So earlier this year The One I Love began building up some hype at various film festivals. Featuring lead performances by indie darling Mark Duplass and Mad Men royalty Elisabeth Moss, The One I Love generated a good deal of excitement and an even greater deal of conversation.
Specifically, people were talking about how they couldn’t talk about the movie.
And it wasn’t just limited to critics speaking guardedly in reviews. Regular festivalgoers refused to discuss the film’s plot with such intensity it was as if their children’s lives depended on it (which, I don’t know, they might have. Indie filmmakers are crazy, you don’t know what they’ll do to children). At Q&A screenings, both cast and crew insisted that no one ‘give away’ the crazy plot twists that were so crucial to enjoyment of the film.
Even the goddamn trailer got in on this action. The entire thrust of The One I Love’s trailer is, “We can’t tell you what this movie is about, but it’s something so weird and crazy that you have to find out!”
So what to make of the fact that the crazy plot twist, the one upon which so much energy has been expended in protection of, happens in the first fifteen minutes of the film. It’s not a plot twist. It’s the fucking plot.
I’m going to discuss the plot of The One I Love now. Fair warning.
OK, so Ethan (Duplass) and Sophie (Moss) are a married couple who have been going through a rough patch. They find themselves desperately recreating moments from their early days together, hoping that reliving various enchanted memories might ignite some spark. It isn’t working, leading them to seek help from a therapist (played by Ted Danson. Why you cast someone as recognizable as Ted Danson for a role consisting of four lines of dialogue is anyone’s guess).
Ted Danson sends them to a vacation house to work out their problems, and it’s very shortly after arrival that Ethan and Sophie discover doppelgangers in the guest house. When Ethan goes in, there’s another Sophie waiting for him. When Sophie goes in, there’s another Ethan.
More distressing, these doppelgangers are somehow ‘better’ than the real thing. They’re healthier, happier, and more emotionally open in a way that the psychologically-constipated Ethan and Sophie of the real world could ever hope to be.
Again, this is all established immediately. The popcorn is still warm by the time Love’s cards are all out on the table. The remainder of the film is given over to Sophie and Ethan’s exploration of the doppelgangers, of their relationship, and of what it is that they want out of life and love.
It’s a feature length Twilight Zone (a comparison the film tries to defer by having the character’s acknowledge it) and, and this is the crucial bit, not a very great one.
And this is the crux of what annoys me about the insistence on secrecy regarding this film. By cordoning off everything after the first ten minutes behind a “SPOILER!” wall, director Charlie McDowell and his publicity team have essentially stunted any and all conversation about the film. Because you can’t discuss the plot with any depth, a critic is forced to deal exclusively with the generalities and surface level details.
All of which are lovely. The film looks nice, and the improvised dialogue has a nice flow between the performers. Moss has long been MVP of Mad Men, the beating heart behind the period gloss, and she manages to completely leave that show’s Peggy Olson behind and inhabit the loving but often difficult Sophie. Duplass can play this sort of lovable chump in his sleep at this point, and they have a very nice, lived in chemistry that makes the pair seem very believable as a couple.
But The One I Love is also distressingly surface level and often clunky. The more the film tries to explain without explaining what is happening in the guest house, the more baffling and arbitrary the situation and the ‘rules’ become. And because the film bungles its narrative threads, it loses sight of the emotional ones as well. Ultimately, Sophie and Ethan’s story is wrapped up in an insulting ‘twist’ that all-but spits on everything the film had been carefully establishing.
This isn’t really about The One I Love, which is never anything less than a pleasant little film. But more and more I find myself becoming distrustful whenever a filmmaker or showrunner plays up the intense secrecy surrounding their story. I’m not talking about actual spoilers (endings, deaths, narrative-shattering twists) but more the desire that some storytellers have to control every single aspect of their story’s ultimate reception.
You’ve got JJ Abrams with his “mystery box” technique, wherein even knowing the NAMES of characters is considered a spoiler, closely guarded and teased out over years. And on TV you have someone like Matt Weiner of Mad Men, who is infamous for sending out screeners to critics with long notes giving detailed lists of what they can and cannot discuss in their pre-season reviews (these lists include items such as “What Year Is This Season Set” and other such bombshells).
The explanation that is trotted out again and again is that these writers and directors are trying to protect the audience experience. They want everything to be fresh! Everything to be experienced completely new and pure!
“In my day,” they’ll say, “we didn’t have the Internet spoiling everything for you. Trailers told you nothing, and you went into each movie or show knowing nothing about it.”
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bull-shit.
First of all, spend an hour on a website like Trailers From Hell and you’ll quickly see that the whole “old trailers didn’t reveal anything” line is warmed over garbage. Marketing departments will seek any and every angle to get you to see a movie. If that means cutting a trailer that gives away the best stuff, well, that’s the trailer they will cut. So if you’re playing up secrecy because of some hallowed notion of what things were like in yesteryear, you’re chasing a bullshit concoction of nostalgia and lies. Which 90% of hallowed notions from yesteryear end up being.
And more to the point, this need for secrecy and withholding of basic plot information as somehow being ruinous to the experience has nothing to do with the audience whatsoever. It has to do with control.
These studios and storytellers don’t want there to be reactions that they can’t anticipate. They want to limit the tools we have at our disposal when discussing the work. They want to keep discussion as broad and inexact as possible.
Disregarding how little secrecy has to do with the actual merits of good storytelling, we’ve already seen this kind of thinking blow up hilariously in peoples’ faces. Just look at Star Trek Into Darkness, which was built entirely on misdirecting the audience’s knowledge of the villain. When it quickly became public knowledge that Benedict Cumberbatch was playing Khan, fan reaction was immediately, virulently negative. This disdain for the very idea of CumberKhan, coupled with the fandom feeling insulted by the ongoing game playing (also known as “flat out lying to reporters for months”) insured that Darkness rode a wave of disgruntled anger to lower domestic box office returns than its well-regarded predecessor.
And I truly think that Weiner’s insistence on secrecy and control has damaged Mad Men’s short-term legacy. The more he pushed critics to stop talking about the show, the more they stopped talking about the show. With each season, more and more critics publicly declared that they would no longer do reviews of the show because they didn’t want to deal with Weiner’s demands. Not only has Mad Men’s viewership tapered off, but it has also largely vanished from public discourse. It’s not the awards juggernaut it was. It’s not a fixture of cultural discussion. Mad Men is one of the most remarkable creations in 21st century fiction, producing some of its best episodes ever in the most recent seasons, and its final days are playing out largely in the background of the greater pop culture conversation.
It comes down to this:
Artists do not get to dictate the terms by which we enjoy or discuss their art.
They can’t. If good discussion is going to flourish, if we are truly going to be able to engage with and digest culture instead of passively observing it, that requires discussion of all aspects from all angles, not just the ones that the writer or director pre-approves.
It’s a terrifying thing, to give up your say in how your work will be viewed. And it’s OK to be scared. Insecurity and nerves are totally normal human experiences, as is the fear that someone might take something you created and reinterpret it in toxic directions.
But there’s a difference between Vince Gilligan taking a stand against misogynists co-opting Breaking Bad to service their micro-penis agendas, and Matthew Weiner demanding to dictate the terms by which critics can and cannot discuss his show.
Treating every single bit of plot information as if it is hallowed information that must be protected at all costs only serves to neuter discourse and infantilize the discoursers. It’s time for authors to trust in their audience and let the people have their say, without fear of getting smacked with the “SPOILER!” screech.