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In this final episode of Season Three we discuss Richard’s new book, which is on the philosophy of spoilers. After four episodes of interviews from the annual meeting of the Pop Culture Association, we are back to our regular format: we have a listener musing and discuss what we’ve been liking of late in Pop Culture (one astute viewer called this segment Siskel and Q*Bert).
Music in this episode:
“Attack of the Mole Men” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Rise of the Superhero
https://www.purple-planet.com
Fat Cartoon Jazz
https://www.purple-planet.com
I haven’t listened to the episode yet, but I’m in the middle of reading the book and just finished the section about the Leavitt and Christenfeld study that was interpreted as showing that people prefer spoiled stories. I generally don’t mind spoilers. I love to reread books and rewatch movies, and I don’t really care if I know plot twists or even the ending. I am of the opinion that knowing ahead of time doesn’t spoil the experience. I think, too, that in most genre fiction people have a pretty good general idea of what will happen, so that, in a sense, the story is already spoiled. My wife and I were watching the Handmaid’s Tale the other night (spoiler alert). It was the episode in season two in which June escapes and gets in a plane that was going to take her to Canada. I knew all through the show that she was not going to make it, as the show couldn’t very well continue otherwise, but like any good viewer or reader, I suspended my disbelief. The only surprise was how she would fail to get to Canada. This is true for many movies and books. In superhero movies, you know that the hero will eventually win, for example, or that, if the hero loses (or even dies) it is only a temporary setback. One reason that these stories are so popular is because people know exactly what they are getting. This also may be why, however, the types of spoilers you mention in the book, like telling people that Snape killed Dumbledore, are such offenses. They are the types of twists that defy our genre expectations or provide real surprises in a film or book that will still follow a genre pattern (the hero defeats the villain).