Can You Spoil a Story That Already Happened?
This is a reprint of the feature essay from Issue #82 of Exploits, our collaborative cultural diary in magazine form. If you like what you see, buy it now for $2, or subscribe to never miss an issue (note: Exploits is always free for subscribers of Unwinnable Monthly).
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Last year, my friends and I got into a debate about whether it was possible to spoil Oppenheimer. It was based on real-life historical events, so what was there to “spoil?” When I watched the film, though, I was struck most of all by its filmmaking; by how deeply subjective its protagonist’s interiority was. In one shot, the camera literally strips Oppenheimer naked at his most vulnerable. Over time, he becomes haunted by ghosts of the past and the future. Director Christopher Nolan even shoots one sequence with all the energy of a classic plot twist – as Lewis Strauss is “revealed” as his villain. It may be a non-fictional story – but the way Nolan maneuvers his narrative and taps into dreamlike imagery is a fiction, meant to shock us.
Do spoilers only pertain to plot? That shock – those aesthetic micro-decisions – directly serve Oppenheimer’s thematic messaging. This, I argue, can be spoiled. When I go into a movie with presumptions about what it is, does and believes, I become less equipped to interpret it for myself. Story matters, but the telling often matters more. The telling is what surprises us.
Whenever I recommend Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About his Father, a 2008 documentary about filmmaker Kurt Kuenne grieving his best friend, I withhold the film’s actual endpoint. So too does Kuenne. Despite his focus being on actual, reported-on events, he guides us through the film’s first half without foreshadowing. We follow the story as he did. We are deliberately blindsided and angered by it too, when – spoilers – his friend’s murderer retaliates. It feels wrong to say that anger can be “spoiled,” but I do think it is right that it is felt.
It is also deliberate that Kuenne edited the film’s first half without any hint towards what is to follow. It is defiant. It wants to imagine a better future than what Kuenne got. You can know the “twist” and still feel that in every cut.
This definition extends beyond non-fiction too. Why do we return to our favorite art and sit through rinses, repeats and retellings? Hadestown acknowledges that we already know how the story of Orpheus and Eurydice will end, but makes a beautiful declaration at both its beginning and its end: “We’re gonna sing it again.” In its final moments, it even revisits the lovers’ first meeting instead of closing on their tragedy. It is tempting for us to linger here. In that moment, the possibilities were – no, are – endless.
While a story is being told, regardless of whether we know its events or not, we sit suspended. In the moment, a part of us hopes for something different – because we ourselves never come to the story the same. Something is always different. Perhaps the real “spoiler” is when we become too self-conscious of that fact.
