Speakers – #spoiltheconference – An Interdisciplinary Conference on Spoilers

Keynotes

Kristina Busse, Independent Scholar

Spoiler Warnings: Negotiating Originality, Genre Expectation, and the Enjoyments of Repetition
Kristina Busse (PhD English, Tulane University) is an independent scholar and media fan. Her primary research is on fan fiction and fan cultures, and her work has appeared in various collections and journals, including Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, and Popular Communication. She is founding coeditor of the online peer-reviewed academic journal Transformative Works and Culture (2008– ). Kristina is the author of Framing Fan Fiction (U of Iowa, 2017) as well as coeditor of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (McFarland, 2006), Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (McFarland, 2012), and The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (U of Iowa, 2014). She is currently coauthoring Fan Fantasies and the Politics of Desire (U of Michigan, 2023) with Alexis Lothian.

Abstract

In this talk I suggest that there exist structural parallels between an inclination for spoilers and fannish engagements that rewards and requires repeated reading/viewing of the text. Fan engagement tends to value repetition: fannish texts are often comprised of genre shows or series that extend existing universes; most fans repeatedly watch and discuss episodes and entire seasons, often collectively; the sharing of screen shots, GIFs, and videos on social media platforms recalls favorite scenes; and, finally, fan fiction revisits familiar moments in the source tex—again and again.Fan fiction is heavily indebted to familiar genre tropes, which is demonstrated in fandom’s intricate archival tagging structures. Tags offer readers basic paratextual information ranging from fandom, age ratings, and triggering content, to setting, characterization, and narrative tropes. These folksonomies are also gaining popularity in professional book marketing and reviewing; this paratextual expansion beyond fannish boundaries suggests that there may be substantial groups of readers who prefer detailed information before starting a text.There has been important recent work that sidesteps the moral judgment so often attached to spoiler discourses. In its stead, there is a greater focus on the exact relationship between types of spoilers and texts and their respective effects on audience enjoyments. I look at receptions within fan and genre studies specifically, in order to argue that anticipating, experiencing, and fulfilling specific expectations can generate deep satisfaction. Drawing from the reception of “retold stories,” I conclude that spoiled texts can offer the safety of the familiar and the comfort of the known.

Albrecht Koschorke, University of Konstanz

Some Notes on Suspense
Albrecht Koschorke is a professor of German literature and literary studies at the University of Konstanz and an extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Recent publications: On Hitler’s «Mein Kampf». The Poetics of National Socialism. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press 2017. – Fact and Fiction. Elements of a General Theory of Narrative. Berlin Boston: de Gruyter 2018.

Abstract

What do spoilers spoil? They deprive people of surprise & suspense. But what is suspense, how is it built into a story, and how does it affect the story’s consumers? There are many genres or ways of storytelling whose attractiveness doesn’t depend on providing suspense. And there are stories that might be considered suspenseful but won’t lose any of their appeal when read, listened to or watched yet again. Thus spoilers are a threat only to a specific kind of narration and certain techniques of finalizing a plot. – The lecture aims at exploring the background of the conference’s topic from a narratological point of view.

Judith E. Rosenbaum, University of Maine

Spoilers and the Narrative Experience: Lessons from Ten Years of Empirical Research
Judith E. Rosenbaum (Ph.D., Radboud University Nijmegen) is an Associate Professor in Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine. She conducts research focused on understanding how people actively use media content in their daily lives and how this usage is related to their identities, relationships, and perceptions of reality. Her research has specifically looked at the role played by spoilers in the narrative experience; how social media usage impacts people’s attitudes, behaviors, and connections; and media literacy, fake news, and misinformation. Her work has appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including Communication Research, Media Psychology, Journal of Media Psychology, Communication Teacher, Journal of Media Literacy Education, and Psychology of Popular Media Culture. She also authored Constructing Digital Cultures: Tweets, Trends, Race and Gender (Lexington, 2018) and co-edited Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020).
Abstract

In the past decade, empirical research into how spoilers impact people’s enjoyment of a narrative has grown exponentially. Starting with a single study published over ten years ago (Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011), which showed that spoilers enhanced enjoyment, and a follow-up study a few years later (Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2015) that found the opposite, the field quickly moved from proving whether or not spoilers impacted enjoyment to understanding how this relationship works. Dozens of publications have since explored how and when spoilers impact the narrative experience. Empirical research into spoilers mainly utilizes experiments and initially relied on literary short stories but eventually switched to clips taken from films, movie trailers, and entire episodes of popular television shows to test new ideas. To date, all this research has produced an impressive, but also conflicting, body of knowledge about the impact of spoilers.The relationship between spoilers and people’s enjoyment of and transportation into a narrative has been shown to hinge on a variety of factors, some connected to the consumers themselves, and others linked to the nature of the spoiler or the narrative. Research has examined the role played by consumer-related variables such as personality traits, reactance, or the level of frustration someone experiences when confronted by a spoiler, as well as people’s level of identification with and concern for the characters in a movie or show. Furthermore, investigations have looked into whether the genre of the narrative that is being spoiled matters and if the nature of the spoiler (major or minor) or its placement in the story is relevant to its impact on the narrative experience. Recognizing the shortcomings of some of the experimental designs used in the past, research is currently focused on utilizing more naturalistic settings to examine under which circumstances people might select spoilers and how this impacts their experience. While studies to date have produced an impressive amount of information about how spoilers impact narrative consumers, findings are not always consistent across studies. This raises questions about the complexity and nuance of the role that spoilers play in people’s enjoyment of narratives as well as the methodologies used in these studies. This presentation will address these questions and more by providing an overview of the major findings that have come out of this decade of research. It will also consider the methodological choices made by various researchers and examine the challenges and opportunities associated with these approaches. Finally, this talk will reflect on unresolved issues surrounding spoilers and ways to move forward.

Panels

Matthias Brütsch, University of Zurich
Plot Points, Twists and Spoilers: Notes on the Dramatic Impact of Withholding and Revealing Narrative Information in Films and TV series
Matthias Brütsch is senior lecturer at the Department of Film Studies of the University of Zurich. His research interests lie in film narratology and dramaturgy with a particular focus on forms of complex narration. Among his recent publications are “Puzzle Plots in TV Serials” (in Panoptikum, 22/29, 2019), “Complex Narration in Film” (in Schickers/Toro eds, Perturbatory Narration, Berlin 2018) and “How to Measure Narrativity?” (in Hansen et al. eds, Emerging Vectors of Narratology, Berlin 2017). In addition to his academic activities, he was an active member of various selection committees, film commissions and boards of trustees of film festivals, funding institutions and promotion agencies in Switzerland.
Abstract

Debates about spoilers frequently focus on the question whether it is good or bad to reveal narrative information in advance, whether “ignorance is bliss” for first-time viewers of a film or TV show. Depending on the personal preferences of each individual spectator, answers to these questions are bound to remain inconclusive. What seems much less controversial, however, is the fact that the viewing experience (whether experienced as enjoyable or not) can be quite different for those who are in the know of relevant pieces of information before they are “officially” conveyed in the process of narration. And the bigger the difference, the bigger the potential spoiler. Spoilers thus interfere with the “knowledge management” set up by filmic texts. I therefore propose to focus on the following questions:

The advance revelation of what kinds of information makes a big difference in the viewing experience and therefore provides opportunities for potent spoilers?
What kinds of films and which genres rely for their impact and appeal on an elaborate schedule for conveying these kinds of information?
At what points in the process of narration are stocks of information normally conveyed which are particularly prone to be spoiled?
In what relation do these points stand to accepted notions of dramatic structure such as “hook”, “inciting incident”, “plot points”, and “climax”?

A special focus of my paper will be on the last question. Despite the fact that numerous screenwriting manuals permanently juggle with these notions, concise definitions are still lacking. I will therefore try to determine in what sense the effects of plot points rely on conveying certain kinds of information, and how plot or turning points can be distinguished from plot twists, which are most frequently associated with spoilers.
The question how spoilers affect our viewing experience seems to be particularly relevant for serial narration which often depends heavily on multiple cliffhangers, turning points and plot twists deployed over whole seasons. To conclude, I will therefore try to assess the different dynamics of spoiling a TV series as compared to spoiling a feature film.
My analysis will be based on a corpus of around 35 feature films and a dozen TV series. The examples examined more closely will be instances of complex narration with plot twists such as The Game (US 1997), The Sixth Sense (US 1999), Westworld (US 2016–2020), or Dark (DE 2017–2020) which I take to be so well known that they can hardly be spoiled for anyone anymore. So be alerted, no spoiler alerts will be given!

Andrew Bumstead, University of Utah
Spoiling Survivor: Edgic, Knowledge Communities, and Narrative Pleasure
Andrew Bumstead is a PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Utah. His research focuses on the intersections of nineteenth-century children’s literature, adaptation, and media studies. His work has been published in Texas Studies of Literature and Language and Peer Review. He is currently working on his dissertation, titled “Adapting Childhood: Spaces of Play in Victorian Children’s Literature,” which will be completed in Spring 2023.

Abstract

Building upon Henry Jenkins’ theories of fan communities as active participants within consumer culture, my conference presentation updates his research by focusing on Edgic and its impact on the Survivor fan community. Edgic is a method used to analyze the editing of each episode in order to determine the winner and to predict the major narrative story arcs of the season. Similar to the controversy surrounding ChillOne and his “crashing” of the spoiler game between CBS producers and the fan community in 2003, the Edgic players more recently ruined the enjoyment of non-Edgic fans by correctly predicting that the unpopular contestant Michele Fitzgerald would go on to win the season. Many viewers were rooting for Aubry Bracco to win, and so the backlash, especially when the winner was revealed in the finale, led to a divide in the fan community.
My approach uses text mining tool Voyant to analyze the transcript of Aubry’s and Michele’s confessionals throughout the season in order to better understand how the editors chose to tell the story of these two players. I track the character arcs of both players to see how they were portrayed, how often they were allowed to narrate the show, and how the editing could have both led Edgic users to predict a Michele win but also lead non-Edgic fans to believe Aubry would win.
The purpose of my research is to show the power of the Survivor knowledge community in its ability to crack CBS’ complex narrative code, how active participation is crucial to the longevity of the show, and how spoilers revealed by active participants can often lead to divisions with the fan community. As the Edgic community demonstrates, spoiling is not just a game with winners and losers, but an interactive process between fans that allows for an engagement with narrative pleasure.

James Aaron Green, University of Vienna
‘Telling [The] Story Second-Hand’: Victorian Sensation Fiction and the Pre-History of the Spoiler
James Aaron Green is an APART-GSK Fellow (OEAW) at the University of Vienna, Austria. His project examines fictions of radical life extension, 1878-1918. He specializes in the intersections of popular fiction and science, and holds further interests in game studies; his work in these areas has been published in Gothic Studies, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and Victorian Network. His first monograph, Sensation Fiction and Modernity, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.

Abstract

This paper proposes that discussions occasioned by the release of Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1859–60) in volume form mark a significant moment in the pre-history of the ‘spoiler’. Collins’s request that reviewers omit to give details of the novel’s plot – ‘is [it] possible to praise the writer or to blame him without opening the proceedings by telling his story second-hand?’ – prompted reflection on the pleasures of suspenseful fiction, how previous knowledge of the plot may affect the reading experience, and the critic’s responsibility to navigate these issues in their discussions of new novels. These responses should be understood, I contend, as some of the first meditations on the spoiler as we would understand it today; while some recognized that revelations about the plot might ‘impair the interest for readers’ (The Examiner, 1860), others concluded that enjoyment should not depend upon concealment: ‘A good story with any life in it will lose nothing by our previous knowledge of the plot’ (Dublin University Magazine, 1861). During the following decades, as suspenseful fiction captured an increasingly large share of the British market for novel reading, these contentions were to resurface and be expanded; other authors were to reproduce Collins’s appeal to reviewers, meanwhile, with varying levels of success. This paper appraises these moments, seeking to understand their historical importance and relevance for contemporary debates about the spoiler. Examining these moments helps to reveal the social conditions in which this ever more ubiquitous facet of media discourse gains cultural significance, as well as what lies behind the polarizing responses it can continue to foster.

Julia Gronhoff
Roundtable: Professional Conduct with Spoilers
Julia Gronhoff is a children’s and young adult book editor with Carlsen Publishing, located in Germany. Prior to her time at Carlsen, Julia worked as a public relations manager and book editor focusing on children’s books for other publishers. She graduated from the University of Freiburg with a dual degree in Scandinavian and German studies in 2006. Her latest projects include a new list for early readers, and a series for reluctant readers with a special focus on visual storytelling.

Spoilers have long ceased to be a phenomenon which only concerns regular film viewers, today they also influence how various professions go about their business. Reviewers of film and literature are the most obvious examples; how comprehensive can or should a plot summary be, and are there differences depending on the genre and audience of a film? Do the same rules apply for a Marvel blockbuster and a French art film? Similar questions arise when it comes to promotion; how much do filmmakers, authors, publishers and distributors want to disclose of their forthcoming works, and are the various parties always in agreement? Another maybe less obvious area is academia: How do teachers deal with spoilers in the classroom, are spoiler alerts needed when works of fiction are discussed in a talk or an academic paper? And what role do questions of suspense and spoilers play for academic writing? After all, do academic papers not also construct a dramatic arc which can be spoiled, e.g. by being too upfront in the abstract?
These and other questions will be discussed in this roundtable which features participants from the worlds of film criticism, publishing and academia.

Milan Hain, Palacký University
To Tell or Not to Tell: The Rhetorical Strategies in Trailers for Films with a Surprise Twist
Milan Hain, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor and Area Head of Film Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. He is the author or co-author of five books on cinema, including, most recently, V tradici kvality a prestiže: David O. Selznick a výroba hvězd v Hollywoodu 40. a 50. let (2021) [In the Tradition of Quality and Prestige: David O. Selznick and the Production of Stars in Hollywood of the 1940s and 50s]). His articles have appeared in Jewish Film and New Media (on Hugo Haas and survivor guilt, JFNM 7.1), the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (on David O. Selznick’s adaptation of Anna Karenina, JAFP 13.3) and The Slovak Theatre (on the production of stars in classical Hollywood cinema, ST 69.3). In 2011 and 2012, he was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Recently, he has become the recipient of the Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Łódź, where he researches the representation of Czech and Polish identities in studio-era Hollywood.

Abstract

The rise of complex narration in film and television in the last twenty-five years or so has led to intensified spoiler panic as many artists and audience members alike fear that disclosing a crucial plot point might rob the viewers of the desired “wow moment” and thus ruin the whole experience. For instance, the release of the highly anticipated installments in the Star Wars franchise The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi was accompanied by a special Google Chrome extension whose purpose was to detect and block pages that might contain spoilers. This relatively recent phenomenon leads to another potentially interesting subject for research: How does one promote films that rely on significant plot twists? On the one hand, a cleverly designed plot or a twist ending can function as crucial selling points, differentiating the work from the competition. On the other hand, there is still the danger that revealing too much information (or merely disclosing that the narrative features an unexpected twist) might actually harm the story’s effectiveness or its commercial prospects.
In the proposed paper I will analyze the rhetorical strategies in selected trailers that were used to promote films with a twist ending – from Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and Psycho (1960) to The Sixth Sense (1999), Femme Fatale (2002), The Prestige (2006) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Using the methodological framework introduced by Lisa Kernan in her ground-breaking book Coming Attractions (published in 2004), I will discuss how these paratexts form audience expectations by presenting and rearranging the story elements and revealing or disclosing motives related to the surprise twist. The paper will thus contribute to our understanding of how producers and distributors address their audiences and what role (potential) spoilers play in their marketing strategies. Do they, too, succumb to the spoiler panic or do they believe, by contrast, that a good story (and its commercial appeal) cannot be spoilt by revealing too much?

Tiffany Hong, Earlham College
Love Persevering: Televisual Homage, Mephisto, and the American Sitcom Family in WandaVision
Dr. Tiffany Hong is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Earlham College. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures (Japanese) from the University of California, Irvine. Currently, she is working on a monograph which examines the narratology of Murakami Haruki through the visual rhetoric of sequential art studies. Her work has appeared in ImageTexT, Superheroes and Excess: A Philosophical Adventure, Image [&] Narrative, Room One Thousand (UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design), The Supervillain Reader, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

Abstract

WandaVision, a 2021 9-episode weekly1 television miniseries for Disney+, not only initiated Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but furthermore inaugurated a new rhetoric for transmedia storytelling. Both diegetically and through its own press, the show enthusiastically engaged fan ambiguity toward spoilers, only to retroactively dismantle its own marketing as a metatextual reading of exegetical strategies particular to this moment of hypertextuality, simultaneity, and participatory culture, not to mention a baroque intertextuality and narratology particular to comics. WandaVision is, I argue, unique within the stable of Disney+ MCU offerings thus far, in its conscious adaptation of its medium – television (especially the traditional linear release vs. bingeing as streaming TV’s preferred format) – not as cinema’s impoverished alternative, but as a historical mirror of the idealized American nuclear family.
Spoiler culture is a response to a temporal flattening, a ubiquitous information dump, which demeans the experience of the here/now: one either seeks a leaping forward with privileged (teleological) knowledge, or the accelerated experience of viewing in time for a larger, inescapable cultural discussion. This is exacerbated by the MCU’s mastery of transmedia storytelling, deferring closure and telescoping narrative anticipation of media events years into the future into staggered end credit scenes and Phased announcements. WandaVision, as the MCU’s experimental foray into a ‘lesser’ format, acknowledged its inherited burden of overdetermination, as (merely) a suturing product between films and Phases, and trolled its audience/fandom accordingly. Weekly social media responses hyped the appearances of every tangential comics character, from Mephisto to Reed Richards to Captain Marvel, responding, in fairness, to the deliberate placement of Easter Eggs calibrated to maximize canonical fan knowledge. In its most egregious and/or ingenious feint, WandaVision even teased the extradiegetic migration of the parallel but distinct X-Men franchise through the uncanny “recasting” of Evan Peters as Quicksilver; the miniseries concluded with a gesture to a multiverse, just not one that had merged (yet) with the recently acquired 21st Century Fox.
WandaVision furthermore embodies, then implodes, a survey of televisual eras with their attendant filmic technologies, opening credit audiovisuals, genre tropes, and most crucially, historicized articulations of the happy American family and the possibilities of audience interaction. Wanda’s psychic captivity of the town of Westview is quite literally and multidimensionally mediated; her grief and abilities externalize her from the diegesis of the miniseries (initially) as simply another actor. The innovation of the show is its performativity regarding expansive, hypertextual, and self-referential fan culture. Its braiding of a multiply external positionality into an archival of American sitcoms proudly presents what is ultimately a nuanced examination of linear grieving, escapism, and a fixation on macro-narratives over interiority, the domestic, and the mundane – or Wanda’s impossible desire.

Thomas Kristjansen, Aarhus University
Abstract: Spoilers as Worldbuilding and Worldbuilding as Spoilers in Fantasy Fiction
Thomas Kristjansen is a freelance scholar who earned his Masters Degree from Aarhus University’s English programme. His academic interests concern human cognition and psychology’s shaping influences on how we construe and imagine the magical and supernatural, and how these structures are reflected in cultural trends, literature and the arts. While his primary research interest is the history and mechanisms of modern fantasy fiction, the intersections of fantasy fiction, religious belief, and cultural conceptions of the impossible and magical are all important to his work. Aside from literature, he has a strong interest in ludonarrative studies.

Abstract

Many modern works of fantasy fiction incorporate spoilers into their worldbuilding and leave crucial components of the world’s history or metaphysics unexplained until a dramatically opportune time. This can even occur quite late in the overall story, and in some cases the missing knowledge is a central and driving plot element. This turns what might be considered story-neutral information into plot spoilers, and formulating a larger picture of the world and setting becomes difficult without revealing elements of high plot importance. In works like N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, or many Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere novels, we see characters, plot devices and events couched in mystery for most of the story, until to be fully revealed and contextualized in plot-related developments.
In contrast, the formative works of the modern fantasy genre, such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea do not obfuscate worldbuilding elements that are vital to the plot. While the world is obviously expanded and explicated throughout the story, the fundamental metaphysics and supernatural relations are by and large mapped and presented to the reader near the beginning of the story. Very few plot spoilers in these works can simultaneously be considered ‘worldbuilding spoilers’. Further elements added tend to elaborate, rather than decisively subvert or recontextualize, previously established world elements.
I argue that this because of a general shift in the preferred narrative of voice in modern fantasy fiction, and a more away from the mythic structure of narrative that Tolkien, Lewis and Le Guin largely emulated. It appears that this tendency towards ‘worldbuilding spoilers’ is a relatively recent development and may be a valuable narrative strategy to keep readers invested in long-running series. These questions will be the basis for an open discussion about the role of genre, worldbuilding, and narrative structure and ethos in relation to spoilers.

Michael J. Meindl, Radford University
Roundtable: Professional Conduct with Spoilers
Michael J. Meindl is assistant professor at the School of Communication at Radford University.

Abstract

Andreas Rauscher, University of Freiburg
Playing with the Plot Twist
Andreas Rauscher (Dr. habil., *1973) – Assistant Professor for media culture studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgau. Formerly Senior Lecturer at the department for media studies at the University of Siegen. Visiting professor of media studies at the Christian Albrechts-Universität Kiel, at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz and the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. Journalist for several magazines on film and popular culture. Scientific curator for the German Film Museum at Frankfurt am Main (Exhibition Film & Games – Interactions. International catalogue available from Bertz Verlag, Berlin 2015).

Abstract

At first the idea of attaching spoiler warnings to classical board games seems to be rather absurd. That Mr. Boddy has been murdered by Colonel Mustard or one of the other stock archetypes in the not-so-mysterious murder mystery board game Clue can be considered an obvious rule of the game. Instead of providing surprising plot the solution to the crime appeals to abstract procedures and logical thinking. The game design in Clue takes inspirations from traditional whodunit genre tropes and adapts them within a game system to provide replayability.
In contrast to this rather Risk-averse philosophy of design the recent success of so-called Legacy games based upon board games like Pandemic by Matt Leacock is built upon plot twists. Spoiling them does not only take the fun out of a series of more than a dozen successive game nights. The plot twists also provide the ludonarrative backbone for story arcs and complex character constellations, elements that still can be considered to be rather unusual for a board game.
The proposed talk will trace the origins of story-driven board games with a (plot) twist back to the design concepts of role-playing-games and choose-your-own-adventure books. It will provide a short historical outline of spoiling ludic systems by introducing narrative elements into games. The process of adding spoilers to games results in a challenge to traditional notions of (re)playability. At the same time they also indicate a paradigm shift turning story-segments into configurative building blocks within larger transmedia architectures and economic ecologies of cineludic forms.

Oliver Ruf, Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences
Spoiler Aesthetics. On the Normalization of a Paratextual Form
Oliver Ruf is a German Professor of Media Studies who is holding the Research Chair of Communication Aesthetics at Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences where he is also Co-Director of the Institute for Media Research and Development and Academic Coordinator of the International Media Studies Programme in Cooperation with Deutsche Welle and the Department of Media Studies at the University of Bonn as well as Head of the Media Master-Study Course.

Abstract

What form do spoilers have? In order to answer this question, the article proposed here would like to take up the discourse and concept of ‘regulation’, which has long been part of the discussion in cultural theory, as the ‘institutionalization’ of a specific process through which an explicitly aesthetic phenomenon is also ‘normalized’, and critically reflect on it for the field of the ‘spoiler’ as an example. On the one hand, it is about concrete laws, rules, and practices of this media phenomenon, and on the other hand, it is about the observation that understands them as ‘norms’ by which a kind of regulation is guided. My thesis of is that in view of the spoiler, from a reversed perspective, the question of what constitutes a norm here goes beyond the instances through which it is constituted. That is, seen in this way, ‘the spoiler’ both submits to certain ‘norms’, follows them and thus complies with them, and deconstructs them in the original sense of the word. Thus, on the one hand, the spoiler ‘normalized’ in this way corresponds to the observance of rules or laws; on the other hand, however, it simultaneously undermines such ‘normalization’, if it consciously deviates or can or even must deviate from specifications, inputs or instructions (directions). Thus, also in the ‘spoiler discourse’, the ‘norm’ has a status that produces an effect that is precisely not designed for docility, correspondence, and compliance from the outset. At the same time, however, this subject area is often characterized by the fact that the ‘norm’ is juxtaposed with that which has at least conditioned art per se since the beginning of modernity and, more precisely, since the incursion of media technology into its sphere: reproducibility. Thus, for the aesthetically determined ‘norm’ of the spoiler, against the backdrop of modern media development, at least one reproducible moment, if not the ideal of duplication, the ‘pattern’ and the ‘template’ must be emphasized. In other words, the question of the form of the spoiler has to be joined by the question of repeatable production, for instance in the manifestation of the ‘construction kit’, but also in phenomenality as a ‘type’. This movement of thought will be reconstructed and sketchily traced by way of example. Historical theoretical positions will be discussed, which can be newly developed and read for the topic, such as the ‘type dispute’ at the 7th annual general meeting of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1914, at which Hermann Muthesius defended his guiding principles on ‘typification’ against Henry van de Velde, among others, and vice versa; although, as is well known, Muthesius was defeated, the course of time (not least due to the rapid onset of industrial mass production at the time) ultimately proved him right: ‘the norm is always a final, most mature result of the agreement of factual solutions of different individuals. it is the general denominator of an entire time.’ (Walter Gropius) On the other hand, genuinely narrative-theoretical constructions (above all Genette’s paratextuality model) are also to be contextualized for such an aesthetic view of the spoiler. This path leads, for example, to Jonathan Gray’s Theory of Paraxtexts, which, starting from the spoiler, ultimately also considers spinoffs, hypes, intros, sequels, prequels, and mashed ups.

Michael Sennhauser
Roundtable: Professional Conduct with Spoilers
Born October 3 1961. 1991 licentiate at the University of Basel. Since 1991 working as a freelance film reviewer, editor of the trade magazine Cinébulletin, president of the Swiss Association of Film Journalists (SVFJ), editor in charge of film for SonntagsZeitung, co-head of the Critic‘s Week at the Locarno Film Festival, film reviewer for Radio DRS3, member of the board of trustees of Fantoche International Animation Film Festival Baden, editor and editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine FILM (RIP). Since 2002 editor in charge of film for Radio DRS2 and SRF Kultur.

Abstract

Anna Smith
Roundtable: Professional Conduct with Spoilers
Anna Smith is a broadcaster and one of the UK’s top film critics. She is the former President of the UK Critics’ Circle, the host of the Girls On Film podcast and a regular film critic for BBC News, Sky News, BBC Radio, Deadline Hollywood, Time Out, Metro, The Guardian, Sight & Sound, Empire and more. She has spent over a decade interviewing major actors and directors on stage, on screen and in print. A former magazine editor, Anna decided to go freelance in 2000, and has since enjoyed stints as Acting Film Editor of both Time Out London and Metro UK Newspaper. Anna frequently appears on TV and radio, reviewing films and discussing breaking film news and awards contenders. She is a regular on Sky News and joined Alex Zane, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Boyd Hilton and Rachel Riley on the Sky Oscars channel sofa throughout the exclusive live UK broadcast of the 2017 Academy Awards. She has appeared on BBC World, BBC News (The Film Programme), BBC Newsnight, BBC Persian and the One O’clock news on BBC1. Her radio gigs include Radio 4 (The Today Programme, You And Yours, Front Row), The World Service, BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Scotland and Monocle 24.

Abstract

Sebastian Smoliński, University of Warsaw
Summary First: Film Criticism and Managing Spoilers in the Studio System
Film critic, scholar and lecturer. Co-author of several books, including the Spanish-language monograph La doble vida de Krzysztof Kieślowski, book about African American cinema, and a bilingual (Polish/English) monograph of David Lynch. Recipient of the 2019/2020 Kosciuszko Foundation scholarship for teaching a history of Polish film at Cleveland State University in Ohio. He is preparing his Ph.D. dissertation about U.S. film criticism and the construction of national identity.

Abstract

Film critics such as Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, and James Agee were part of an institutional and media network that scrutinized but also occasionally cooperated with the Hollywood Studio System. They did not consider the question: “spoil or not to spoil?” as a significant one. Instead, many reviewers were preoccupied with exposing repeating structures and worn-out genre formulas and frequently included lengthy summaries in their reviews and essays. The persistence of summaries and open discussions of plots in the U.S. film criticism from the 1930s until 1950s suggests the existence of a fragile consensus among filmmakers, viewers, and critics alike: revealing crucial elements of the story was acceptable, or at least tolerated.
Launching off this realization, my presentation aims to do three things. First, I will provide a brief overview of the mid-century spoiler-friendly critical practices. Second, I will address the moment that, to my mind, marks the end of this culture: the release of Psycho (1960), whose sophisticated and innovative marketing attempted to shift critical emphasis from the focus on conventionalized, run-of-the-mill genre products towards the idea of one-of-a-kind, shocking, and surprising narrative. This shift constituted a significant departure from earlier critical practices and may have influenced contemporary fear of spoilers. Finally, I will propose that it is possible to think about the period’s embrace of the spoiler as the last gasp of the cinema of attractions, as theorized by Tom Gunning. For the spoiler culture can be understood as a turn away from narrative suspense and tension usually associated with the dominance of streamlined and well-crafted narratives.

Dana Steglich, University of Mainz
Spoil the Classics. Plot and the Assessment of Capital ‘L’ Literature
After working at a literary agency parallel to attaining a Bachelors and Masters degree in Comparative Literatures at Freie Universität Berlin (final thesis on narrative personality in Jean Amérys autobiographical writing) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (final thesis on fairies and elves in the works of Shakespeare and Tolkien), two years as an academic associate for the English Studies department at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and three years as a PhD student in the graduate college Gegenwart/Literatur at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Dana Steglich recently defended her dissertation on the concept of escapism and the works of Lord Dunsany. She currently works as a scientific researcher at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in the DFG- and AHRC-funded research project Spaces of Translation. European Magazine Culture 1945–1965.

Abstract

The concept of spoilers and the review culture surrounding it is much more apparent in film and television than it is in literature. On a practical level, the reason why books as a medium are less likely to be ‘spoiled’ is simply because the time needed to read a book differs greatly from reader to reader and thus, simultaneity on the scale of international cinema or streaming releases is rarely achieved (with the exception of singular literary events like the releases of the later Harry Potter novels). On another level, a common argument found in the context of spoilers in literature is that only ‘bad’ texts can be ruined by what is commonly understood as a spoiler, namely the revealing of (important) plot points, whereas ‘good’ literature – which any canonized text would be counted as – cannot be spoiled because it isn’t defined by plot (the what) but by it’s construction/style/language (the how).
The disregard of plot that is apparent in literary criticism has consequences for the way readers (are supposed to) engage with the classics: Series of classic literature – like Oxford or Wordsworth editions – contain introductions which give away major plot points, or rather: take the knowledge of those plot points for granted, which illustrates how even on a paratextual level the practices of engagement are different for canonized texts. But: Can f. ex. the plot point that Romeo and Juliet commit suicide even be considered a spoiler – especially since the text spoils this fact in it’s own prologue? If so, in what context or for whom? And if not, why not? What difference do the 500 years of performances make to this and what role does the knowledge of genre (i.e. tragedy) play in this context? What happens if the same arguments are applied to the almost 100 year old Murder on the Orient Express?
In my talk I would like to question the practices of engagement with and the assessment of literary classics through the lens of spoilers. In focusing on the discourse about spoiler culture in literary criticism and the often humorous, sometimes highly ironic way in which the idea of spoiling a classic is discussed, I’d argue that along with the idea of an inability to ‘spoil’ classics, the importance of an ‘innocent’ first reading of a classic text – which would involve engaging with the plot or having the same amount of information as the characters – is discredited in literary criticism, which presupposes that any ‘real’ reading of a classic text is only ever secondary and thus, only ever analytical.

Marcus Stiglegger, University of Mainz
‘Performative iPhone Cinema’. Can Feature Films and Series Resist Spoiler Damage?
Marcus Stiglegger, professor of film studies, currently teaching at University of Mainz, University of Regensburg, film academy of Ludwigsburg and University of Klagenfurt; was visiting professor at Clemson University, SC, USA. In 1999 he published his doctor’s thesis on the subject of politics and sexuality in cinema (Sadiconazista, 4th ed. 2016) and has edited several books on film history and film aesthetics. His publications include books on the seduction theory of film (2006), western (2003, co-ed.), war films (2006, co-ed.), pop and cinema (2004, co-ed.), modern horror cinema (2010, 2018), David Cronenberg (2011, ed.), Dario Argento (2013, co-ed.), global bodies in the media (2012, co-ed.), Akira Kurosawa (2014), genre theory (2020, ed.) etc. He regularly contributes to international conferences and magazines like Kinoeye (USA), Paradoxa (USA) and Eyeball (UK). His research interests are: body theory, transgressive philosophy and cinema, media mythology, performative aspects of cinema, and the Holocaust in the narrative media.

Abstract

The ghost of spoilers is haunting the social media community especially when dealing with long awaited new seasons of streaming series. Narrative media depending on surprising turning points and plot development can be damaged by those aspects being spoiled on the internet. But can feature films actually resist spoiler damage?
When Danish maverick Nicholas Winding Refn shot his films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon he often insisted on the fact that the framing of his films will make them look appealing on the big screen as well as on small iPhone displays. Thus he kept the whole digital distribution process in mind. But he went further and did never rely on plot development, turning points and conventional climaxes. In fact it is hard to spoil these films as the events going on are closely woven into a web of events that can hardly be explained in a Twitter post. The bare fact “the protagonist dies in the end” tells you nothing about the respective films, as they even do not point out a certain protagonist. Thus Refn has managed to create spoiler resistant films that rely heavily on the performative power of mise en scène instead of the ‘strong narrative’.
The paper will discuss this basic idea further along Refn’s streaming series Too Old to Die Young (Amazon prime). Can Refn’s performative strategies also work on the epic format of a 10 episodes crimes series?

Tobias Unterhuber, Leopold-Franzens University Innsbruck
Spoil the Game, Shatter the World – Spoilers in Games and Play
Dr. Tobias Unterhuber studied modern German literature, comparative literature and study of religion at LMU Munich and at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2018, he earned his PhD with his thesis on the works of Swiss author Christian Kracht. He is a post-doc for literature and media studies at the Leopold-Franzens University Innsbruck. In addition to pop literature, literary theory, discourse analysis, literature & economics and gender studies, his research interests focus on video game research in the field of cultural studies. He is a co-editor of the game studies journal PAIDIA – Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung and the Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung.

Abstract

Since video games have been inextricably linked to Internet culture since its inception, spoilers play a central role in gaming culture and discourse, and are regularly discussed and condemned. Spoilers seem to endanger games even more than other media, as games can span a hundred hours or more in length. But what can be spoiled in a game anyway? A game’s narrative, its mechanics, its puzzles? At the same time, certain kinds of spoilers in the form of game walkthroughs are generally accepted and sometimes necessary to finish a game. But apart from these points, the connection between games, play and spoilers might be even deeper, because spoiling a game can, in the words of Johan Huizinga, shatter the world of the game and the play.

Wendy Wagner, Johnson & Wales University
Spoiling for Love: The Influence of Shipping on Spoiler Seeking Among Television Fans
Wendy Wagner is a Professor of English at Johnson & Wales University. She has published in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice and contributed to Not Your Mother’s Bodice Ripper: Romance in the 21^st Century [McFarland, forthcoming 2022] and the Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction (Greenwood, 2018).

Abstract

This paper explores an under-analyzed aspect of spoiler-seeking behaviors among fan communities: the role of the fan’s emotional involvement in romances among characters in a serial television or film narrative. For many scholars (and fans), spoilers are viewed in terms of the emotion of surprise; television showrunner Joss Whedon has referred to surprise as a “holy emotion.” He argues, “[Surprise] shows you that you’re wrong, the world is bigger and more complicated than you’d imagined.” Whedon represents that feeling as a positive emotion.
In recent years, however, Jason Mittell and Jonathan Gray have identified spoiler-seeking behavior in new ways. Mittell and Gray emphasize the cognitive pleasures of reading spoilers, the need to solve the mystery or put the puzzle together. Mittell’s focus on the ways tv shows nurture intense viewer engagement by creating complex narratives, and Gray’s focus on the role of paratexts in helping viewers understand and prepare to view media texts both add depth to the media scholar’s understanding of spoiler-seeking behavior.
However, these perspectives do not address the emotional engagement of viewers with media texts, particularly through serial romance storylines. From Sam and Diane to Dave and Maddie to McDreamy and Meredith, television viewers have been highly invested in the romance story in serial television. Denise Bielby and C. Lee Harrington, in their book Soap Fans, describe this intense engagement in terms of Dorothy Tennov’s concept of limerence, arguing that the experience of attachment to a fictional romance is a kind of limerence, prone to the same feelings of emotional intensity and anxiety as being in a real-life romance.
Thus, for the emotionally engaged fan, seeking spoilers is not mainly an act of decoding but an act of confirmation and reassurance. Spoilers increase pleasure in television viewing because they reduce the anxiety of limerence and allow viewers to enjoy the narrative. In this, the desired experience of shippers is not unlike that of readers of romance fiction, a genre that has a predetermined ending, a “happily ever after.”
This paper explores the connection between shipping and spoiler-seeking by examining online discussions of spoilers for television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Game of Thrones, and Supergirl. Much like the fans of complex tv described by Mittell and Gray, shippers comb paratexts for clues about the future of the romantic narrative. However, the motivations involve reducing anxiety and increasing the pleasure of the shipping experience.

Eberhard Wolff, University of Zurich
Roundtable: Professional Conduct with Spoilers
Eberhard Wollf is an academic associate at the ISEK – Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. He will contribute to the roundtable with some ideas on spoiling in academia.

Abstract