Movies you can spoil, and movies you can't

Yesterday I watched Hamnet, a movie about Shakespeare and his wife, the death of their son, and how that (fictionally) inspired him to write Hamlet.

Today I watched It Was Just an Accident, in which a guy thinks he’s found the intelligence agent who tortured him in jail, now years after his release.

I’ve now told you the whole plot of the first movie, but if you’re gonna like it I don’t think that matters. And yet I don’t dare tell you anything more about what happens in the second for fear of ruining it for you. What the heck? How can two excellent movies be so different in this way? What’s the difference between movies you can spoil and movies you can’t?

I think that it has something to do with what’s interesting about the movie. A fractional list of ways a movie can be interesting: It can have shots that convey some symbolic meaning, like the crime boss in Tazza standing at Jesus’ place in The Last Supper and looking over at Judas. It can have shots that are simply wordlessly moving, like gosh, any shot of the sea in The Outrun. It can make you itch to know something, like a good whodunit. It can make you curious to learn more about a mysterious world. It can make you laugh. It can take you to a place that you don’t want to leave, or let you spend time with characters you think are clever, or cool, or hot.

Some of these kinds of fun are wholly reliant on surprise, like the whodunit itch, and some are totally separate, like the moving landscape shots. Others land somewhere in the middle. A joke is less funny the second time -- with some rare exceptions -- but I think you’d be hard pressed to tell me any of the jokes in the Naked Gun in such a way as to spoil them. You could describe them, yeah, but they’re still going to be funny when I see them in the movie.

I would divide them into two categories: experiential and analytical. Here by experiential, I mean things like feeling an emotion, looking at a richly textured image, or watching an expression play out on an actor’s face. These are complex experiences with a ton of detail that’s hard to put into words. They stand in contrast to the analytical: the events in a story, the meaning of symbols, or a fact about the world. These may be complicated, but if we sat down and talked through them we could get all the information across. For whatever reason, experiential fun is harder to talk about, unless both people have a shared experience that they can point to. If you’re both lying there looking at the clouds, you can just say “that one looks like a nose” and the other person will get to have the same perception as you; but go home to tell your partner about the cloud that looked like a nose and, try as you might, they won’t really get it.

Because experiential fun is so hard to convey in words, a movie that relies mostly on it is unspoilable. The point of watching Hamnet is how the pictures, gestures, and expressions build up an arc of feeling in you bit by bit over the course of the movie. Know what you may about the plot, these elements will still have their impact. Analytical fun, though, is all about words! Symbols, meaning, and plot are all tied up in and made out of language, and so by using language we can defang their fun. In It Was Just an Accident the crux of the fun of the movie is the tension of what will come next. Did our main character get the right guy? Will he run from him? Capture him? Kill him? The open question of the plot creates tension that would fall apart if I told you what comes next.

Most movies incorporate fun from both sides of the spectrum. Even the examples I’ve chosen do this: Hamnet’s second half is probably more impactful if you don’t know quite how it plays out, and It Was Just an Accident has plenty of beautiful shots that can delight even if you know where the story is going.

So take some comfort the next time you see a trailer that shows too much. The story might be spent for you, but the telling is still to come.