Spoiler Alert: Trigger Warnings Ahead
Earl Fowler
Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m a hard-nosed private dick circling the abyss, more Preparation H than petroleum jelly. My pronouns are Chivas and Regal.
Hope you guess my name.
So I was sitting behind my desk, Newport dangling from my lips, wondering how I’d wound up tangled up in this mess. You see, the Chuck E. Cheese crowd — let’s call them Zillennials, though I’m still not sure whether they’re sugar-plum fairies from The Nutcracker or refugees from The Truman Show — had a funny habit. They came to me, gibbering and gesticulating about trigger warnings and spoiler alerts, two things that go together like RFK Jr. and a Grade 7 frog dissection class.
Who elected me the Daydream Believer whisperer anyway? Your shavin’ razor’s cold and it stings. Boo-hoo. I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I’ve done no wrong.
Now put away childish things.
First, the trigger warnings. “I just want to know if I’ll be uncomfortable,” they say. “I can’t handle anything upsetting, not in the movies, not in books, not in my daily bowl of Lucky Charms.”
They’re magically capricious.
In recent years, and I am not making this up, the American universities that cater to these folks have compiled lists of banned terms — we’re talking words here, people, not iron maidens and semi-automatic pistols — of such offensive word combinations as “balls to the wall”, “white paper”, “peanut gallery”, “insane” and “virgin.”
Oh, the humanity!
“Virgin” hurts somebody’s feelings? How, then, to placate Honey Boo Boo? Perhaps a friendlier, more compassionate locution would be “a human being not used, touched or defiled by the cruel world,” though in the right context — Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon penthouse or the Mar-a-Lago Club, for instance — “touched” and “defiled” conjure images too horrible to contemplate.
How about “a person who has never engaged in breeding, mating, coupling, copulating, fornicating, intercourse, coition, lovemaking, humping, rogering, knobbing, rooting, shagging, screwing, banging, boffing, making whoopee, nailing, shtupping, philandering, procreating, poking, having amorous relations, bone jumping, bumping uglies, hooking up, boinking, saliva swapping, knowing someone in the biblical sense …”
Well, this could go on all night. From what I’ve been told about seniors’ homes, it sometimes does. But as someone who lives outside the border walls of Super Nintendo World, “virgin” seems like the kinder, gentler option to me.
Instead of risking violations and depredations of other people’s happy places with verboten speech, perhaps we should just make faces and point excitedly while making chimp noises like Cheeta in a Tarzan movie?
Wait, that would never do. Spoiler alert: Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs was the Wuhan wet market of white supremacy.
So it would appear there’s no easy solution at hand. Tell me an abstinence joke ... I’ll wait. I once threw a celibacy party and no one came.
That last bit of monkey-like feces flinging, I know, could elicit a summons from the Ministry of Exquisite Vulnerability for eight weeks of sensitivity training … and two additional minutes for mansplaining. If ordered to step away from this blog for a mandatory period of sober reflections, I assure you said ruminations will most certainly not include seductive femmes fatales in white sharkskin bathing suits named Diana, Venus, Amazon or Sappho.
Mind you, why anyone would want to name a bathing suit in the first place is beyond me. But they always have me at “trigger warning.”
Dames. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live withou … ooh, pass the beer nuts.
And speaking of beer nuts, here’s another insane, balls-to-the-wall true fact from the peanut gallery: Students at Brandeis University have added the term “trigger warning” to their banned list of trigger warnings. This might strike you as ironic, but that would leave people who think ebony and irony live together in perfect harmony feeling shaken and unsafe.
Lord knows we can’t have that here in the Marvel Universe. Hulk smash. Cut to commercial for Nationwide Insurance.
Still, I could see where these snowflakes were coming from. I get it. Life serves up enough curveballs to knock a guy off his feet. Nobody needs to sit through a film and have their world flipped upside down by a plot twist that reminds them of something from their past they’d rather forget. Unless they’re into art and reflection and adulting and all that jazz.
Zillennials need their safe space locked away inside the algorithms they inhabit, which is why you can’t watch a movie trailer these days without seeing every crucial plot point unfold in 150 seconds or less.
Why waste two hours on character development and building suspense? Who wouldn’t exult in more time to upload pictures of last night’s spicy bacon grilled cheese to Pinterest or transmit racy photos of sundry private parts to 50-year-old lechers masquerading as teen girls on Snapchat?
Problem is, the ravenous trigger-warning impulse doesn’t stop there. It needs to know everything. It demands a map, complete GPS co-ordinates, maybe even a weather report on what is coming up next in the story.
Cloudy with a chance of cancel-culture castigation.
Nor is this purely a North American phenomenon. A recent production of Romeo and Juliet by London’s Globe Theatre was accompanied by a warning that the plot includes suicide. That was fine as far as it went, but the way my young clients see things, it should also have come with a 428-year-old spoiler alert.
Because that’s the contradictory imperative.
Tell me what’s coming next, so long as you don’t tell me what’s coming next. I want to see the plot unfold, but only on my terms.
My terms being identical, of course, to the terms of everyone else in the echo chamber where I exist, follow and subscribe with all my followers and subscribers. God forbid that I should ever experience a tinge of nuance or a nagging second thought about signing the petition I just signed demanding an apology by some celebrity for something they said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do.
It’s a tangled mess. These Reese’s Pieces peanut butter cups want the world all wrapped up in bubble wrap, like their social media accounts, with no sharp edges or sudden surprises. But when it comes time to sit down and read a novel (as if) or watch a movie, the spoiler-alert reflex means they don’t want anyone handing them a detailed map to the treasure chest before they even get to the beach.
So which is it?
One minute these space monkeys are clutching their pearls and sucking on their security blankets, asking for a heads-up on any content about abusive relationships or unsettling political commentary; the next they’re yelling, “Arghhh! Don’t tell me Christoph Waltz did it again! I would never have seen that coming.”
They want a thrill ride, but only if the car has seat warmers and Bilstein off-road shock absorbers to handle potholes. They hunger for bread and circuses, but only if the crusts have been cut off and the lion tamers replaced by happy-face kitty emojis.
In short, Zillennials crave spoiler warnings for spoiler warnings. Trigger alerts for trigger alerts about spoiler warnings about spoiler warnings. They talk mumbo jumbo. Monkey on your back. They talk crazy talk. They could make a sleuth a ruin.
Here at the intersection (sorry, intersectionality) of Is This The Real Life? and Is This Just Fantasy?, it’s infinite regress all the way.
This is surely the opposite of progress, but that odious word smacks of colonialism and the Enlightenment and dead white men, making it a virtual lock for the ever-expanding inventory of embargoed labels, designations and appellations at college campuses across the land.
My question to the Can You Feel the Love Tonight? demographic is this: Why do words suddenly disappear every time you are near?
I tugged on the brim of my fedora, stubbed out my cigarette, put my lips together and blew a final smoke ring. A world where benighted nebbishes demand both trigger warnings and spoiler alerts is suffused in a ghastly red light from the push-buttons of their precious remote devices and the ghostly pulsing green of their iPhone chargers, but at least I still knew how to whistle. In analog.
Outside, another yellow moon had punched a hole in the nighttime mist. I pulled on my trenchcoat, left my office and locked the door behind me. The Blue Gardenia was four doors down. Raymond Burr and Anne Baxter were sitting at the bar. I figured maybe I’d join them. Sascha, make it a double bourbon. And leave the bottle.
Calgon, take me away!
When I woke a few hours later, crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, my first thought amounted to a simple word of advice for all the prissy, priggish, shallow, hypocritical, hypochondriacal, histrionic, apology-and-safe-space-demanding, clenched-asshole, mint-julep-sucking, face-punchable, groupthink-tweeting, velveteen-couch-in-their-parents-basement-sitting, snitching-and-tattling insinuating idlers, creepy little rats and oversensitive purity purgers of the Snowflakex community. Gen Zed men wear plaid. (And some, I assume, are good people.)
But before we go any further, I should caution the fragile little darlings that the following tip-off — sorry, I mean message of empowerment — contains words that may be harmful or traumatizing to some readers. Steep terrain and cliffs beyond this point. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. And don’t blame the message shooter. My only trigger warning comes with a holster:
Spoiler alert to the easily offended: If you go messaging selfies of Chairman Ow, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.
Me. I was part of the nastiness now. Me and the Zodiac Killer.
Hello, darkness, my old friend.
Ex-ca-use me! Mr. Clerk teller, do you have the extra-strength, no-see-through Saran Wrap?
I think little Johnny saw his teacher using non-biodegradable chalk the other day. He’s refusing to leave his room.