Is Fight Club Ruined by Spoilers?

Please note that this post will have spoilers in it - and even though I'm talking about a movie that is more than a decade old, this probably still matters to somebody out there.

Okay, that's out of the way; I can get on with this quasi-review.  This week, I both read and watched Fight Club for the first time.  I'd seen the first 20 minutes of Fight Club when I was in High School, but never finished the movie.  I'm sure most of my readers have seen this shirt before*, so it should come as no surprise that I knew of the major twist at the end of the movie.

My question then is: did knowing this spoiler ruin the movie for me?  For that matter, do spoilers in general ruin stories at all?

First, I think I should mention that while I read the book before watching the film, I'm going to concentrate on talking about the film - most people haven't read the book anyway, I assume.  I should also assert that the simple fact of knowing that the narrator is Tyler Durden DID colour my viewing experience.

While I was watching, I was looking for all the clues that point to Ed Norton really being Tyler Durden.  You know what?  There are a lot of clues, starting with one of the opening lines: "I know this, because Tyler knows this."  There's also an almost throw-away scene on a city bus where a passenger knocks into Norton, and not Tyler.  All the references to sleep - the narrator never knows if he's awake or asleep; Tyler disappearing when Marla shows up; the subtle camera angles when both Tyler and Nortn are supposedly in the same room that only shows one or the other.**

These clues are fairly subtle, and I'm not sure that I would have noticed all of them had I not known the big secret at the end.  These are clues that I would have definitely picked up on during a second viewing of the movie.  Honestly, as much as I enjoyed the film, I don't think I would watch it again.  In a way, this was my second viewing.

In this instance - just this particular case - I believe the spoiler did ruin the movie for me.  But not because of someone else telling me the secret; I would have only watched it a second time anyway, no more.  What may have been ruined was the whole "my mind is blown" moment, but I'm not too concerned about that.  I can tell you what wasn't ruined: how I enjoyed the film.

Yes, the joy of discovering the truth about Tyler Durden was taken away from me, but instead I had fun picking out those "Aha!" moments that I mentioned earlier.  You know what?  I probably even missed more than what I mentioned, and could find more on a second viewing.  So to answer my initial question, Fight Club was NOT ruined for me because I knew the story's secret.

But what about in general - are stories really ruined by spoilers?  Most of the time a spoiler is just one small tidbit of information, and in no way affects the rest of it.  I knew that Snape Kills Dumbledore, but I didn't know the Snape was the Half-Blood Prince (sorry).  While I'm not presenting very much evidence in support of my theory, I think my stance here is fairly obvious.  Spoilers don't ruin anything beyond a brief surprise at the end of it all.

* I'm not a fan of the wording of "Tyler Durden isn't real".  While it gets the point across, I'd very much argue that Tyler Durden is very, very real in Fight Club.

** I really appreciated the way these clues were pulled off.  Also the fact that the writers/director didn't feel it necessary to go back to each instance and hit us over the head with it, as many other entries into pop culture dealing with an imaginary person do (*cough*Dexter*cough*).

Why Movies and Books are The Same

I am so bad at this Blogging Business - I was going to have three well-thought-out posts about movies/books and try and have something somewhat similar to an intelligent discussion.  Well, I got one post out of the bag, and got busy with work, podcasting, and life in general.  Oh and I got sick somewhere in there, too (and STILL released a podcast on New Year's Eve).

So now I'm scrapping my original plans, and giving you my reasoning (or at least, the best reasoning I can remember) for why film is essentially the same medium as print.  What a crazy notion!  I'm probably not even going to try framing this as an intelligent debate, either.

The main reason I came up with this argument in the first place was I was trying to classify film and books under different mediums: film is visual media, and books are intellectual.  But wait, we use our eyes in both, don't we?  And films can jumpstart our brains just the same as a book, right?  So they must both be visual media!  So then I thought some more (sometimes, a dangerous prospect).

It's my view that the movies are simply a forced perspective narration, just the same as books - and this is why film adaptations are almost always inherently different from the source material.  With books, authors have the luxury of picking any view point - our minds can paint the picture, so to speak.  Unfortunately for film, we're stuck with one unchanging perspective (with a few experimental exceptions, I'm sure): third person.  There are minor variations (sometimes, we are omnipotent and others not) but for the most part, this is how a movie must be presented.  Wait, did I say omnipotent?  I am pretty sure I meant omniscient.  If only we were omnipotent viewers, we could change some frustratingly bad movies.

As I said just last paragraph, this is the only reason (well, that's a lie, there are other reasons that don't prove/disprove my point) that books and their film adaptations are different.  The ones that closely match probably do so because the narrative in the original book is in the third person; often, I find that third person limited offers the easiest adaptations.

I think that was my general point, and I wish I had made it better the way I originally intended.  But I just needed to get it out there.