In the real world, we want to know what happens next. Astrologers are consulted, probabilities are analysed, and consultants are paid good money to predict outcomes. When it comes to books, movies, and TV shows, we want to be kept in the dark. Those who reveal spoilers are shunned and worse. In 2018, for example, it was reported that a Russian scientist in an Antarctic outpost stabbed a colleague with a kitchen knife because he was “fed up with the man telling him the endings of books”.
Remote outposts apart, there was a time when spoilers could have been considered a minor nuisance, restricted to a few annoying individuals in one’s circle. The digital age has changed all that. Now, one has to constantly be on guard for the cry of “spoiler alert!”
Perhaps the increasing attention paid to spoilers is also understandable at a time when storytelling is seen as a supreme virtue, and not just for professional storytellers. Everyone is falling over themselves to make presentations with rising arcs and successful denouements.
Creators have been suspicious of spoilers long before social media. After theatrical performances of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, for example, audiences were told not to give away the ending. Similarly, Alfred Hitchcock went to great lengths to prevent the finale of Psycho being discussed. Good PR, apart from anything else.
Spoilers, it is commonly believed, are an irritant because they ruin the pleasure of watching or reading a work for the first time, most often with whodunnits and thrillers. Sounds reasonable. Would you really want to know in advance the name of the murderer of Roger Ackroyd, the identity of Fight Club’s narrator, or the fates of the Avengers?
This assumes that the twists and turns of a plot are the most important thing about a creative work. It ignores all other elements one can take pleasure in: the prose style, the sense of place, the acting and the cinematography, for example.
Some argue that there’s nothing wrong with privileging the pleasure of finding things out. Other pleasures, they say, can emerge through repeat viewings and re-readings. That isn’t necessarily wrong, but it seems lopsided to pay so much attention to one aspect and downplay the rest.
Why do people spoil things in the first place? A few unpleasant individuals may rub their hands together at ruining the experience of others, but as philosophy professor Richard Greene explains, most simply want to tell people what they’ve viewed or read - and they want to be the first. “People just can’t keep a secret,” he writes, “and that’s essentially what spoilers are”.
In this sense, the person doing the spoiling is disrespecting the agency of others. If I want to know the ending of Murder on the Orient Express before I watch or read it, I’ll ask you – otherwise, consider my need to experience my way, thank you.
Nevertheless, some studies have shown that spoilers don’t spoil very much. Earlier this month, Anna-Lisa Cohen, professor of psychology at Yeshiva University, wrote in the New York Times about a recent survey designed to determine “the extent to which knowing the outcome of a dramatic scenario would affect a viewer’s ability to be drawn in by it”.
Participants were shown a nail-biting 30-minute TV episode directed by Hitchcock about a boy who finds a loaded gun and mistakes it for a toy. One group of participants knew nothing about the outcome, and another was told about the ending in advance. Members of both groups were asked to raise their hands every time any character said the word “gun”.
As it turned out, both groups forgot to raise their hands as the suspense mounted. Cohen reports that all participants were equally immersed, including those who knew the outcome. All reported the same levels of engagement and enjoyment.
Her interpretation is that we are transported by stories, identifying and empathizing with the characters. “Knowing the ending doesn’t affect us, because the characters in the story don’t know the ending and, for that moment, we have hitched our mental state to theirs.”
The results of another 2011 University of California survey went further. Here, participants were asked to read different types of short stories by the likes of John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver. The result: “subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories”.
The researchers concluded that “suspense regarding the outcome may not be critical to enjoyment”. It distracted attention, they felt, from a story's details and aesthetic qualities. The spoilers turned out to be enhancers.
However, as Greene points out, it’s one thing to be unruffled by spoilers when asked to watch or read something arbitrary. It’s quite another when you’ve personally invested time and emotion in a creative work. Another way of saying that is I’d be peeved if someone revealed the ending of Succession before I’ve watched the final episode.
Having said that, it’s best to remain equanimous if waylaid by a spoiler because the work in question has much more to offer. After all, even Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about drama, inserts a spoiler at very start of Romeo and Juliet: “A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life.” Apologies to those who thought they lived happily ever after.
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