This post continues my exploration of spoilers and story arcs.
I saw Avengers: Endgame (which, I’m sorry whatever spirit I angered, please don’t make me mention Marvel properties here again) before every one of my friends back home. It released later for them, somehow, than it did for me in rural northeast Missouri. When I saw it, my group chat allowed me to send one text, one byte, to indicate the number of post-credits scenes: 0, 1, or 2. No “dude guess what happened,” no “I can’t say any more but,” not even “I liked it” or “I didn’t.”
My friends and I pathologize spoilers. Why? Endgame isn’t art. It’s not confronting. Its creators would never suffer a twist ending. What did we all seek from unblemished viewing?
Well, I’ve been thinking about catharsis theory, or any of the explanations for why we like sad and scary movies. No one claims to have cracked this thing wide open, but plenty of reasonable explanations pry the question ajar. All have to do with stimulation.
When we are exposed to the supernormal (gah, I love that), we’re switching on lights in potentially disused parts of our brains. You don’t usually get to enjoy it when a masked figure hurtles at you with a kitchen knife. In the safety of a story, you can. It’s rehearsal.
We experience sadness more commonly, so sad movies are less kicking the wheels and more about taking our emotions out for a spin. Empathy rules, and getting to feel empathy where no one you love is actually being hurt rules more. This feels like it’s on the right track.
Sadness, fear — but also joy and righteous anger. Surprise, the startle response, is another foundational emotion. Surprise is ephemeral by definition. Tragedy and true terror linger on for a long time, so it’s easier to noodle on the depth of experience afforded by those emotions. Why don’t we give surprise a fair shake?
Art is about novelty, among other things. Surprise is the emotional response to novelty. Don’t these two naturally pair?
In D&D, we huck dice all the time. Running that game would be so much easier if I could just describe what I want to happen. But that murders the magic of the game. Dice reflect uncertainty. They are ersatz novelty — something for us non-Lynchian laymen, still chipping through our nonfiction books but watching three Bond movies in a month, who have moments rather than tortured days to consider how the Character’s decision will unfold in the direction of their Motivation, towards Tragedy and Bliss.
If you could tell me how every die roll would turn out, the game would be ruined. If you could spoil it, in other words, the game would lack surprise.
Stories conjure sadness, fear, happiness, anger, and surprise. Some arcana could probably thieve the joy from a happy movie — just try watching a feel-good flick starring a hard cancelled actor. But in a world where it’s easy to steal joy or fear or rage we would need some word for it. We don’t. We only have spoilers, because surprise is easy to spoil.
Surprise doesn’t star in superhero movies. At best it’s on the fourth or fifth screen of the credits. “Robert Downey Jr., with surprise and Buncha Crunch.” The event of Endgame, though, had drama all its own. There were stakes. 0, 1, or 2? We didn’t know what was next. We all wanted to walk away with our own experience, our own opinions, ones that were ours. Spoilers, maybe the thrill of spoiling, is that you can make someone else’s experience your own.
And people love power. No surprise there.