The Hugeness of Our Unworthy Thinking
Spoilers, Reputation, Ignorance, Knowledge, Experience, and Cymbeline at the Civic Center
Ignorance isn’t bliss, but it can be a blessing. Being ignorant of, say, the plot of a book or movie prior to reading or watching it is - for some - a desirable thing. They don’t want to know things until they come to know them directly. By protecting their ignorance, they are - as they see it - preserving the quality of their future intellectual and emotional experience of the story’s twists or turns. They’re ensuring that knowledge, when it comes, comes to them in a pure and direct way. They’re trying to guarantee that their reaction to the happy, sad, smart, dumb, shocking, or dull moments of a story is fully their own.
[If we wanted to get fancy here, we could say that cultivating temporary ignorance (in the sense described above) is a phenomenological practice that seeks, by cultivating ignorance rather than bracketing knowledge, to encounter the thing-in-itself or enjoy something we could (problematically) call the experience-as-it-was-intended. But we’re not here to get fancy, so set that aside.]
Some ignorance is not only desirable and seen to be good, but justifiable. While we’d normally take issue with someone who said “I’m actively trying to avoid learning,” we have no problem with someone covering their ears and making lalalala noises at the merest suggestion that some plot point on some show might be revealed before they’ve had a chance to watch it. This kind of willed ignorance makes a certain kind of sense. We’re currently in a cultural spot where this kind of ignorance is the norm. You needn’t justify your desire not to know because it is already tacitly justified. It is both assumed and broadly shared. This norm - nice for some - is, though, a little problematic.
Our generalized respect for spoilers and those who wish to avoid them has some unfortunate effects. First, it tacitly over-values a narrative’s plot. We treat the specific ways that a story unfolds as more meaningful, more somehow precious, than any other aspect of the thing. For instance, to learn in advance that a main character dies halfway through a novel would “spoil” the thing and, taking that term seriously, render the entire thing unpalatable if not outright indigestible. A spoiled thing would hurt your (figurative) tummy and the only way to spoil a thing is to reveal an element of plot. Advance knowledge of any aspects of a story (save plot) is either neutral or beneficial to know (e.g. the genre, folks responsible, year of release, etc. etc.) while plot knowledge is seen to be ruinous. The dramatic difference between the effects of these differing knowledges suggest a value difference.
[There are a bunch of ways that this is weird. The primary weirdness is that knowledge is rarely conceived of or treated as negative or corruptive in domain, so for it to be imagined as somehow harmful or destructive (at all) means that this state of affairs is exceptional. Now, you might say that this is an earned exception because plot relies on suspense or surprise which then, definitionally, requires a certain kind of ignorance to “work” - but that’s not exactly true. We’re not going to get into this in any detail, but we’ll just note that you can experience suspense and surprise even with foreknowledge (e.g. you can be surprised by a surprise party even if you know it’s going to happen because the particulars of who’s at the party, etc. will still be surprising). Teasing out how this works a little we could say, by analogy, that knowledge of a set does not harm the “surprise” of the elements of that set or by extension knowledge of some elements of a set does not alleviate the “suspense” that accompanies the discovery of other elements, the definition of the set itself, etc. How’d math sneak in here? So sorry! Anyways… ]
Knowing the plot of some narrative, some might say, is like knowing the final score of some game. The resolution of a plot is (taken to be) the primary point of a narrative and - likewise - the designation of a winner and loser at the end of a game. But is this, really, why we’re engaging with either narrative or games? Don’t we fuck with narratives because of worlds and characters who (incidentally) get caught up in certain events and perform certain actions as a result? Don’t we watch or play games to participate in or witness how certain things are done rather than the mere fact that they are done? In other words, isn’t plot (like the designation of a winner or loser at the end of a game) just an excuse for everything else, just a pretense to get absorbed in the activities of some real or fictive people in a special real or fictive place? Are we really, now, only after the most manageable, surprises we can get? We want brief shocks that we can weather rather than sustaining mysteries we can’t shake (i.e. we want the twist ending rather than the inscrutable motivation, the buzzer-beater rather than the impossibly elegant play)? All signs point to yes, so… maybe.
Our seeming adamance that plot is the most critical part of a narrative, in our view, skews our sense of what makes them worthwhile. What happens, to our eye, is no more important than how and when it happens or who it happens to. If a story or game is worth engaging with, it’s worth engaging with because it hangs holistically together. Each part works with and on each other part and, in turn, works on you (the experiencer) variously. This, though, doesn’t seem to be how we conceive of stories. Stories are all and only plot and the experience is all and only the little thrill of specific knowledge displacing circumscribed ignorance.
A corollary to this “no spoilers” ideology is the desire for “endings explained.” It’s as if our experience of narrative requires that we go from one epistemic extreme to another. Knowing nothing to absolute knowledge. Of course, understanding the plot completely does not mean you (or anyone else) have understood the story completely - but by reducing stories to the particular events or incidents included in them maintains the illusion that a story is fully understandable and its work entirely knowable so long as you “get” the plotted part.
Now, we’re not here to say that folks ought to search out spoilers or avoid the explanation of endings. Your preferences and habits aren’t really the issue here. You’re welcome to seclude yourself in a dank cave prior to seeing whatever it is you want to see. This is none of our business. (We admire commitment in any form especially when such commitment calls for caves.) We’re just trying to highlight that this attitude towards or treatment of narratives might be messing with how narratives are conceived. Further, we’re a little concerned that this (flawed) conception of narratives (or, more particularly, this problematic over-valuation of one component of narratives) fucks negatively with how we experience, assess, and appreciate them by rendering them more shallow, hollow, simple, and (epistemically and experientially) exhaustible than they necessarily are. This concern is motivated, finally, by the peculiarity of this situation. It is only with narrative art that we treat knowledge as alternately destructive and completely attainable. Only narratives seem to be spoilable or spoiled by knowledge.
You can’t spoil a painting by knowing what it depicts or how it’s depicted, etc. Like, we’re not doing any harm to Lucien Freud’s “Hotel Bedroom” if we tell you that it’s a painting of a hotel bedroom in which a man is standing in the shadows overlooking a woman laying in bed under the duvet with her hand drawn pensively to her cheek in full light.
Likewise, you can’t really spoil a song. We could tell you that the chorus of Portishead’s “Roads,” such as it is, is “How can it feel, this wrong.” We could show you the sheet music, describe all the instruments, name each musician, and so on. It wouldn’t do anything to the song or your experience of it:
It seems strange that we so readily agree that most art can’t be ruined by foreknowledge or, really, knowledge of any kind - but narratives are crazily thin and fragile things shattered by some half-heard detail about their plot or possessed in toto once that plot is known. Just as we can’t spoil Freud’s painting or the Portishead song, it would be crazy to say that we can fully explain or understand either. At best, we can get closer to them through interpretation or investigation. We can get more familiar with both through repeat experiences. But we’re not likely to ever “get” either thing. Art isn’t here to get got.
Treating narratives as spoilable plot delivery devices, we’re pretty sure, doesn’t only mess with how folks seem to approach narratives (e.g. “predictable” is used almost exclusively in a pejorative sense, but it’s hard to say why it would be bad that a story unfolds in a way that you can readily anticipate), but it messes with people’s willingness to revisit narratives.
We know a remarkable number of people who neither re-read nor re-watch things. This might be, we don’t know, common - but it seems crazy. The idea, we guess, is that you already have the most important thing the narrative has to offer (plot) so returning to it would be unnecessary or unfun or disvaluable. You’d be wasting your time. You already have all the knowledge or the entirety of the experience you were after.
There are almost no analogous experiences that we treat as so singular and so easily exhausted as narrative. If someone said they ate a strawberry once and liked it, but refused to eat another because, y’know, they already knew how “eating a strawberry” turned out, we’d want to banish them to an island for the deranged. (We might belong on this island for different reasons, but nevermind.) The same would be true for most other things. “Oh, yeah, I really liked that orgasm, but I’ve already had one so….”
You might argue that experiences other than narratives have variation - each strawberry differs slightly, each orgasm likewise - or that your lived experience endows those repeated instances of the same things with some kind of novelty - you desire strawberries more at certain times or in certain places, you feel inclined towards or away from orgasms depending on mood or company or whatever - BUT the same should hold true for narratives, no? Each time you engage with a story, some different or new or changed aspect might reveal itself. Each time you engage with a story, you are inevitably different than you were last time. We’re not saying that you should monomaniacally obsess over one single narrative and revisit it endlessly (what’s up, Office lunatics?), but the refusal to revisit narratives (and only narratives) seems wild and unusual and unfortunate and a direct result of our emaciated conception of them.
Wait, sorry, didn’t we start by saying ignorance can be a blessing?
Right, so, ignorance of plot is weird and misguided and in many respects bad or at least questionable. From where we’re sitting, this kind of ignorance (and the valorization of this kind of ignorance) does far more harm than good. It doesn’t really benefit anyone and absolutely does not benefit the narrative or your substantive experience of it. But there is a kind of ignorance that is, more often than not, a real benefit: ignorance of reputation.
In almost every instance, lacking knowledge of an artist or the work of art’s reputation prior to encounter is better for your experience and the artist and the thing they’ve created.
The surest way to truly destroy whatever pleasure can be found in some work of art is to endow it with “cultural significance.” It renders it a duty, an obligation, or - writ otherwise - a fucking chore. To know that a composer as “important” or a book “influential” or to use any of the other nebulous adjectives that indicate value is to burden the work of art with extraneous and distracting stuff. Experiencing a work of art that shoulders such a burden stops being about experiencing the work of art and starts being about being cultured or bettering ourselves or engaging in some other supposedly edifying activity. It becomes at best an intellectual affair or at worst just another transactional acquisition of cultural capital.
To be clear, we’re not saying that knowledge of a work of art’s cultural context, it’s production details, etc. etc. is bad, but rather the generalized value judgments regarding the artist or the artwork are bad. Awful, even. For example:
Hitchcock, when he made Psycho, was so concerned with the plot of the film being spoiled that he bought up all the copies of the novel upon which it was based. He, like most, thought that knowing in advance that [redacted] and that [redacted] would ruin the experience of the narrative.
Now, [redacted] is one of the most famous scenes in the history of film. We all know [redacted], can even act it out and perform a rendition of the string music that plays during it. Is the scene ruined? It’s hard to say how it could be. The narrative is built such that it’s a surprise, a shock, even when you know it’s coming. Knowing in advance that it’s going to happen definitely produces a different kind of shock, but we’re not sure how/why you’d argue it’s worse or less striking than the surprise that comes from total ignorance. And the second spoiler? The fact that [redacted] is [redacted] in the end?
We’re guessing - just guessing here - that many of you have no idea what we’re referring to here because you haven’t seen Psycho. And why not watch Psycho (if you’re into that sort of thing)? Either because a) you feel you’re already over-familiar with it due to its prominent place in the cultural landscape (i.e. you feel like you’ve seen it without seeing it, it is already so spoiled that watching it would be redundant) or b) you haven’t seen Psycho because the only reason you’re typically given to watch it is that it’s an “important” movie by an “important” filmmaker and was “influential” in the history of horror, etc. and this reason doesn’t motivate you or inspire desire.
The perceived pressure to see Psycho that follows from its reputation, we’d argue, is a far harder barrier to clear than the (mistaken) notion that it’s been spoiled because you know part or all of the plot. To clear the first means just accepting that some of the events will be known to you in advance, but you’ll still have the fun of seeing how these events go together and meeting interesting characters and everything else. To clear the latter, well, there is no clearing the latter. Once something is affixed with a specific cultural reputation, you’re stuck measuring your experience against it and, worse, you’re likely not even measuring your experience of the thing but fixated on assessing whether you assent or dissent to this thing’s reputation. You aren’t so much engaging with the work of art, but judging it against some standard from the get-go. It’d be far better, now, to tell everyone about the plot of Psycho, but tell no one who made it or what place it holds in cinema history. [We’re not spoiling it ourselves because, well, we’re trying to be respectful even while undermining the premise underlying such gestures. We’ll happily spoil this movie and everything else if you ask us to in the comments.] Reputation not only fucks with whether one approaches a work of art, but how one appraches it. It is, truly, corruptive.
Unfortunately, reputation is also the primary engine that moves people to see old stuff. While novelty recommends itself, antiquity (i.e. anything that occurred before 2012) seems to need help. And how do we help? We skirt the specifics of the artwork (don’t want to spoil it) and instead prey on the godforsaken idea that folks have a duty or responsibility to see allegedly significant or important cultural works. We don’t advertise the Picasso exhibit by emphasizing all the demoiselles or cubes - but instead talk about the creator of a movement that changed art forever (or whatever). We don’t say watch Prince of Darkness because it’s batshit insane, but rather watch iconic horror director John Carpenter’s masterpiece.
[You can extend the corrosive power of reputation outside of art, too, obviously. Imagine having the option of going on an average waterslide or going on the most influential and important waterslide of all time (designed by the genius slide architect Dr. Twistera Weeeeee). The former would be more fun, surely, and the latter would be “interesting” (which, and we’re not going to talk about this here, is a terrible adjective that connotes only hidden boredom and works to prop up various hegemonies.]
In sum, we seem to be in the habit of treating narratives as if they’re jack-in-the-boxes, good only insofar as they delight a child with dumb surprise, and treating old art (and narrative arts especially) as if they were homework. The options seem to be, sadly, either incline yourself toward toys or get down to the serious work of cultural study. This isn’t anyone’s fault nor ought anyone feel bad about it. It’s just a shame is all.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could treat the cultural landscape like any other landscape? No place spoilable by mere epistemic means or exhaustible by simple experience? No location more important than any other? The whole thing just something to explore and experience (for better or worse) variously depending on need or whim and full of somethings that might differently inspire or move us in inchoate and hard to explain ways?
Anyways, we went to see Cymbeline in the suburbs the other day. It was supposed to be played in the park, but rain forced the performance indoors into the civic center. It was a pleasure. We’ve read the play a bunch, but never seen it staged. Repercussions Theatre did a wonderful job of creating a version of this maximalist, insane play that was followable, funny, and low-key wondrous. They’re performing it in parks across the province for another week or so and we’ll probably go see it again. It’s free (donations welcome obvs) and runs 2 hrs or so (not incl. intermission). Really good time. The whole cast is very good (especially Anna Morreale who plays Innogen).
If we were in the business of recommending things, we’d recommend everyone go and, before going, we’d recommend reading the plot summary a more than acouple of times and thoroughly spoiling that part of things because, for real, it’ll be much more fun (we promise!) if you know in advance what’s actually going on. We’d also recommend, if possible, that you disregard utterly that the play was written by William something. He’s not important. The play’s the thing, as someone once said.
Here’s a pic we took before the show started when we were very aware of each and every event that would happen, but eager and excited to see how, on this evening with this cast and among these people, those events would strike us and everyone else.
We gained no cultural currency that night, gained nothing more important than a pleasurable experience in great company, and are (as always) very grateful for that.
P.S. We’re still attending Fantasia (it goes on forever) and we’ll let you know how that’s going soon.
P.P.S. The title of this post is a modified half-line from Cymbeline. The reason we used it is as title will be readily clear if you decide to go see the play or read it.
P.P.S. Shout out to Kevin who inspired us to think about some of this stuff after he called us out for talking undue shit about Citizen Kane.
"i.e. we want the twist ending rather than the inscrutable motivation, the buzzer-beater rather than the impossibly elegant play." Well, why not both? Sometimes the elegant play that leads to the buzzer-butter are both beautiful in distinct ways that work independently and together. Thus to have it "spoiled" (and, to keep the sports analogy, recapped in a series of highlight reel clips, for example) arguably diminishes a rich first hand experience into a series of crude summaries.
As someone who doesn't go out of my way watch trailers online (in the cinema is fine, I'm not a maniac), it's not that I'm worried about plot spoilers, it's more I'm wary of having a marketing department's view of what this thing is. I mute certain films or books on Twitter, again not because of narrative spoilers per se, but because those are often hanging off "hot takes" I'd rather not have coloring my yet to be experienced thing.
So I suppose there is an element of wanting to keep the thing experientially pure, but also not wanting some sort of commercialized or opinionated shaping of it thrust upon me prior to my own engagement. Just as I wouldn't want a Joseph Cornell exhibit advertised at me from a skywriting airplane (even though, on some level, maybe that would be dope, but you get what I'm saying).
Or to put it another way, sure you can't spoil a Portishead song, but by the same token, you wouldn't necessarily want someone to say "Oh man, have you heard the new Portishead? It sucks!" and then they send you a ten-second clip of the bridge.
P.S. Rewatch "Citizen Kane" already.
P.P.S. Thanks for spoiling the Lucien Freud painting smdh.
"generalized value judgments regarding the artist or the artwork are bad"
As for spoilers.. I don't remember anything ever so it doesn't affect me. ;)