Some people shriek at the sight of a spider. Others can’t get into elevators. For many contemporary consumers of literature and film, the merest hint of knowing what’s ahead sends them into panic mode. Where did this “spoilerphobia” come from? Is it rational?
Well, like most aesthetic questions, the answer is…complicated.
As an ancient mariner, I first noticed this phobia when I was teaching film history. I often wanted to talk to my students about a movie that they hadn’t seen and possibly never would. When I would start to describe a turn in the plot, the students would mockingly place their hands over their ears.
Spoilerphobia didn’t just infiltrate my classrooms. In 2010 fans and showrunners publicly pilloried TV critic Alessandra Stanley for revealing plot details about Mad Men. Goodreads reviews and Reddit threads hide and warn about spoilers.
If language is our guide, spoilerphobia appears to be a relatively new phenomenon. Lexicographers date the origin of the term “spoiler alert” to the late 1970s and the growth of the internet. In an article on Medium, Alex Mell-Taylor offers insight into how spoilerphobia has been deployed to hype current releases and shield them from criticism.
Certainly, spoiler censorship has conquered the internet, the playground of younger generations. Knowing about the hot new book or movie can embody a certain cultural “one-upmanship” and indicate class privilege. Those with the money, time, freedom, and motivation to stay on top of current releases or buy new hardcovers may obtain an experience denied to those who have to wait for library copies or cheaper venues. So, the power to “spoil” lies disproportionately in the hands of those with elite access—like the critic—while anxiety about being deprived of an “untainted” experience affects people with less access.
In my classes, students whose families subscribed to HBO had an edge over those of us (including me) who didn’t. If they wanted to, the HBO students could have given away the shocking turn of “The Red Wedding” episode of Game of Thrones. (Except—I was armored against any such a loss because I had already read the books.)
At any rate, I feel that both “the privileged” and “the deprived” are over-emphasizing the wrong elements.
Does revealing plot details ruin anything? Are plots analogous to glasses of milk that go bad if they sit too long? In the classroom, I would brush aside my students’ resistance by declaring—with deliberate hyperbole—“Plot doesn’t matter!”
After all, most texts more or less give away their own endings. With many stories, readers intuit from the moment they start more or less where they will end, taking cues from genre conventions, advertising, titles, and blurbs. Were you really ever in any doubt that the humans of Westeros would defeat the White Walkers? Did you think that the women pilots in The Calculating Stars, Book I of The Lady Astronauts, would be forever barred from flying?
Having expectations fulfilled provides its own special pleasure. We love adaptations. There’s no mystery left as to what is going to happen in Pride and Prejudice (spoiler alert: the lovers get together). But we watch each new iteration to discover what this Elizabeth Bennet and this Mr. Darcy are going to be like, which characteristics these actors highlight. How will this version capture their misunderstandings and their passion? As moviemakers know too well, the more familiar we are with the story or genre, the more likely we are to go see the movie. Remakes, like adaptations, multiply like rabbits. And most of us enjoy rereading and re-watching, long after we know all the turns of the plot: we take particular pleasure in waiting for key scenes.
Only a few stories—commonly called “twist” novels or films—manage to shock us. No Way Out (1987), The Usual Suspects (1995), and Fight Club (1999) became famous for their subversive endings; in novels, one could point to Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1990), Anne Tyler’s One True Thing (1994), Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper (2004), or Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). Twist endings—particularly common in mysteries, thrillers, and horror—have become more popular in recent decades.
Twist stories work via a gimmick; they withhold information to misdirect us, the way a magician performs a trick. If part of the pleasure of consuming a narrative is thinking we are smart enough to solve an enigma, successful twists rock us back on our heels and prove that we readers are not as perceptive as we thought we were, and the author/magician is fully in charge. When they succeed our mouths fall open and we experience awe at how masterfully we’ve been hoodwinked.
Even with such limit cases, what I most want to do with twists is go back, re-watch, and figure out where and how the unreliable narrator led me astray. My enjoyment of a story is not ruined by knowing ahead of time the information that’s been so zealously kept hidden. By now nearly everyone in the world must know that “Rosebud” is a sled—Charles Schultz drew a memorable “Peanuts” cartoon strip on this topic—but people still watch Citizen Kane. After all, as Thompson says, no one word can explain a person’s life. There’s a downside in putting so much emphasis on the shock of a twist: one of my friends mentioned that because he’s heard about the reveal of The Sixth Sense, now he doesn’t need to see the movie. This saddens me because he’ll miss out on a clever and moving film, with good performances, and a truly fascinating narrative device.
Psychologists have done experiments with “spoiled” and “unspoiled” short stories, experiments that have yielded contradictory results, perhaps because readers emphasize diverse aspects of narrative. I can’t be alone in enjoying the texture of the world-building, the way characters develop, the themes that rise to the surface, or the social commentary. I savor the style of the writing and all that it conveys about the narrative voice. In movies, the music, cinematography, dialogue, or acting are often more satisfying to me than the (rather predictable) plot beats. “How is this story told?” is as important to me as where it concludes. I can give away the fact that Mrs. Ramsey dies in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, but in doing so I’ve hardly prepared you for the breathtaking flow of the novel’s “Time Passes” section.
I do understand that part of the “how” of stories is “how the plot develops.” As scholars have analyzed, “What’s going to happen next?” is one of the engines of narrative, it draws us forward, creating a chain of cause and effect, little mysteries and gaps that must be filled in, enticing us to keep reading.
Speaking now not about endings per se but surprises we stumble across as the story unfolds, these turns may catch us off guard. Who is unmasked as a traitor, spy, or ally? Game of Thrones—among other things—is about treachery. Enigmas constantly arise as to who is loyal to whom and who knows about which betrayal. Sometimes the characters are misled; sometimes the viewer. I was quite surprised by the way the “Trial of Arya” in Winterfell in Season 7 suddenly turns into the “Trial of Littlefinger.”
Surprise can indeed be one of the great pleasures of fiction, the moment where you say to yourself—“Whoa, I didn’t see that coming!” And narratives that shake the ground under the readers’ feet create a certain heightened, tingling tension: “If that can happen, what else is this author going to do? What other conventions will she defy?” If the biggest star and central character, Janet Leigh (Marion Crane) is killed off half-way through Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Sean Bean (Eddard Stark) is beheaded despite Joffrey’s promise in Game of Thrones, then we’d better be on our guard for the rest of the story.
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A Queen in Hiding
Of course, I understand that revelations and endings do matter. I just don’t think they matter as much as people think they do or for every story. What I object to most about admonitions never to reveal plot is the implicit evaluation that surprise is everything, vastly more important than every other element of the work.
Because I had read the novels, my experience of Game of Thrones differed from the experience of viewers new to Westeros. For one thing, I was less confused (!) and I had a better grasp of the characters and Houses. Perhaps my enjoyment of the series was enhanced over a first-time since I anticipated key events.
I believe we can have more meaningful discussions if we push through the dictates of spoiler phobia. When I taught the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the protagonist (Kevin McCarthy) survives to warn the world about the pods, I’d tell the students about the 1978 version in which the heroine approaches the protagonist (now Donald Sutherland) at the end, believing that he is part of the resistance, only to discover… he too has been taken over! The divergent endings tell us so much about the decline in American optimism between 1956 and 1978. Or, summarizing the genre conventions of a romantic comedy, I’d want the class to know about My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), in which the girl doesn’t get the guy, and we accept this as the right conclusion.
If we are going to share our experiences of stories, we must be free to mention everything that we find relevant without fear of censure. Talking about the plot isn’t automatically a malicious flaunting of privilege. These days, with so many options to meet every taste, we’ve all seen or read works that have eluded our friends. To venerate only surprise is to downgrade every other pleasure. Oftimes I can seduce someone into watching a movie by describing a particularly noteworthy plot turn. (Don’t you want to see My Best Friend’s Wedding now? It sheds light on the whole genre.)
Especially these days, as our viewing and reading choices multiply exponentially and we share so little common ground, let’s break through this artificial, self-imposed censorship that holds us back. We may find that knowing more rather than less about a plot entices us to experience a story more richly.
Sarah Kozloff is Professor Emerita of Film from Vassar College and the author of the epic fantasy series The Nine Realms published by Tor/Macmillan.
My stance is that for any story, I have one chance to experience it without knowing what’s going to happen next. Yes, if it’s a conventional genre story I can probably figure out the broad strokes of what will happen but that’s still different from having answers told in the narrative. So I’d prefer to keep that chance if I can. If I want to experience the story while knowing what’s going to happen, I can read/watch it a second time.
The priveleged/non priveleged divide is an interesting one (and for me it’s also about the privelege of TIME) but I do kind of resent the idea that we just shouldn’t care.
I actually don’t even like going into adaptations with spoilers because even if I know WHAT is going to happen, all those other little details have a certain joy when being experienced for the first time. I don’t even like music/soundtrack spoilers because it’s so cool to get excited by a little moment as part of the whole. My one exception to this is listening to the soundtrack albums for the Star Wars movies before watching it to see if I can guess the plot (but even that I consider part of the ‘first time’ because the album is a work in and of itself, and was part of got me hyped for the movie itself) – and even that STILL had surprises for me because some key musical elements were left off that album, and also hinted at other things that I could guess but didn’t truly know.
At any rate, everybody gets to choose how much they want to hype themselves up and how much they want to be unspoiled. Weirdly enough, nowadays, even a trailer can be spoiled (I’m still kind of bitter at Tor for spoling the Han reveal at the end of the first TFA trailer by blasting it on the front page, instead of the experience of a trailer which – musical and visuals alike – were perfectly crafted to build to an emotional experience that ended with that reveal).
I’m with noblehunter @1. I am an avid re-reader (or, I used to be, when I had the time), and there is definitely value to me in re-exploring works that I know backwards and forwards, but I really appreciate not knowing what’s coming the first time I read/watch something.
And a lot depends on how soon after the work premieres that the spoiler happens. Someone complaining about being spoiled for The Sixth Sense these days is fairly ridiculous (a twenty-year old movie, really?), but the issue of privilege and early access is definitely a factor.
Overall, it boils down to respect and expectations. There’s not a bright line where “after this point, spoilers are a go” in every situation, but as long as people know the expectations they can go to forums that are appropriate for their tastes.
Thank you for a fascinating, well-reasoned article.
I love spoilers, I wouldn’t have survived season four of Babylon 5 without them. Spoilers warned me that the new Star Wars Trilogy was going to be a disappointing retread and saved me some money. Spoilers have saved me hours of time, enabling me to ignore shows I wouldn’t like and soothed my nerves, which don’t take suspense well.
I didn’t read this article so nobody tell me how it ends
I’m also an academic, and I thought this was interesting and worth diving into – but I’ve also been tired for a while of the notion that the young folks today are being noticeably more squeamish and hysterical than in the past. Nothing in my experience suggests this, and I always find this condescending given that (in my experience, anyway) undergrads if anything now talk much more openly and nonchalantly than they did 10-15 years ago about e.g. mental illness, power dynamics in society, etc. This article reminded me a bit of the uproar over trigger warnings, which were also painted as a supposed coddling device (unconvincingly, in my opinion, relative to their use and effects in reality as I’ve witnessed it). I do think that if students sign up for a class and something’s on the syllabus, they should know the entirety is going to be discussed. Literature majors will soon learn that grasping their subject sometimes might well mean running into spoilers sometimes. But I also think it was inevitable that spoiler warnings as a societal phenomenon were going to arise, because of the utter volume of entertainment out there these days and how wildly accessible it is to anyone who has an Internet-connected device of any kind. The commonality with trigger warnings, I’d say, is that it’s easy to mistake for an overreaction in the direction of censorship, when (as per my observations) it’s just giving a heads-up to people in the room who might have a different set of experiences and background knowledge that it’s worth being a little bit careful about because then their experience in the classroom will be orders of magnitude better. The key in both cases is giving people control over when they receive information.
I think TVTropes handles it well: spoilers are whited-out by default (such that you’d have to highlight over them to see them), but for any page referring to a specific work of entertainment (a book, TV series, webcomic, etc.), you can click a button to show all the spoilers if you know them and/or aren’t bothered by the idea of running into them.
It’s an interesting question.
But I do think that students in a film history class ought to be prepared to hear things about films.
And I may not always know where to draw the line, but I’m pretty sure that even the finer plot points of Little Women should fall on the open-secrets side of it. (Yes, I have actually seen such a discussion.)
I’m entirely on the side of 1 and 2. I don’t see any harm at all to spoiler warnings, and a great deal of harm to reveals without them.
Respectfully, I find this article to be the same condescending stance that I am wrong for preferring to enjoy the journey of a story my first time through.
I can find enjoyment in rewatching something I enjoy, but the experience is different than going in fresh. I do not take enjoyment from watching something I have not seen if I am thinking of the big spoiler all the way through, which is going to happen if I know it. I have done this and it does not work. The experience is lessened. It is the equivalent of someone warning me “This part is so funny, you’re going to laugh so hard when you see it,” just before the joke is told. It falls flat and it leaves a terrible taste in my mouth.
Some things are going to be impossible to avoid as time and distance lengthen from a work’s original airing. Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Empire Strikes Back, etc are all well within the cultural zeitgeist that it would be nearly impossible to experience other media without being spoiled. But a discussion of something like Harrow the Ninth, or Knives Out should absolutely be done in a way that anyone entering the space would know to expect spoilers.
The viewer, and only the viewer, should be the one to decide whether they wish to have prior information and to think otherwise is both selfish and offensive. The internet has provided us with plenty of spaces to cordon off our discussions of the things we enjoy.