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scifantasy
scifantasy
14 July 2005 @ 11:27 pm
On Spoilers, or Spoiler Warning For Pretty Much Anything
With the flood of people discussing possible spoilers for Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, I started thinking about spoilers in general.

First, some ground comments. The Darkfriends of my acquaintance have a rule about spoilers: Once you get past maybe a year or two tops, it's no longer feasible to protect against them. Certainly not for old material like Citizen Kane. The rule is summed up best by [livejournal.com profile] prince_corwin: "Caesar dies. Frodo lives. Christ does both."

Spoilers are often not the whole story anyway...as in the case of Citizen Kane, the spoiler doesn't destroy the movie, because it's often just as much about the process. Babylon 5 mastered this.

That said, there are some movies (or books, or possibly even video games) that have spoilers, now long since past expiration of course, that qualify as Big Deals, or would have when they came out, or are just ones that people pretty much know or know about. Revelations that really change the equation, or are historically significant. I'm curious what some of you think they are. I'll seed the pot with a few of my own; feel free to leave a comment with more.

Ground rule: If it's still spoiler-protected (read "less than a year or two old," unless you'd have to be living under a rock not to know it), don't post it. This is about more "classic" spoilers. If you complain about spoilers, don't do it here, because you're given plenty of warning. Don't piss me off about that either...you will get no sympathy.

The Current List Of Big Spoilers (last updated Saturday July 16 0215 PDT):
Citizen Kane
The Maltese Falcon
Star Wars
The Usual Suspects
Soylent Green
The Sixth Sense
War Of The Worlds
The Crying Game
Final Fantasy VII
Fight Club
Psycho
Harry Potter
Memento
Vertigo
Babylon 5
Spartacus
Escaflowne
The Third Man
Watchmen
Old Yeller
Planet Of The Apes
Primal Fear
Chinatown

(Those are the ones I really consider spoilers, or recognize. There are some that really don't count in my mind [such as, I kid you not, Kefka being crazy in Final Fantasy VI] or whose source material I am completely unfamiliar with that I've not listed here.)


Citizen Kane: Rosebud is his sled.

The Maltese Falcon: The statue's a fake.

Star Wars: "I am your father."

The Usual Suspects: "Verbal" is Keyzer Soze.

Soylent Green: Is people. (credit to [livejournal.com profile] jchance)

The Sixth Sense: Bruce Willis is dead. (credit to JC as well)

War Of The Worlds: The Martians die of the common cold.


Any more from the peanut gallery? What spoilers are (or were) big?
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[identity profile] tzikeh.livejournal.com on July 16th, 2005 08:31 am (UTC)
To narrow your question, I suggest defining spoiler as "a fact of the narrative, which, once revealved, fundamentally alters the meaning of all which has preceded it." So many of these suggestions are not "spoilers" so much as "surprises".

If we go with this narrow definition, then I wouldn't consider the "surprises" of War of the Worlds or the Harry Potter or Spartacus to be true spoilers -- knowledge of the surprise does not change our sense of what came before. That said, I think you are missing a handful of huge spoilers from literary and cinematic history:

Planet of the Apes's revelation of which planet the Planet of the Apes is;

Primal Fear's revelation of the true nature of Aaron's illness;

Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge's revelation of the condition of the rope; and

Chinatown's revelation of Evelyn Mulwray's relationship to Katherine.

I'm sure there are a few others, but it's 3:15 in the morning. ;)

Oh, and about Psycho -- I agree that it should be on your list, but the spoiler isn't the true identity of the killer. Hm - the problem with discussing Psycho, w/r/t spoilers, is that we've come so far since then. It's hard to imagine what was so revolutionary about it, but it was staggeringly so. The real "spoiler" is that Psycho is not a noir caper film, because the first third of the film *is* a noir caper film. Marian Crane (Janet Leigh) is stuck in a dead-end job, can only meet with her lover Sam during lunch breaks, he can't marry her because all of his money is going to alimony, etc. etc. etc. One day, Marian is entrusted by her boss to deposit $40K for the business and she sees a chance for escape. She takes off with the money, heading for Sam's workplace. It's a very long drive for one day and she gets caught in a storm, so she pulls off the road and signs in at the Bates Motel for the night. After talking with the proprietor and being shown her room, she takes a shower. This is the movie you've been watching for thirty minutes, and it has set up specific narrative expectations for how the rest of the film will go. And then - suddenly this isn't the movie you paid for. The spoiler is that Hitchcock was changing film - in a way, it's a meta-spoiler.
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