The spoiler policy

Leah asked about this, so I thought I'd post it here instead of burying it in the comments. With my discussions of movies, I will stick to what seems to be industry-standard spoiler policy: avoid giving away major plot points, especially things that occur near the end, but talk freely about general trends of action, or specific details of scenes that don't give away major plot points.

I'm always torn when faced with a review of movie I haven't seen. It's so rare to go into a movie clean-- knowing nothing more about it than you saw from posters and previews. This is pretty much how I watched Punch-Drunk Love, and I think it was a better experience because of it. But if you're going to do that, you have to either see movies as soon as they come out, or strenuously avoid reading and listening to lots of things you'd like to be reading and listening to. (Or, as happened with me and Punch-Drunk Love, wait so many years before seeing it that you've forgotten everything you'd heard about it.) Is it worth it? The consensus seems to be no, unless it's a movie where a surprise is an important part of the whole experience.

Which brings me to a tangent: what about those classic movies with a major spoiler, like Psycho and Citizen Kane? I haven't seen either, but I know the surprise in both, from numerous sources. There seems to be a point at which spoilers pass into the public domain, as it were, and it's no longer a social crime to reveal them. My real question is, when does this occur? When will it be okay to talk freely about the surprise in The Sixth Sense? It's not, yet, but there's a sense that the restriction is slackening. As fast as our culture moves, I expect it won't be many more years before the movie attains "classic" status, at least in that sense.

This gives rise to a number of interesting speculations for me... defining "classic," the pace of culture, reasons spoilers pass into the public domain, unwritten social contracts... but it's Thanksgiving, and I'm in charge of potatoes, both sweet and white. So I'll leave the discussion to be picked up by any of you who are interested.