In the world of film blogging, spoilers are an everyday battle. When you’re reading, or writing, about movies that won’t be released for months, sometimes years, there’s a thin line between feeding your frenzy but also preserving the final experience. The general consensus is that spoilers are bad and most of us do everything we can to avoid them. We believe that if you know who Kaiser Soze is, The Usual Suspects won’t be as good. If you know Tyler Durden’s identity, Fight Club is ruined. Or if you know Batman fights Bane on the steps of City Hall in The Dark Knight Rises, somehow, that knowledge will take away from your enjoyment of the movie when you finally see it.
Not so, says a new study. In fact, UC San Diego psychology researchers say that spoilers actually make audiences enjoy a story more. Spoilers are good for you. We’ll explain after the jump. Read More »
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A few days ago, Brian Moylan over at Gawker wrote up a manifesto for spoiler alerts. I’d tell you to go read it, except Moylan straight up spoils plot elements from Treme, Game of Thrones, and Lost with no warning whatsoever. To quote my colleague Matt Singer, if you spoil things in your article about the rules of spoilers, maybe you’re not really an authority on spoilers.
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Posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 by David Chen
[Photo by Flickr user Cheryl]
Note: The following contains potential spoilers for third season of Mad Men. We’ve hidden them in invisotext so you can easily avoid them if desired.
Here at /Film and on the /Filmcast, we deal with the issue of spoilers on a daily basis. We are true fans of the moviegoing experience, and although we cover news about movies that won’t come out for months or years, we try not to reveal a movie’s plot details if we think they could potentially spoil the joys of watching that film. If we do reveal such details, we scrupulously attempt to ensure that these are marked clearly (aurally or textually) with a spoiler warning. [In general, when I refer to spoilers, I'm referring to plot elements that occur more than 1/3rd of the way through the film, although there are certainly many exceptions to this.]
I was scanning through my Twitter feed this morning when I saw a link to an article at Televisionary entitled “Spoil-Sport: Why Talking About An Episode That’s Already Aired Isn’t a Spoiler.” The context for the piece: Earlier, Televisionary author Jace Lacob had published a spoiler-heavy piece over at the Daily Beast, with the title “Mad Men Postmortem.” The piece featured a lengthy interview with series creator Matt Weiner, but its opening, bolded paragraph led off with the following: “Dead presidents, divorce, and new digs.” I have not seen more than one episode of Mad Men, but I have been told that these words (arguably) reveal key plot points for the ending of Season 3. And obviously, the interview itself discusses major spoiler-ific plot points in detail [Side note: Hunter's Mad Men season three wrap-up discusses this interview and other topics in-depth].
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