“Spoilers, Sweetie.”
Another cultural discussion about spoilers is upon us, with a chunk of online discourse devoted to their definition and their statute of limitations.
This has in part been prompted by the announced simultaneous “drop” of the next series of Doctor Who, with some fans who’re intending to watch the programme on transmission concerned that it being available on iPlayer from midnight Saturday mornings means they will, in practice, be unable to use the internet between then and that evening’s showing, for fear of being told what happens without asking.
(It is, additionally and incidentally, delightful that this discussion should be occurring in the same week that Steven Moffat’s return to Doctor Who as a guest writer is confirmed, with many fans hoping / assuming his new episode will provide for a meeting between Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor and his spoiler phobic wife, River Song.)
The galaxy brain take on spoiler discourse is to declare caring about knowing what happens in fiction in advance laughably unsophisticated. As such, the concerns of anyone who does so can be dismissed.
This falls into two parts. The first is the idea that concern about spoilers is a recent phenomenon, and part of a broader infantilization of culture. The second is an assertion that anything which is lessened by having elements of its plot known in advance is not worth bothering with anyway. Something which is “good”, lasts and thus the details of many good things are often known in advance, yet they remain “good”. Audiences engage and re-engage with material of lasting worth for pleasures more rarefied and esoteric than plain, silly old “what happens”.
The phrase “Spoiler warning”, it seems, originates in the proto-internet of newsnet and was appended to discussions of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) in the days immediately after its release. By 1991 the idea was cemented enough for The Simpsons, already one of the biggest television series on the planet, to do a celebrated gag about it, with a flashback showing Homer blowing the plot twist from Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back (1981) for those queuing outside a cinema. Neither of those are recent, but there are plenty of earlier examples of de facto spoiler warnings. The trailer for Psycho (1960) has Hitchcock warning viewers not to reveal the ending, even as he lies to conceal the plot. Agatha Christie’s play 1952 play The Mousetrap asks the audience not to reveal whodunnit at its conclusion (and Christie disliked plot points from her work being discussed in reviews). Invoking the “statute of limitations” question from earlier, when Paul Merton joked about the end of The Mousetrap on television in 1994, the BBC received complaints from people who had tickets for it the following week. Up to a point, who can blame them?
Some would argue that none of the above qualify as good enough works of art to dismiss their second objection to “spoiler culture”, although The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan and Psycho have grown, not diminished, in stature since original release, and The Mousetrap, still on in London’s West End after most of a century must be doing something right. In each case, the work’s authors (however defined) demonstrably preferred as much of the audience as possible to come to their stories unencumbered with foreknowledge.
This is unsurprising: nobody ever wrote anything hoping its contents would be outlined to interested parties via someone else’s third hand account rather than through their own work. Not even this. (Receiving plot information in such a manner is a process analogous to how much online political discourse is conducted by people reacting to other people’s reactions to the headlines of articles neither has read.)
I have lost count of the number of introductions I have sat through at film festivals or the BFI, up to and including this week, where an invited guest has felt unable to say anything beyond pleasantries until after the screening, because they want you to see work they’re proud of, before they tell you about it. Of course, we’re not obligated to take someone’s own high opinion of their work at face value. But the BFI has included spoiler warnings on its screening notes for at least three decades. I think we can reasonably assume that it thinks at least some films are good? Equally, the introductions to Penguin Classics have drily advised readers that “New readers are advised that this introduction makes detail of the plot explicit” since before I was an undergraduate, and exactly because their editions of something explicitly described as “the world’s best books” serve multiple audiences with multiple needs.
It’s well attested that in 1841 crowds gathered to buy imported copies of the issue of the Charles Dickens edited magazine Master Humphrey's’ Clock, in which the final episode of The Old Curiosity Shop was printed. They wanted to know what happened, but they wanted to discover that by reading the story and as soon as possible, because plot points are, for most, more satisfying in situ.
If we can quickly define the difference between story and plot as “what happens” and “how it happens”, (offending all Russian formalists by trivialising fabula and syuzhet along the way) the reason that a viewer doesn’t want Doctor Who spoiled isn’t because they crassly only care about plot, it’s for the same reason hundreds of people found themselves waiting for magazines to be unloaded onto a New York dock. Because they want to see plot in context. If they only cared about plot, they’d just read a synopsis. Or ask a friend. Or go on social media more than four seconds after an embargo is lifted.
The idea that plot can never matter is an obvious reductio ad absurdum, eliding plot with surprise, and surprise with shock: The affectation that the controlled release of story is a cheap trick rather than a long established art: Aristotle thought plot (as “mythos”) the most important aspect of drama, while not being the whole of drama. That’s obviously true. Soap opera attracts huge audiences, but is little returned to, because it almost entirely consists of forward momentum, of plot and revelation.
To dismiss worrying about “spoilers” is to say there aren’t different, legitimate methods and processes of experience. Anecdotally, some find knowing plot details in advance makes some fiction, regardless of media, less stressful to consume (perhaps reflecting Derrida’s description of plot as “an instrument of torture”.)
I don’t ever remember not knowing that the Daleks turn up at the end of Frontier in Space. I think I knew it even before I read its excellent novelisation Doctor Who and the Space War. This meant the first time I saw it I was watching it as others might on a subsequent viewing. Spotting little clues such as the logo on the Master’s jacket, smirking as the Doctor ponders who is responsible, and generally just waiting for them to turn up. I enjoyed that process, but would I have gotten more out of it had I not known? I can’t tell you. I suspect so. Someone who saw the story unsullied first, and then returned to it probably could. Because if you really do think you can appreciate something in a more exalted manner once you know what happens in it and how it happens, you can always watch it or read it again.
Most Doctor Who is, of course, rewatchable. And I say that as someone who has seen every extant episode of Doctor Who, bar a handful of the most recent, a minimum of twice. But it is also a series that delights in the reveal. Whether that’s the Dalek at the end of The Space Museum, the revelation that the Doctor and the War Chief of The War Games know each other, the meaning of YANA, the existence of the War Doctor or Captain Jack’s return in Fugitive of the Judoon. Those are all great Doctor Who stories.(Yes, I’m including The Space Museum.) They are all worth returning to. But all gain an extra frisson from the viewer going in unforewarned. Again, I know this because I did.
Because, and this is important; not knowing and knowing are pleasures that can be enjoyed successively. Knowing and not knowing aren’t.
Months used to pass between US and UK film releases, these days widespread simultaneous release strategies means it’s a matter of hours, and with the UK tradition of films opening on Thursdays or even Wednesdays in large cities, spoiler traffic across the Atlantic is not always one way. Perhaps Doctor Who at midnight is America’s revenge for all those Marvel films we got first. Although there is arguably something ridiculous about avoiding the morning news in a UK undergoing a protracted political crisis because a television programme nominally aired at midnight in simulcast with its US screening, and that means some people regards its contents as fair game, whether you want them to or not.
In 1980 the mystery of “Who Shot JR?” could be preserved for Dallas’ UK audience by the BBC showing the episode the day after it screened in America; because it was less than twenty four hours, the papers had already gone to press. In a world of 24 hour global news and social media, and a smartphone in every pocket, it seems impossible that it was ever so simple. (Although as no one now remembered the answers to that question, perhaps in this instance it was not even worth that effort.)
We talk about spoilers and their consequences more now, yes. That’s annoying for both those who want to avoid them and those who can’t understand why anyone would. But it’s also not because plot or what spoils it has changed. It hasn’t. Everything else has.
