Spoilers

This post contains some very cryptic spoilers for the movie Seven and the Dark Tower book series.

I don’t want to say that my course load my last semester in high school was senior-sliding, but when one of the classes was just watching movies for an hour and a half a day, I’m not sure what else to call it. Still, I’m glad I took film and literature, mostly it introduced me to some really great cinema (especially Miller’s Crossing and Brick, which in turn introduced me to a genre I ended up ripping off extensively in my own writing) and taught me the basic terminology I’d need to survive Race, Sex, and Gender in Film my first semester in college. So when the teacher gave some film recommendations for future viewing, I paid attention. At one point he was singing praises of director David Fincher’s movie Seven and was describing the plot as, “a serial killer murders people based on each deadly sin, and two detectives-”

And then some dimwit in the row behind me said, “Oh yeah, that’s the one where the detective is the killer the whole time!”

My professor gave the student a withering glare, then went on to expound on Zodiac.

Seven went up on Netflix last week, and as I saw it in thirty-minute nightly installments I built up a mythology around what I was sure the final shots would be. One of the detectives (played by Brad Pitt) would be sitting in a small room, looking over crucial information that revealed that his partner (played by Morgan Freeman) was the killer. Then he’d look up, and see his partner through the window hold up a card that says, “Pride,” then walk away. The detective would jump up, try the doorknob, find that it’s locked, and realize that he’s the last victim. His final punishment will be starving in this room with nothing to do but ruminate on how proud he had been to think that the killer was some psycho living on the margins of society rather than a man he’d come to know and respect. I have no idea where that scene comes from, but I never questioned it as it slowly built in the back of my mind: it was simply what would happen.

If you’ve seen the movie, you already know the twist to my story about the twist: that scene never comes. The dimwit sitting behind me in class must have been thinking of some different, probably considerably worse movie. But I’m glad he said it, because it’s a unique experience to watch a movie believing with all your heart that it will come to a very specific, devastating conclusion, then watching as it culminates in a different but no less devastating conclusion. It combines suspense and surprise in ways that aren’t possible without some serious miscommunication.

Something similar happened with a sincere spoiler a few years back. I read an essay in Wonderbook (excellent creative writing book, by the way, though the aggressive quirkiness can get a bit grating) a few years ago where the author said point-blank that she was going to spoil the ending of the Dark Tower series*. Against my better judgement I read on and found out that the main character would find no answers in his quest for the series’s titular destination, just an empty tower and a return to the beginning of the journey. Years later when I read the series itself I decided I knew what would happen to Roland before even finishing the first chapter. In the beginning of the book the traveler Roland stops on his journey through the fantastical land of mid-world at the home of a corn farmer named Brown and his profane talking crow Zoltan. The book establishes early on that this is a world so broken down that even time has stopped working right. Brown doesn’t even know when the last person passed through his farm, it could have been two days or two years. I read the eight book, four thousand page adventure of Roland’s quest for the Dark Tower thinking I knew the ending: that he would climb to the top of his Dark Tower, find an empty room that gave no answer, no meaning for his quest. Then the last few pages would detail his long journey back, until he comes across Brown. Brown hasn’t aged, his corn hasn’t grown, his crow is still swearing and he is still reaping and he believes that Roland just left a day ago. All of Roland’s adventures meant nothing to this dirt-poor corn farmer, and at this Roland realizes how little his quest mattered in the grand scheme of things.

I was wrong, of course. The spoiler was one hundred percent accurate, but just vague enough to spawn an incredibly specific theory that I just got more and more attached to as I got deeper and deeper into the series.

What’s all this supposed to say? Maybe it’s something about the failure of human intuition, how we tend to jump to conclusions and without even realizing it sink deep into incorrect theories with total certainty. Or it could be the opposite, that there’s something fun in writing your own endings to stories and believing them, and something even more fun about realizing how wrong you are. But I think the real point in all of this is that you can never really spoil a story. Yeah, you might get a good idea of what will happen in the end if you listen in on the wrong conversation or read a review where the critic is a little too loose with the details. But endings are overrated anyway. If what happens in the end were all that mattered then books would only be a few pages and movies would take less time than the trailers. What matters, and what all my subconscious theorizing got wrong, is the middle. The characters, the plot, the tension. It’s about how it all happens, not what happens, that makes a story so satisfying.

So if anyone has a story they’d like to spoil to me, please let me know.

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*As mentioned earlier, I got large chunks of the middle parts spoiled on cross country runs, but that’s a different story altogether.