Last week, I introduced the idea of the Spoiler Window. You can spoil a window that’s been out for more than six months, but less than five years.
An underlying assumption throughout the piece was that spoilers are bad. But is that necessarily true? After all, there was a time when people would walk into a theater in the middle of a movie, watch the whole double-feature, and wait for the first movie to come back around. It’s where the phrase “This is where we came in” originates.
Do people really hate spoilers?
There’s a famous study1 from a few years ago that claimed spoilers actually enhance the reader/viewer’s experience. Most people, upon hearing about this study, immediately respond, “That’s not true, I hate spoilers. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t.” Sometimes we need to accept our personal experiences aren’t necessarily representative, but when a study shows something this far off from common sense, I think it’s worth looking at the study’s methodology2 and reproducibility.3
In this case, the methodology made a lot of sense to me. They tested a few different short stories from a few different genres. The researchers would (or wouldn’t, at random) “inadvertently” spoil the ending without telling the subject it was a spoiler. And people who had been spoiled liked the story better, on average.
There are some problems, like the fact that these test subjects weren’t seeking out these particular stories on their own. If you haven’t been meaning to get around to “Lamb to the Slaughter,” maybe I can’t spoil the story because you don’t care.
There’s also the possibility that knowing you’re hearing a spoiler means you view the entire story through that lens. If you don’t know [SPOILER ALERT] that “the classic story in which the woman murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb” spoils the twist, then it’s too late to get upset by the time you realize what happened.
But what about replicative studies? I haven’t found any studies that reproduced these results,4 but several that contradict them.5 It turns out, not only does the kind of spoiler matter, but also the kind of viewer. Some people like to approach a story as a puzzle, something to figure out; they hate spoilers.
As to the way a story is spoiled, it seems to come down to whether you’re bluntly describing events, or offering a broad overview of the theme.
Not all spoilers are equal
All of this is complicated by the fact that spoilers aren’t all exactly alike. As mentioned above, popularity matters. Do you know who Luke’s father is? Do you know who Keyser Söze is? Do you know who Rosebud is?
The answer is obvious or baffling, depending on your generation and film tastes.
Sometimes, just telling you that there is a twist means that you’ll watch the movie differently. I saw Gambit in class with virtually no introduction, and I’m grateful for that. Even the poster frames the movie in terms of spoilers—
Once, I read a review for Coherence that started something like, “This is a movie that’s better when you don’t know anything about it. Don't even finish reading this review, just go watch Coherence right now.” That was enough for me; I really never did finish reading the review, and I loved the movie.
The same thing goes for Better Watch Out—the less you know, the better. But knowing that, you’ll be thinking about the movie through that lens, won’t you? The knowledge that there’s a spoiler is a spoiler in itself,
Finally, there’s the question of what exactly you’re spoiling. Major events are obviously more spoilery than minor ones. But people seem to take death spoilers more seriously, too.
My Tell, Don’t Show video spoiled the death of a major character in Unforgiven, but it also gave away the ending of A Few Good Men. I heard complaints about the former, but not the latter. These both came out in 1992, so it’s not a question of age. I really think it’s just that death, even fictional death, is more important.
A personal example
I had read and very much enjoyed The Martian, so when I had the chance to go see a sneak preview, I jumped at it. It was a test screening, so the effects weren’t even done yet.
My wife, on the other hand, hadn’t read the book. She wanted to know if Matt Damon’s character got off Mars or not, before deciding if she’d come with me to the screening. I said, “I can’t tell you that! That’ll spoil the movie.”
We went back and forth, but she kept insisting. “I’m not going to waste two hours on this movie if he just dies in the end.” She wanted to be spoiled, not because she wanted to know the sequence of events in advance, but because she wanted to know if the movie was a downer.
Epilogue
I learned my wife hates down endings. At some other point, I found out she really loves The Great Escape. [SPOILER ALERT] So one day, we sat down to watch it together, and I was a little… surprised by the ending.
“What the hell was that?! I thought you hate down endings!”
She goes, “I usually stop when Steve McQueen rides away on the motorcycle.”
So, she kind of anti-spoiled the ending for me by not saying anything about it.
Spoiler warning: that link contains spoilers for The Usual Suspects, Game of Thrones season 6, and the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “Lamb to the Slaughter.”
Like that shoddy “study” that showed people were confused by Babylon Bee headlines by… rephrasing the headlines to remove the jokes.
If you haven’t heard of the “replication crisis,” beware, it is a scary rabbit hole to fall down.
Psychology Today has a good write up on the state of spoiler research.