And lately, most likely with the “blessing” of social media, such warnings have become annoyingly, even threateningly abundant. At the height of popularity of the TV series Game of Thrones, British TV host James Corden made a joke on the air about one of the characters being killed off, prompting a full-on Twitter backlash against him. Fans of the show did not shy away from calling Corden a “fat fuck” for the spoilers on the air, and saying “I hope his kid gets cancer.” There are countless examples like this.
Is it true that if you know the plot, the story of a novel or a movie from the start, you no longer need to read or watch it? To reduce a work of art to a mere plot, to evaluate it on the basis of the invented effect of a “twist at the end” is unfair both to its creators and to the viewer. And what about so many theory books on art, different genres, trends, the unique style of each author, means of expression, actors? How did spoiler hysteria come about in the first place, and why has it become so relevant?
Media research expert Judith Rosenbaum and Professor Benjamin Johnson in their study “Spoiler Alert: Consequences of Narrative Spoilers for Dimensions of Enjoyment, Appreciation, and Transportation” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0093650214564051#con2) define a spoiler as “premature and undesired information about how a narrative’s arc will conclude.” That is, something that kills the intrigue of the plot: to put it crudely, learning, for example, the identity of the killer from someone else kills the reader’s or viewer’s excitement and interest in the work.
The word spoiler in its current meaning was first used in 1971 by writer Douglas Kenney in the article titled “Spoilers” in the humor magazine National Lampoon. In his article, Kenney gave away the endings of many books and movies, including those by Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock, saying this was a public service to readers and viewers to save them time and money.
Until the 1970s, the movie industry had no problem with spoilers. On the contrary, word of mouth advertising was considered one of the most effective methods. Popular culture researcher Richard Greene says in his book on the nature of spoilers Spoiler Alert!: “Back then my friends and I would race to be the one to reveal a spoiler to the entire group, though we didn’t think of them as spoilers. It was a kind of competition among us. <…> Surprisingly, no one would have dreamed of objecting upon hearing this news. We simply didn’t have the concept of a spoiler back in the 1960s.”
Spoiler warnings, however, can be found at various times in cinema history. For example, the opening credits of the 1926 silent film The Bat read: “Can you keep a secret? Don’t reveal the identity of ‘The Bat’. Future audiences will fully enjoy this mystery play if left to find out for themselves.” And in the closing shots of French director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 psychological thriller Les Diaboliques, the author addresses the audience, saying, “Don’t be diabolical. Don’t spoil the film for your friends by telling them what happens.”
And then, of course, there is Alfred Hitchcock. The seasoned master of suspense, when he came up with the idea to adapt for screen the novel Psycho, not only did he buy the rights to the novel anonymously, he also acquired every available copy he could find. When the film was released in 1960, he refused to hold a press conference and forbade the actors to talk to reporters. The film’s trailer featured footage of Vera Miles screaming, and the rest of it was Hitchcock strolling through the Bates Motel. The director also instructed not to let people who were late for screenings into movie theaters, even if that person was the Queen of England, which was quite a bold move for America.
In those days, movie theaters in the United States operated on a system of continuous admissions; anyone could buy a ticket and enter the theater at any time, or even watch several movies in a row on a single ticket without leaving the theater. Although movie theater owners were initially reluctant to comply with Hitchcock’s demand, the film was an instant hit. People who were late would line up and wait for the next showing of Psycho.
In the 1970s Hollywood went through a recession, movie companies lost about half a billion dollars. By the way, the popularization of television also played a major role in that. In order to mitigate the recession, the government introduced new investment reforms, which also included tax incentives, young people were getting attracted to the movie industry, action in movies came to the fore. Among other things, the movie theater system was revamped, multiplexes were expanded, allowing multiple simultaneous screenings of blockbusters. The reforms resulted in what film critic David Bordwell called “megapictures”, or “event pictures”. These movies were screened simultaneously in thousands of venues, they were covered by the media, they were discussed by almost everyone from children to adults. Sequels to movies like Jaws, Star Wars, and The Godfather were being made, generating a lot of interest from audiences. It goes without saying that both production and advertising budgets for this type of projects were also quite large. The financial risks of studios, the probability of movies being box office failures were so high that plot twists, endings of movies were strictly safeguarded to attract viewers to the theaters. But in most cases, the studios intentionally fueled public curiosity by creating a veil of mystery around the plot. Thus, in the words of Richard Greene, the concept of spoilers gradually began to take shape.
“Spoiler alert!”, the famous spoiler warning during movie discussions on various forums that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Internet quickly became widespread, became relevant. The mass popularity of the Internet also gave rise to a new phenomenon called “geek culture.” One of the founders of this phenomenon was Harry Knowles, creator of the website Ain’t It Cool News. Along with news and reviews, this website published gossip, rumors and hoaxes. Knowles’ site would post news, reviews of franchises like Star Wars faster than anyone else. Soon the site became a force capable of both promoting and disrupting major movie projects. Knowles, on the other hand, adopted the pseudonym “King Geek.” Hollywood studios began to reckon with Knowles and his kind, and invite them to premieres, the privilege previously reserved only for journalists from popular publications. Thanks to Knowles, giant studios discovered the true potential of the spoiler, its ability, if used correctly, to generate interest in a product. Studios set up special marketing departments to oversee this process, and teasers began to emerge.
In the 2000s, as social media started to invade our lives, the fear of spoilers turned into a real hysteria. Along with the regular audience, media, movie platforms paid special attention to this issue. For example, the popular culture website Vulture introduced spoiler rules in 2008. According to this rule, spoilers cannot be published without warning until a week after the premiere of a movie, on the following Monday, and spoilers are not allowed in the title of a piece until a month later. Most platforms that host movie content leave it up to the reader to choose whether to read spoilers, hiding reviews and audience comments in various ways. Famous American film critic Roger Ebert in his 2005 article “Critics have no right to play spoiler” (https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/critics-have-no-right-to-play-spoiler) urges his colleagues to be careful: “The characters in movies do not always do what we would do. Sometimes they make choices that offend us. That is their right. It is our right to disagree with them. It is not our right, however, to destroy for others the experience of being as surprised by those choices as we were. A few years ago, I began to notice “spoiler warnings” on Web-based movie reviews — a shorthand way of informing the reader that a key plot point was about to be revealed. Having heard from more than a few readers accusing me of telling too much of the story, I began using such warnings in my reviews. In the case of some films, however, even to hint that there is a surprise is to reveal too much. In my review of ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ which I consider the best film of 2004, I wrote: ‘It is a movie about a boxer. What else it is, all it is, how deep it goes, what emotional power it contains, I cannot suggest in this review, because I will not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and death.’”
Lately, the fear of spoilers has grown so much that authors and studios resort to most unthinkable methods. Scripts are delivered to the actors directly into their hands, on paper. Or the script is not allowed to be taken out of the studio, and the actors have to read it under the supervision of security. Chris Carter, director of the movie The X-Files: I Want to Believe, watched the actors through a hidden camera to prevent script leaks. On the set of The Avengers, actors usually have no idea who they are talking to, who they are fighting, the lines are addressed to a green screen.
Spoilers are feared not only by creators of franchises and blockbusters, but also by the authors of independent films. The executive producer of Antichrist Peter Aalbæk Jensen accidentally revealed the film’s planned twist, which caused Lars von Trier to develop a severe depression, the filming was suspended, and the ending was changed. (In the original version, earth was created by Satan.) A similar incident happened during the filming of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. One of the director’s friends posted the script on the Internet, and he had to rewrite the ending. After the screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the Cannes Film Festival, Tarantino asked the audience not to spoil the film on social media.
A Netflix poll on spoilers revealed that 76% of Americans think spoilers are a “necessary evil” (24% in the UK) and 58% feel guilty about sharing spoilers (37% in the UK).
Nowadays, this fear has reached the point where many professionals have begun to fight it, even the term “spoilerphobia” has been coined. In the article mentioned earlier, Roger Ebert proceeds after the spoiler warning to write in detail about the plot of the movie Million Dollar Baby: he has to do it, otherwise its analysis is impossible. Lindsay King-Miller in her article “Stop Caring so goddamn much about spoilers” (https://www.vice.com/en/article/gyb73j/stop-caring-so-goddamn-much-about-spoilers?utm_source=vicetwitterus), says that discussions of the issues raised in works of art hit a wall of spoiler warnings: “Our obsession with spoiler warnings actually prevents us from having meaningful and necessary conversations about art.”
In fact, if you think about it, it is easy to see that spoiler is an unwarranted artificial concept embedded in our minds. Otherwise, we would not be able to reread our favorite books and rewatch our favorite movies over and over again. Not to mention the classics. For example, yet another film adaptation of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was released in Russia in January. With a budget of 1.2 billion rubles (approximately 19-20 million manat), the film grossed more than 1 billion rubles in the first two weeks. If the concept of the spoiler is to be believed, the film should have flopped because most of us know by heart what happens in Bulgakov’s novel of the same name. More than that, the book has been adapted many times.
In 2011, Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld from the University of California, San Diego, gave two versions of famous writers’ stories to a group of people to determine the strength of spoiler effect. One of the versions contained spoilers about the ending of the story at the beginning or in the middle. At the end of the experiment, many of the participants said they were more interested in reading the spoiled stories. Analyzing the results, the researchers concluded that prior knowledge of the ending enables a deeper appreciation of the work and increases the desire to know how the story reached a particular outcome.
As we can see, spoiler is a marketing trick of the capitalist world, designed to increase the consumption of a product, and there is no need to be afraid of it. The reason any work of art makes a certain impression on the reader or viewer is not so much what the story is about, i.e., the plot, but how it is told: its means of expression, imagery, visuals, special effects, style, acting, and much more. This can be applied even to franchises like Star Wars, or Marvel products. So, let’s not needlessly deprive ourselves of the pleasure of personal experience just because we learned the identity of the killer from an envious friend.
