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A few days ago, the trailer for Star Wars' The Last Jedi dropped.
I know this not because I smelt its scent on the wind and barrelled towards the nearest computer like a jackal, but because a wave of messages began rolling in.
Some were from friends, some from readers, and some from family members. They all asked the same question: have you seen the trailer yet?
I get it. Believe me, I get the almost chemical hit you feel when, halfway through, the character nobody was sure would be in the movie crests the top of the hill.
That kind of moment can have you punching the air with exultation.
I understand how brutally, animally gratifying it is to get a glimpse of the future. To peer ahead.
When a film you're slavering for haunts you with a release date months away, what could be more edifying than getting a taste?
Just a taste, mind.
It's like you're standing at the docks with a Bolivian drug-runner. He punctures a bag of white powder marked "The Last Jedi" with a butterfly knife, and offers you a bump.
The Bolivian's henchman adjusts his AK, and looks right at you. "Is good. Has Skywalker in it."
What's the point?
Here's the thing, though: I'm beginning to wonder who these trailers are even for.
If you're a fan, you're going to see Star Wars anyway. The damned series has something approaching a gravitational pull.
We're like Obi Wan, clutching his temple, as a freshly-kidnapped 19-year-old hick swings a pylon of molten light around blindly in a spacecraft prone to instant depressurisation.
We, the fans, will feel it's "great disturbance" whether we like it or not.
Which leaves … who, exactly?
Because if you're not sold on Star Wars as a franchise, nothing is going to haul you into its orbit at this late stage.
But there are other trailers — such as those for indie films — with a certain degree of restraint. They hint at the contours of the plot, without mapping the entire thing out.
You can't come away from a trailer for the new ennui-infused onslaught from Lars Von Trier knowing much, besides "I will not be watching that" and "why is that fox yelling at Willem Dafoe?".
Thanks for the spoilers
But here's the main reason I'm so worked up about trailers: The Avengers.
It's a surprisingly terrific ensemble superhero film from Joss Whedon. I went in cold, without any trailers.
My partner, however, did not. So, she saw the scene in the trailer — and this is a spoiler — where The Incredible Hulk flings himself through the air. At his apex, he plucks an inert Iron Man from the sky. He then smashes his way down the side of a building, and if you listen carefully, you can hear the body corporate screaming the entire way down.
The problem here is the last 20 minutes of the film builds up by implying that Iron Man is going to die saving the planet. But you can imagine what even a gently astute watcher of the trailer is thinking: 'let me guess, Hulk will save Iron Man'.
Because we're getting more receptive to what trailers contain, whether we want to or not, we're gathering every scrap and weaving them into a plot-quilt, and as each moment from the trailers occurs in the films themselves, we check them off a list. We're reverse-engineering a story.
So the trailer is capable — and often guilty of — weaponising our attention to detail, to ruin the movies we love.
Spoiler lockdown
So, what do we do? Well, one solution is to just watch the damned trailers. Pee into the wind. Burn it all down.
I think this idea is an abhorrent one, but take care not to go too far in the other direction, like an ex-housemate of mine who shall remain nameless.
This young man, hearing a new Star Wars was coming out in a year (The Force Awakens), went into spoiler lockdown.
He set word filters on all his social media accounts, and when friends began to post about Star Wars, he unfriended or blocked them.
He ran from the room screaming whenever a TV spot for the film came on.
Even when I went to interview Harrison Ford himself as part of the press junket, I had to lie to this housemate about who I was chatting with, lest he find out Ford was even in the movie.
In the end, his girlfriend led him into the cinema with noise-cancelling headphones and dark sunglasses, so ambient chatter and posters wouldn't give anything away.
The tragedy here is that he spent so long with this figurative stick up his arse that he couldn't enjoy the film at all.
He'd done nothing but make himself and those around him miserable for a full year.
So, naturally, after I'd moved out, I decided to call him and see whether his fandom had been sundered.
He sighed.
"I get it, Paul. I think that's why Luke ran off to that island to live like a hermit for all those years."
"What do you mean?" I replied.
He paused for a moment before replying.
"To get away from all those f***ing spoilers."
Paul Verhoeven is an author, broadcaster and comedian.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, film-movies, action, science-fiction-films, australia