Séamas O'Reilly: Spoiler alert - spoilers don't detract from the art of cinema and telly

Actor Brian Cox as Logan Roy, head of the fictional conglomerate Waystar RoyCo in Succession. No spoilers.

I had the third episode of Succession’s fourth season spoiled for me last week. Not fully, and not in so many words, but rather by a single online image of a certain character with a caption that heavily, but not quite, suggested a significant plot point. If you have seen that episode, you’ll know what I mean, and if you haven’t, well, I apologise for making you read what must be one of the most garbled and inscrutable paragraphs you’ve ever read. 

So, from here on out, I promise that this is not a column about Succession or its plot, but on the strange psychological capture that spoiling has made of our brains.

Sometimes, and always with great fondness, I remember the time a spoiler made my brother punch me in the back of the head. It was the early 2000s, a week or two after I’d seen The Sixth Sense. 

He hadn’t yet seen the M Night Shyamalan film but had heard a lot about it — enough, certainly, to know it had ended with one of the most talked about final twists in modern cinema. 

“What is it?” he asked, adamant that I ruin for him the ending of a film he was likely to see quite soon. I refused to tell him since I thought he’d have a much better experience if he went in untainted by expectation.

I’m not sure if either of us knew the word ‘spoiler’ then, but today it would be hard to find an even remotely culturally literate person who hasn’t, much less one who would seek them out. 

SPOILER: DISCOURSE

There’s hardly a film podcast or website on Earth that doesn’t give spoiler warnings right at the top. Some, make a point of never uttering spoilers at all, and expend superhuman skill and care in talking about films for 10 minutes or more, without once mentioning events on screen. 

For a period of time, many websites went further, running parallel weekly reviews of the most popular TV series — one spoiler-free, one spoiler-filled — just to cater to the burgeoning, detail-averse consumer without fear of upset. I think this was a decent compromise and one that mainly makes me nostalgic for the bygone days when websites had that much money to throw at their writers.

Marvel no longer gives their actors scripts, instead sending a password-protected email directing them to a physical location where they then read it under supervision. Recently, I’ve seen critics get hate merely for saying they enjoyed films before they go on general release, as if the very knowledge that The Sacramento Bee’s chief correspondent liked the new Avatar sequel, might ruin your own enjoyment ahead of time.

Much of this is exacerbated by social media, where spoilers of any type are less avoidable than they once were, but what’s curious is that repeated studies indicate that spoilers don’t spoil much of anything. A University of California San Diego study from 2011 indicated that participants actively preferred short stories when they were given major plot spoilers beforehand. Although this seems counter-intuitive, it makes perfect sense to me. 

At root, the plot or incident of a given story, film, or TV show is unlikely the thing driving you to the cinema, or your couch, week after week. If it were, the preponderance of prequels and spin-offs in which you know how many of the characters will eventually take their last breath, could not persist.

Knowing, or even suspecting, what was going to happen in that Succession episode was mildly annoying, sure, but that feeling left me the second my mental faculties adjusted to focusing on how it was done, and what it meant for the characters I’d grown to love and hate, through deft writing and savvy performances. To some extent, having an inkling of what was going to happen might even have enhanced the experience, allowing me to watch it more closely, and with greater attention to the artifice as it unfolded.

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

SPOILER: SIBLING UNREST

Which is not to say I seek spoilers out, much less dispense them to people unprompted. Unlike my brother, who you might presume took my refusal to spoil The Sixth Sense on board and moved on. That’s because you haven’t met him, and certainly not when he was 12 years old. 

In the event, he simply asked me again. And again, and again, until he was no longer speaking out of thirst for knowledge but merely because I was refusing to tell him the thing he wanted to know.

An entire life spent as the youngest of 11 children had calcified within him a reflective horror of any situation where he felt he was being denied something by his pernicious older siblings. He was a boy who had been psychologically formed, as if manufactured in a lab, into a being of pure stubbornness. 

Trying to turn him to your way of thinking would be like trying to talk your way out of a sunburn. As he shredded my nerves with his insistent demands, I eventually did what I always did in such situations: I caved. Sort of.

“Alright,” I said, with unfaked exasperation, “at the end of the movie, it turns out Bruce Willis is a woman.” He buffered for a second. “The entire time, you think he’s a man, but he’s actually a woman. Happy now?” He wasn’t, especially. He’d just been given an orphaned plot detail about a film he’d never seen, but for which that ending still didn’t seem to make sense. He had, however, gotten what he’d requested, and seemed content with that at least.

It was some weeks later, following a sleepover at a friend’s house, that he came into the kitchen, enraged. “You bastard,” he said, “we watched The Sixth Sense last night.” I was already laughing so hard I was choking by the time I heard him shout “I TOLD EVERYONE,” before — and I hope I didn’t spoil this for you — punching me in the back of the head.