CARLISLE, England: As I write this, my wife is desperately trying to avoid spoilers for the latest episode of British reality show Strictly Come Dancing.
Having missed the original broadcast, she has been frantically logging out of all forms of social media, lest a stray Facebook status or retweet give the game away. Add to this the possibility of a friend innocently revealing what happens, and it’s clear just how difficult it is to live spoiler-free.
And it’s not just difficult for those watching television. For followers of sports, too, there is a longstanding problem of avoiding the final score before being able to watch the game.
Popular book series also face the problem of key twists being revealed too early. When JK Rowling’s novel Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince was released in 2005, a banner was hung over a bridge over the main road in Shropshire revealing an important character’s death.
Council officials swiftly removed the banner – although possibly because it was likely to fall, rather than out of fear of ruining people’s enjoyment.
NO HIDING PLACE
Spoilers, then, seem to be everywhere – and the general view is that they are bad. In its extreme form, “toxic” spoilers arise from both the pleasure some take in spoiling others’ surprise and the use of plot ruining as a form of vengeance.
This ire can be aimed at specific people or the series itself. The latter happened with the Star Wars prequel films, as some fans spoiled the endings for those who hadn’t seen it yet for “immunisation against disappointment”.
Spoilers can be weaponised in this way because of some of our assumptions about them. Most fundamentally, that they ruin enjoyment. But is it that simple?
In a series of psychological experiments published in 2011, researchers in California found that knowing the end of a story did not diminish readers’ enjoyment. In fact, readers preferred the stories where they had the ending revealed to them beforehand.
The researchers theorised that we think of spoilers negatively because we are unable to compare spoiled and unspoiled experiences and therefore assume that the unspoiled is better.
They argued that: “It is possible that spoilers enhance enjoyment by actually increasing tension. Knowing the ending of Oedipus Rex may heighten the pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character marching to his doom.”
These experiments focused on classical literature, which often requires some kind of explanation in order to follow the plot at all. The spoilers in this research were therefore arguably able to complement the plot, at least for a contemporary readership unfamiliar with the complexities of ancient Greek tragedy.
Perhaps the experiments may have reached different conclusions if they had used, say, screenings of the Succession finale.
