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- The Guardian, Friday 16 January 2009
Disgruntled artists often accuse audiences of being ignorant, but there is a serious aspect to the question of just how clueless viewers of entertainment should be.
Critics attending previews of Seven Pounds, the Will Smith film opening today, were handed documents formally requesting them not to disclose the ending. Similarly, the BBC has pleaded with previewers not to give away the identity of the villains in Hunter, a crime-drama starting this weekend. Also advising critics to carry lip-glue in their kitbags was National Theatre boss Nicholas Hytner who, announcing a 2009 line-up featuring something identified only as "a new play by Alan Bennett", explained that "plays go better" if their contents are protected in advance.
These artistic dances of the veils touch on a question about the presentation of art. This has always been problematic but becomes more so in a culture of aggressive publicity, in which everyone from star actors to best boy grip will have discussed the plot on chatshows before release.
But even without the pressure of publicity, a media blackout on plots is implausible because there are different types of film. Seven Pounds, in asking reviewers to sign an embargo, is applying for what might be called The Sixth Sense protection, a pseudo-legal principle established by the M Night Shyamalan movie, in which almost the entire point of the film depends on the final revelation of Bruce Willis's nature. Once you know, The Sixth Sense is scarcely worth knowing.
In the same way, anyone who goes into the new Will Smith vehicle aware of the motivation of the protagonist will derive no pleasure from the elaborate mysteries established. And yet, in this case, the reviewer is aware that a ticket-buyer may feel cheated when the disclosure comes. By keeping the secret, we may be colluding in disillusionment.
Another obstacle to ignorant enjoyment is that most films are based on pre-existing material. Among the titles encouraging 2009 Oscar chat ahead of next Thursday's nominations, Frost/Nixon and Doubt are based on plays, while The Reader is adapted from a bestselling book, so a large section of the audience is doomed to deja-vu.
The Reader works much better as a narrative if the audience doesn't realise until her lover does that the postwar German seductress played by Kate Winslet was a Nazi concentration camp guard. But the popularity of the book - and the fact that this is some of the strongest material available in any interview with Winslet - means that there was little hope of this detail being withheld.
A still greater complication is the concept movie, in which the plot is the publicity. For those who aren't admirers of F Scott Fitzgerald's short story, the best way of selling The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which received 14 Bafta nominations yesterday) is to tout its tantalising storyline of a man born old and dying young. But this plot-spoiling hardly matters because the viewer wants to see how actor Brad Pitt and director David Fincher visually create this journey.
Critics who give things away are accused of being spoilsports, but the calculation is difficult because reviewing fundamentally involves the question of whether a plot makes sense. The most noteworthy aspect of Hunter is the identity of the extortionists threatening to murder children, and analysis that omits this detail is like writing an essay on Othello without mentioning the hero's skin colour. And yet to tell you would kill the show before it's born.
These are real dilemmas but, in general, we should try to stay as uninformed as possible. In more than one sense, dramas are best seen while in the dark.
Staff
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