Spoilers are good?

I noticed when this trend started. They started making movie trailers that gave away every single plot point in the movie. I was sitting in a movie theater with a friend.

"Well. I've seen it the movie," he said after a preview. I can't remember when this was, but it was a movie starring Michael Keaton as a cop who is also a single father.

In contrast, look at the trailer Stanley Kubrick put together for his movie Full Metal Jacket which gave an impression of what the movie was like while revealing almost nothing about the plot: http://www.youtube.com/movie?v=t-_qLQa4Piw&feature=mv_sr

Spy magazine specifically criticizing the studio head who started this trend. There were people who thought this made people feel they didn't need to see the actual movie.

I was reminded of this when NPR reported on a study from UC San Diego which claims that "spoilers" make things more enjoyable.  They gave test subjects short stories they hasn't read before and gave away the ending to half the of them. They gave some of them a copy of Shirley Jackson's story, "The Lottery" (the professor gives away the ending in the interview.)

"Spoilers are, in fact, enhancers," he said.

"It turns out that when people knew what was going to happen, reading the story was more enjoyable," the reporter said. They interviewed a movie critic who repeats what Alfred Hitchcock noted about suspense---suspense is when you know something is going to happen, not when you're surprised that something happens.

Other disagree. They note that a lot of shows now use plot twists in lieu of "great writing or characters" and someone talks about the difference between a literary work and a movie. "I feel like a novel cannot offer the same kind of visceral shock and pleasure that a great plot twist in a visual medium usually can."

I can't remember where I read it, but there was an attack on M. Night Shyamalan which claimed that, since his movies tend to have twist endings, once you knew the ending, there was point in seeing the movie again. They didn't stand up to repeat viewings.