Gather 'round, kiddies, and listen to old Uncle Eric tell you a tale from his youth. Back when I was a teenager, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, movie fans didn't have to worry much about "spoilers." There was no internet, and entertainment magazines weren't interested in scooping one another by being the first to publish secret details of upcoming films. The only way someone could ruin a movie for you was if they saw it before you did and blabbed about it. And you knew better than to be friends with those people.

I remember an Entertainment Weekly article in early 1993 talking about some aspect of The Crying Game, and it was necessary, in the context of the discussion, to mention the film's big secret twist. At the top of the article was a warning that said something like, "Certain key details about The Crying Game are revealed in this article. Don't read it if you don't want to have the viewing experience diminished." The term "spoiler" didn't really exist yet. Spoilers were so rare that the English language didn't even have a word for them!

Then the internet happened. It was quickly established that to reveal a movie's surprises to an unsuspecting reader was poor netiquette. For the most part, people didn't indulge in the heinous practice. But as the internet grew, and especially as it became incredibly easy, through Blogspot and other do-it-yourself models, to create one's own website, and as more and more sites began hosting message boards and allowing readers to post comments -- as all of this happened, people's netiquette began to slip and spoilers started to become plentiful. The term "spoiler alert" (usually rendered "SPOILER ALERT!") came into common usage. Many movie sites even implemented a way for commenters to hide spoilerish text as a guard against accidental spoilage.

I am a proponent of spoiler alerts. I agree that the best way to see a movie is with its major secrets still intact. Revealing a film's surprises to someone who hasn't seen it is thoughtless and boorish.

But an unfortunate byproduct of spoilerphobia is that it has produced a new kind of movie fan. Today there are some film lovers who are so accustomed to living in the internet era of over-saturation, where every last detail is available if you know where to look, that the pendulum has swung back the other way and they don't want to know ANYTHING about a movie. The problem, as you might have guessed, is that these people still spend a lot of time on the internet -- which means they're bound to find out SOMETHING.

I've encountered the phenomenon, too, when a few readers have said they avoid my reviews until after they've seen the movie because I tend to give too many "spoilers." Asked to name specifics, no one has ever provided any. Believe me, I don't want to spoil a movie for anyone! If you can point out something in particular that I shouldn't have revealed, please say so! But I suspect these readers are the new breed, the kind who don't want to know anything at all. Which is fine, of course. But you can't expect everyone else to go by the same very limited definition of "spoiler."

To most people, a spoiler is something that would spoil a movie for you if you knew it beforehand. Usually it's something that happens in the second half of the film, something that you wouldn't suspect was going to occur based on the way the movie starts out, or something that dramatically affects the story.

A character dying, or a good guy turning out to be a bad guy, or the particular ingenious method by which the hero saves the day -- those are spoilers. The revelation that there are fire ants in the new Indiana Jones film is not a spoiler. The movie isn't ABOUT fire ants. They play a minor role. If you were upset when someone told you there were fire ants in the film, then I suspect you are the "no information whatsoever" kind of viewer. And like I said, more power to you. But maybe that means you shouldn't read movie websites, since movie websites have a tendency to provide information about movies. I'm just sayin'.

There's some subjectivity here, of course. What if the character dies in the first 20 minutes? What if it's obvious, due to inept filmmaking, that the character being passed off as a "good guy" is actually a bad guy? Is it a spoiler to point it out? Maybe it's best to err on the side of caution. So just in case you haven't seen The Crying Game, I'm not going to tell you its big secret, which is that it's kind of boring.

* * * * *

Eric D. Snider (website) has been a ghost the whole time!!