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With the end of year (Christmas/New Year/Summer/I know Aunt Bronwyn will start in again about my weight and childlessness and every year I tell myself I won't put up with her nonsense and every year I don a rictus smile, walk away and take a swig of Bundy) holidays upon us, the lucky of us are on holidays from work, which means a chance to catch up with relatives like Aunt Bronwyn; vow to fix that thing about the house and get as far as the Bunnings car park before seeing it's so crowded the laws of civilised parking have broken down and going home; or cursing that once again, you neglected to make plans to get out of the city.
But hey, the summer break means you've got a chance to catch up on the reading and binge watching you haven't had time for through the working/school/appointments/what the heck has the cat done to the carpet now year. And in putting aside that book or TV show until now, you've assuidiously avoided spoilers, refusing to read any episode recaps or round ups of the year's best books, lest the ending be given away; for what then would be the point of reading or watching?
But if you've been avoiding possible spoilers whilst eagerly awaiting the chance to watch Sunny or The Only Murders in the Building, or read Intermezzo or Martyr, then before you do settle back to enjoy any of these, find a good review or two for your chosen tome that reveals the ending. Yep - spoil yourself. Because knowing the ending to a work of fiction - having the ending spoiled - increases people's enjoyment of the work.
Researchers from the University of California discuss the studies and their findings that spoilers make things better here:
The idea is anathema in an online society, even as those of us too old for Snapchat and too young for constant Facebook have scaled back from social media. Revealing spoilers for whatever novels, TV shows or movies are trending right now is viewed as perhaps not as bad as hate speech, but definitely worse than sending the link to your "world's sexiest horses rated by how far they could get it" drive to all your colleagues, friends, and family, including your Great Aunt Joy, who admitted to you later that the sub folder "Robert Mapplethorpe pics evoking horses" actually gave her much needed cheer in her recovery from gall bladder surgery, for which you were very grateful, remembering the time you saw Joy empty a bottle of tomato sauce into Bronwyn's handbag after Bronwyn made a homophobic slur about your cousin Jack. Alas Great Aunt Joy was the only relative who wasn't unhappy with the turn of events and you heard from every last one of the others in increasingly shrill indignation.
In the pre streaming era, when recent TV episodes and movies aired in Australia months before their American releases, we were used to spoilers. Someone had recently returned from America, or had spoken to friends or family in America, and word spread fast. Maggie shot Mr Burns, the Seninfeld gang end up in jail, the ship sinks at the end of Titanic. We knew what was coming, and watched it anyway.
The mindset that avoids at all costs spoilers for works of fiction - books, movies, TV series - seeing them as, well, spoiled, the experience ruined, is a mindset which, rather than revelling in and appreciating those works, has come to see them as achievements to be ticked off. This mindset informs how we reflect on the works - I figured out who the murderer was before it was revealed, Penny and Maria getting married after the massacre makes no sense at all and feels like the author just wanted to finish the damn book, I can't believe Smithers won the Iron Throne.
But in avoiding spoilers, you're also avoiding the magic of great works of fiction - whether on the page or the screen - the opportunity to immerse yourself, for however long, in another world, to understand the characters, to appreciate the settings, to revel in the language. It's hard to fully enjoy what's happening if you have half your mind on wondering what's going to happen.
Subconsciously I realised this - when particularly enjoying a novel, I'd sometimes take a peek online for the ending, so I could enjoy the journey without focusing on the destination, but I always felt strangely guilty about it, like I was breaking the rules of readership. Not anymore: from now on I'm going to seek out endings any time I fancy.
Great works of art can be enjoyed again and again. As the University of California researches say, no one skips a performance of Romeo and Juliet cause they know the kids die at the end. Any decent work of art should be able to stand on its own without holding viewers in its thrall in anticipation of the big reveal.
There will be a few books in your life that become favourites, that stay with you forever, that you'll read over and over across your life. But (one hopes) you'll read a bunch of other good books that for whatever reason, usually that there are always too many books to read and never enough time to read them, that you'll never read again. In racing to the conclusion of these books, we often fail to stop and savour the journey.
Try this with one book on your upcoming reading list: seek out some good reviews which include spoilers. These can be hard to find. Popular books often have highly rated Goodreads reviews including spoilers. Wikipedia sometimes gets all coy, bo articles repeating the publisher's promotional blurb in place of a thorough plot outline from beginning to conclusion. There's this "Book Tok" business but I don know much about it, and I can only imagine that Gen Z have even more of a horro spoilers than earlier generations who had to wait weeks or months for books or sh and knew that sometimes, endings are revealed before the book is available. But a book which can't stand up as a work of entertainment once its surprise ending is revealed, isn't really a work worth reading at all.
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