On one hand, you’ve got Aristotle in the Poetics describing opsis as the least artistic of the six parts of theater. On the other hand, the summer blockbuster is a genre unto itself, and one that’s only now coming into its technological own. Spectacle has its place:
As for the idea that a plot has to be surprising or dense to be entertaining, there’s not much in Classical tragic theory to justify that. The tens of thousands of Athenians who showed up to the theatrical contests already knew how the plays would end. And now there are even studies on this. Spoilers actually improve audiences’ experience:
The study, called “Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories” and published in the September issue of Psychological Science, couldn’t be simpler. Leavitt and Christenfeld curated a selection of stories by writers like Chekhov, Carver, and Updike… They asked a few hundred participants to read the stories and rate how much they’d enjoyed them. Sometimes, the stories were in their original form; in other cases, they were either preceded by a paragraph which, in explaining the story, gave away the ending, or were edited so that the ending was obvious from the beginning of the story itself…
The results? The “intrinsically spoiled” stories weren’t enjoyed any more or any less than the originals. But the explicitly spoiled stories — the ones prefaced by a paragraph giving away the ending — were rated as more enjoyable. This was true even for mystery stories, and for stories ending in “ironic twists” — exactly the stories that you’d think would be most spoiled by spoilers.
In Aristotlean terms, it could be that spoilers free audiences from anxiety over the plot, allowing them to attend to the intrinsically more artistic dynamics of the playwright’s interpretation and of imitation as such. In any case, mark it as yet another theoretical question that’s become amenable to empirical investigation.
References:
* Opsis [Wiki]
* Transformers 3: Master Class Trailer [YouTube]
* Surprise: Spoilers Make Stories Better [Boston Globe]
* What Can Experiments Tell Us About Heidegger’s Being-Toward-Death Speculation? [Icon Index Symbol]
