medication control, the things I can see in the theater are the things that people tell you are not important to see in the theater. The things where the spectacle is not the point. The things that are not packed with fast-cuts and panning and awe-inspiring camera angles.

(Speak not to me of Arrival. NO.)

So: theaters. Not for me. I know people who go internet silent for a day, two days, even a week, to avoid spoilers on a movie they're not going to have a chance to see right away, but honestly: that is not feasible. I have not seen Black Panther yet. Sure, if it was vital to me, I could pirate a copy. A better solution is to form a different relationship with spoilers.

Because...sure, yes, it is nice to be able to let a story unfold without knowing where it's going. It is. I recently watched Brigsby Bear (at home, streaming on my TV), and if you can watch that without spoilers, I recommend it; it's not that it's thoroughly unpredictable, but having it unfold organically added to my experience, I think. (Mark Hamill is great in it.) But I watched it with someone who had seen it before, and I will happily watch it again; if it wasn't worth watching again, it wouldn't really be worth watching. Because most stories have been told in some form already, and the question is, how will the details work this time. How will the experience of it be.

Which is not to say that I think you should go out of your way to spill the details of a brand-new book or movie to those who haven't read or seen it; you notice that I'm fairly careful about that in my posts here. I know that a lot of people don't have the attitude I do, and that's okay. But...I don't have a lot of choice. And I like where I've ended up with that. I've made a virtue of that necessity, rather than railing against it. I'm still looking forward to seeing Black Panther. Being the last one on my block to see a thing has its perqs; having a phalanx of friends I could turn to and say "I got to the episode that's Amethyst's origin story!!!" when I was watching Steven Universe was a lot of fun.

And I'm not really the last one on my block. This week someone else got to Amethyst's origin story and wrote to me. A couple weeks ago, a different friend did. Today I read a Moliere play for the first time. When I read Middlemarch there was the entire horde of Middlemarch fans ready to squee and welcome me in; when I mentioned it in a recent book post, a local friend said "OH FINE YOU'VE CONVINCED ME" and I expect that when she gets to it I will get email from her. My best girl friend from college hasn't gotten there yet, but maybe when her youngest leaves for college I'll get an email that says, "Dear Marissa, I have just finished Middlemarch. OMG YOU WERE RIGHT." Because you're never actually the last one on your block to get to it, and hearing something something Dorothea something is not the same thing as reading it.

So yeah, I'll probably find out sometime this week that the Infinity War was the friends we made along the way, and that's fine. It really is the journey. And when it's not, I don't want to go on that trip anyway.

Comments

Thanks for this excellent insight

[jesse_the_k]

if it wasn't worth watching again, it wouldn't really be worth watching encapsulates something I've been struggling with.

Re: Thanks for this excellent insight

[rmc28]

I think this is generally true and I often like to rewatch films and tv. Max Max: Fury Road is a personal rare exception - it was an amazing experience and I'm very glad I've watched it but I don't want to go through that experience again.

Re: Thanks for this excellent insight

[mrissa]

That makes sense, and I probably feel the same way about some things. But having the plot described to me can't tell me whether I'm going to feel that way about a movie. Sometimes it can tell me "this movie will not be worth going through at all, 99% certainty." But it can't really tell me "this movie will be intense in a direction you won't want to repeat," so it's not really something spoilers can address for me.

Re: Thanks for this excellent insight

[larryhammer]

My personal exception is Grave of the Fireflies: amazing movie that will almost certainly bear rewatching by someone strong enough to, and that person is not me.

[elisem]

*listening and nodding*

[thistleingrey]

I haven't seen Black Panther yet, either. (Different reasons. I do hope to.)

> A better solution is to form a different relationship with spoilers.

Yes, very much agreed.

[thanate]

I have a number of weird mental doubles of stories based on the things other people told me about them before I saw them that bear rather little resemblance to what was actually in the book/movie. Sometimes I like the thing I thought I was going to get better, and sometimes they're just different.

[mrissa]

This happens to me not just with spoilers but with cliffhanger endings to seasons of things. If you give me enough time to fill in story, my brain will do it, and you risk me doing it better than you did, especially since my brain has infinite budget for props and casting and special effects.

[thanate]

I am sure there are books I've given up on in the middle because I put them down at the wrong point in the narrative & didn't like where I thought the author was going with them.

[swan_tower]

YES. This is one of the reasons I like the Netflix approach of releasing a whole TV season at once: I have less time to sit around and think, oh, wouldn't it be great if the story does XYZ? And then have it turn out that the writers did not think up something nearly so interesting.

[mrissa]

Strangely it doesn't really have an effect on that for me because I mostly watch shows at the end of their season rather than one episode per week anyway. So it's the end of season major cliffhanger that has a tendency to go off the rails in the discrepancy between my head and their version rather than the interepisode smaller ones--and Netflix's model still allows for those.

I don't notice them doing a lot of them, though, which is all to the best to my way of thinking.

[swan_tower]

Ah, that makes sense. And yeah, I haven't seen Netflix do a lot of inter-season cliffhangers -- their seasons tend to stand as complete units, rather than trying to leave you hanging.

Honestly, those types of cliffhangers suck for all kinds of reasons. Even if what comes next is pure grade-A awesome plotting, by the time the intervening months have gone by, I've lost the energy of the cliffhanger anyway.

[pameladean]

I haven't seen the movie yet either, though I intend to.

You remind me of the distinction C.S. Lewis makes between surprise, which is only good once and (not that he says it this way) can be spoiled, and surprisingness, which is good every time and cannot. The first is fun but the second is both fun and durable.

P.

[swan_tower]

I remember reading an article some years ago about a psychology study which indicated people may enjoy stories more when they know some spoilers. Even when those people say they dislike spoilers; even when the story is of a type (e.g. a mystery) where in theory a spoiler would "ruin" the ending. The study's authors theorized this is because not knowing where a story is going produces a degree of anxiety, and so spoilers allow you to appreciate the events without that anxiety.

Whether or not they're right I can't say, but I've shifted my thinking in much the same way you have. I'm not going out of my way to find spoilers for Infinity War, and I'm avoiding them to the extent of not reading those posts in my RSS aggregator yet, but if I happen across one? Eh. Anything that loses its impact by being spoiled didn't have a lot of substantive impact to begin with.