I find that expecting a twist lowers the enjoyment. The twist, when it arrives, tends to usually be anticlimatic. If it turns out there's no twist, it ruins the whole experience.
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).
Telling me the whole plot of a movie robs me the experience of discovering it as it goes.
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...
I like to re-watch movies for discovering small details and for all the well choreographed sequences. That’s more like re-watching a music video, you do it because the material is just plain cool to watch.
As you say, this only works for movies I like, only for movies that have sequences like that and details.
My dad was reading Game of Thrones and got to a shocking spoiler at the end of book 1 (you can guess which one). He told me he stopped reading the series right there. He probably wouldn't even have begun reading if he knew beforehand.
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.
I saw the HBO series before reading the books (miway into book 3).
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.
The spoiler wasn't for his father, it would have been for him:
> 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."
Correct. Sorry if I was obtuse. Neither my father nor I knew about the "shocking event" before reading it. I would call this a spoiler (certainly I would encase it in a spoiler warning before mentioning it online) but I guess you can argue about whether it's really a spoiler if it wasn't actually spoiled for anyone in the story.
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.
My favorite thing about A Song of Ice and Fire is that the author could literally do anything. In Harry Potter, you know the main three won't die. Forget about what GRRM does in books 2-5...
I've been rereading the Dune novels (because I never did read the last one and it's been a while). Since I have read them before, but it's been so long, I've been skipping ahead at times to read the final chapters (something I never do with other books). I've found that refreshing my memory of how it ends improves my enjoyment of the books quite a bit, as I can really appreciate the Herbert's craft in getting there.
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.
I can't find the article online (it does say it's "upcoming") but here's the press release[1] in the journal. An interesting comment from the authors:
"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.
I think the authors go a bit too far with their suspicions (but they use appropriate language, so that’s alright). I would like to see their experiment repeated with, for example video games like Portal (where I do suspect that spoilers matter) or movies. I think their results are very intriguing, but it’s still very possible that the truth is a bit more complicated. It’s time to explore the landscape of spoilers. (Isn’t that what everyone writes at the end of their papers? “Further research, however, is necessary.“)
I wonder if there's a subset of people (presumably people who often do puzzles and the like) who run counter to this finding. I often run gimmick car rallyes[1], which is an extended exercise in parsing the rules, and when I've fallen for a good gimmick, I'm more likely to smile once I've figured out how I was tricked.
I don't think I'm typically bothered by spoilers, but The Usual Suspects stands out as an example of where it definitely hurt my enjoyment of that movie. I mean, I still liked the movie, but man, I can only imagine how much more I would've enjoyed it without the spoilers.
Also, by this point The Sixth Sense is ruined for me, so I'm not sure I'll ever get around to seeing it.
I can only imagine how much more I would've enjoyed it without the spoilers.
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.
The study suggests something that is true in general for people, it doesn't apply to every person in every case. Like I said, in most cases I'm not bothered by spoilers. However, in this particular case, I felt a diminished sense of enjoyment of that movie. I base this off of my experiences of other twists of similar or lesser magnitudes and how much enjoyment I got out of those. I liked the movie, I liked the characters, but I was missing the punch at the end and I knew it. It felt like a letdown. Hell, I would've probably liked the movie more if it hadn't had the twist because knowing the twist and knowing I wouldn't be surprised made the movie end rather flat.
I did that with 'Psycho'. The publicity for the original release was full of pleas that people not give away the ending. By now, is there anyone in all of western civilization that doesn't know that Norman Bates was the killer? (If so, sorry about that.)
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.
Sometimes telling a story non-chronologically can create the anticipation effect of knowing a spoiler ahead of time. The recent Battlestar Galactica did this, to the extent of possibly overdoing it.
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).