Nick Waterman wrote:
Gordan Bobic said:
The last week's episode of B5 was the EndGame I believe... So,
President Clark...
WHOA! WHOA! WHOA! Hold it!!!
Some of us have videoed it and haven't had time to watch it yet. It's
considered polite, if you're about to do this, to say something like:
B5 SPOILER ALERT! B5 SPOILER ALERT! B5 SPOILER ALERT!
DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN "EndGame"...
Then to leave about a page of empty lines so we can hit "delete"
without reading anything that'll upset us.
Heh heh heh. In the interests of further discusion I've got the
permision of Andrew Rilstone to post one of his "Rant of the
Weeks" to the list. His Web page of "Rants" can be found at
http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/weekly.htm. Well worth a visit
periodically.
Anyway, let the ranting begin:
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Stop Me If You've Heard This Before
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So, we decided to go to the pictures, and phoned up the cinema to find out
what time the film started. We got through to one of those
touch-dial-multi-choice-interactive-pre-recorded things. Before telling us
that the film started at 2.15 it helpfully told us what it was about.
Aliens: Resurrection is, apparently, a thrilling sci-fi adventure starring
Sigourney Weaver as a clone of Ripley, and Winona Ryder as /DELETED/.
This irritated us somewhat. You don't find out that Winona Ryder's character
is /DELETED/ until 20 minutes before the end, and it's just about the only
twist in the entire movie. So this rather spoilt our enjoyment of the film.
Still, I'm used to it. My newspaper has taken to revealing the whole plot of
every episode of Babylon 5 in advance. 'This week, Sheridan escapes from the
prison camp and succeeds in liberating Mars, but Ivanova is mortally wounded
in the battle.' Thanks, guys. We were only turning on because last week's
show left us with two slightly arresting cliff hangers. 'Will our hero
escape from the prison camp? if so, will he win the battle to free Mars?'
The death of Ivanova was meant to be a surprising twist. So our enjoyment of
the episode was spoilt on two fronts.
This sort of thing has become such a menace that the Information
Superhighway has developed an etiquette for dealing with it. If you are
about to reveal the twist ending of a film or TV show then you have to write
'Contains Spoilers' in the subject line. If you drop a remark about the plot
into an otherwise innocuous article, you are supposed to write 'SPOILERS
FOLLOW', and leave some space. The reader can make up his own mind whether
he wants to know the film's ending in advance. This seems to me to be fairly
good manners, although it does make religious groups a little strange at
times. ('We believe that Jesus was crucified...SPOILERS FOLLOW...and that he
rose again on the third day.')
This sort of thing can go too far, of course. The Teletext TV listings fail
to give you any information at all. 'This week, the Enterprise visits a
strange planet'; 'In tonight's episode, Number 6 is subjected to a bizarre
form of brainwashing'; 'A baffling mystery for Columbo.' Fans can have
endless fun trying to guess what episode the summary refers to or (harder)
guessing what episode it does not refer to. A newspaper critic once wrote
'This week, Spock and Bones argue, while Kirk falls in love with someone
blonde', but I suspect him of satire.
In the case of a big, popular, expensive movie like Aliens avoiding spoilers
is a considerable achievement. Films of this sort come with merchandising
campaigns attached, so that the true aficionado may very well, before
arriving in the cinema, have already read the story as both a graphic novel
and an...er...ordinary novel; seen stills of all the major scenes in the
poster magazine, and heard all the incidental music on the cast CD. This may
be why some of the most expensive and spectacular films (for example, Mars
Attacks and Batman and Robin) go out of their way to have no plot to spoil.
I despised Mars Attacks for its lack of plot, character, motivation or
indeed anything at all, but I suspect that I was making a category mistake,
like the guy who goes to ballet and complains he can't hear the words. More
or less since 1977, I have enjoyed the intellectual game of trying to
imagine what happened before Star Wars started: building vague daydreams out
of Lucas's masterly hints about the Sith and the Clone Wars. Now the prequel
is actually being made, parts of the 'solution' are leaking out. It seems
that 'Darth' is not a name, but a title given to a high ranking evil Jedi
Knight. It will take an almost monastic asceticism to avoid knowing the
films' entire plot before they are released.
Does it matter? Does revealing plot details really 'spoil' the film? If the
main hero is in prison and the secondary hero is on his way to rescue him,
is the person who says 'Oh, by the way...the good guys win' really telling
us anything we didn't know? How many of us really sit down in a cinema
without the faintest idea of what the plot of the film is going to be? Flash
refuses to go and see Citizen Kane on the grounds that someone told him that
'Rosebud' turns out to be /DELETED/. The revelation of this central mystery
has irrevocably ruined the film for him. I have re-assured him on many
occasions that 'Rosebud' is, in fact, almost an irrelevance to the movie:
little more than an artificial and only half-convincing macguffin to link
the fragmentary narrative, and that the real point of the film is the almost
Freudian way it sketches the forces at work in a man's life, without ever
becoming a conventional biography. And, along the way, throws lots of
amusing character vignettes at you. 'Well, it's no trick to make a lot of
money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money.'
Actually, I only half believe this.
I remember the first time I saw the movie. I remember the camera swooping
over the cases and piles of memorabilia, waiting for the credits to roll. I
assumed that this was the end. I thought it was rather clever, but a slight
let down to have predicated the film on a mystery and then not given us a
solution. I even recognised /DELETED/ when it appears, and could see its
significancea sort of visual reference back to an earlier scene in the
film. So the final close-up literally jolted me out of my seat: the final
image causes the whole film to unwind and re-align itself in your head.
Brilliant. I'm surprised it's not more highly regarded.
I've seen the film five or six times since then; I've enjoyed it more each
time. I've even enjoyed the final scene more each time. But never again can
I be fooled by the film, and never again can I be jolted out of my seat. So
in one sense, anyone who already knows the solution to 'Rosebud' has been
deprived of part of my experience of the movie.
When I watched the video of Kane with my mother, she commented, about ten
minutes after it had finished 'Er...so did we ever actually find out what
Rosebud was, then?'
I also contrived to see King Lear (a play by William Shakespeare) without
knowing how it ended. I was sort of expecting Lear to die in some unpleasant
way, but Cordelia to survive. This is, in fact, the ending in the myth
Shakespeare was working from, and also in the Restoration reworking of the
play. I was not so much surprised by the ending as pissed-off by it. I felt
rather like the little boy in The Princess Bride. 'No Grandpa, you read that
wrong. When you said dead, you didn't mean 'dead'. Cordelia's only faking,
right? She can't be hanged after she's spent five acts being the only good
person in the play. That wouldn't be fair...' This is, I suspect, almost
exactly the reaction that Will was hoping for. It's also almost precisely
the reaction of Lear himself, come to think of it.
One could say that the entire edifice of English Literaturefrom Brodie's
Notes right down to doctoral theses on 'The Renaissance Theory of Suffering
in King Lear' is dedicated to 'spoiling' literature in precisely this way.
We don't let children see Twelfth Night without first showing them dreadful
30 minute TV cartoon versions and then sending them to dreadful schools
where dreadful teachers dictate dreadful notes, explaining all the jokes and
the difficult words. (Let me assure you, ma'am, that no twelve year old in
the universe needs Brodies notes to tell them that the line 'These are her
Cs, her Us and her Ts and thus makes she her great Ps' is a very dirty
joke.) And we don't let adults see performances of it without first giving
them programme notes which explains why it is absolutely essential and
consistent with Shakespeare's intentions to re-set the play in a brothel in
Sarejavo. We can't possibly be allowed to see the play for the first time,
to be surprised by it, to form our own impressions of it.
One could say it, and indeed I might have said it, had I not also seen the
recent (modernised) film version of Romeo and Juliet, in the Bristol Arts
centre along with thirty or fourty other people who all (presumably) knew
the story. And yet, as it reached its climaxas Romeo is opening his poison
even as Juliet stirs (a break from theatrical tradition, this, but one which
the text allows) I am fairly certain that they were all, like me, stifling
an urge to shout out 'No, you fool, don't do it!'.
One bit of good acting can overcome the damage done by any number of 'O'
levels.
Jokesparticularly corny, school boy jokesare spoiled if you have heard
them before. It is impossible to convey, at this late stage of the
afternoon, just how funny the exchange:
'What's green and pear shaped?'
'A pear'
was the first time I heard it; and how completely unfunny it has been on the
seventeen subsequent occasions. Whodunnitsparticularly bad, country house
whodunnitsare spoiled if you know the solution. I admit that The Mousetrap
delivers a very real, very disorientating, very enjoyable jolt when you
discover that, in complete contradiction to all expectations, the murderer
is in fact /DELETED/. If someone has told you in advance, then there is no
pleasure to be had out of the play whatsoever. You simply sit back and
wonder how as accomplished a writer as Agatha Christie could possibly have
written such a load of old /DELETED/.
A horror movie such as Aliens: Resurrection is very much at the level of a
whodunit or a schoolboy joke. It delivers, if it delivers anything at all, a
series of brief, physical 'hits'. When the spooky music starts playing (with
its in-time-with-your-heart-beat rhythm) you get butterflies in the stomach,
as if you were waiting for an interview or slowly going up to the top of a
big-dipper. When the alien jumps out from behind the /DELETED/ your heart
skips a beat, and then starts beating very quickly, and then slows down, as
if someone had burst a balloon behind your head. This is not a particularly
high form of aesthetic enjoyment. You can get it just as well by going to a
fair ground or being in a car accident. But it's quite fun, all the same.
But if these thrills are the main thing you want, not knowing what is going
to happen next is by now means a guarantee that you will get them. Recent TV
shows like Babylon 5 and Dark Skies make great play with the fact that they
have a developing plot-line and no status quo. When Lohengren's missus gets
kidnapped by aliens, you genuinely don't know whether she is going to escape
or not: it could go either way. But (for all Dark Skies' cleverness) I found
it very hard to care. The characters were two dimensional. On the other
hand, every time I watch a re-run of old, creaky, formula-ridden The
Fugitive I find myself on the edge of my seat, feeling suspense and tension
so intense that I sometimes almost wish I hadn't switched on. The small town
policeman is congratulating Kimball for his heroism and at the same time
fingering an unopened letter from the FBI that would reveal Kimball as an
escaped convict. Never mind penis shaped creatures with two rows of teeth
bursting out of people's chests: this is such stuff as nightmares are made
of. And yet I know, with 100% certainty, that Kimball will escape.
It's called 'good writing'.
A pre-occupation with 'spoilers' involves at least three errors. It
pre-supposes that the main point of a film is its capacity to deliver a
'hit'. It assumes that these hits are delivered by uncertainty and
unexpetedness, not by good story-telling. And it takes for granted that the
main thing we are watching for is the plot.
I would, on the contrary, be tempted, to say that anything which can be
spoiled by a spoiler was probably already pretty spoiled to begin with. I
therefore make no apologies for revealing that Winona Ryder was, in fact, a
sledge.
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Later,
Adam Hattrell, Support, Cimio Ltd. adam@
