The May 3, 2006 American broadcast episode of Lost, entitled “Two for the Road,” ended with a series of bangs. Heroic character Michael shot and seemingly killed two members of the castaway community of plane crash survivors, Ana-Lucia and Libby, for reasons left unresolved on the episode. For many fans of the program, this ending was a first-class shocker, motivating water-cooler discussions as to why Michael did it, whether the characters were really dead, and what greater meaning might be extracted from this event. But a significant number of Lost fans were already speculating about why Michael did it, as his actions were completely expected, having been revealed via “spoilers” on the online forums that have cropped up around this and other programs. Spoiled viewers watched the episode to see how the story that they already knew would be told, but experienced little if any of the jaw-dropping surprise seemingly intended by the producers and enjoyed by other fans. Yet most of these so-called “spoiler fans” purposely sought out this information, looking to short-circuit the suspenseful design of Lost each week. Why? How might we account for this practice of narrative consumption that seems to contradict the very pleasures that a show like Lost offers each week? And what do spoiler practices tell us about the shifting dynamics of storytelling and popular pleasures in a digital age?  To answer these questions, we offer both a theoretical exploration into spoiler practices and an empirical study of this particular incarnation of fandom.

Lost itself offers a particularly charged case study to examine spoilers. The global hit program debuting in 2004 may be the most elaborated example of the complex narrative strategies that Jeffrey Sconce (2004), Glen Creeber (2004), and Jason Mittell (2006) argue have emerged over the past decade. Beginning with a plane crash onto an unknown and mysterious island, Lost has weaved a dense web of mystery and conspiracy, science-fiction and mysticism, all told with innovative storytelling strategies of nested flashbacks, shifting perspective, and protracted seriality. Nearly every episode concludes with a cliff-hanger, often combining suspense with a mystifying ability to force viewers to question their assumptions about the diegetic world constituted by the show. The program offers such a complex apparatus of conspiracy and mystery that online fandom has embraced the show to demonstrate their collective intelligence in action, charting relationships, creating maps, and decoding minute clues on discussion boards, wikis, and blogs. Based on the facets of Lost that seem most innovative and successful, it would seem that mystery, suspense, and the parsing of mysterious clues are some of the show’s chief pleasures – and that the best way to experience the complex narrative is for viewers to put their faith in the producers’ ability to deliver the thrills and head-twisting revelations that the show regularly offers. Since the design of Lost seems predicated upon the serial form and strategic use of the unknown, the practice of spoiler fans appears to be a greater mystery for this program than for a show less dependent on complex narrative structures for its pleasures.

What might the research on fandom and textual consumption tell us about spoiler practices? The word spoiler comes fully-loaded with pejorative and aberrant connotations. Spoiling or spoils, after all, are most commonly associated with milk left out on a warm summer day, with ill-gotten gains from war, or with taking a woman’s virginity under questionable circumstances. Hence, to spoil already connotes an aggressive, hyper-masculine, violent act of robbery, and a destruction of purity, leaving the smell of sour milk in our nostrils. As such, it is perhaps no surprise that spoilers have received little academic attention: they connote incorrect, cruel, and mischievous practices from the outset, and hence present themselves as oddities and aberrations. That said, aberrations and abnormality teach us of normality, or at least of the expectations that create normality, and thus a proper examination of why viewers seek out and enjoy spoilers could promise to tell us more about the process of narrative engagement, both “normal” and otherwise. While certainly not typical of the majority of viewers, spoiler fans are hardly a rare breed: the Internet is awash with fan sites, many of which contain spoilers; several dedicated spoiler sites have enjoyed considerable popularity, such as spoilerfix.com; and the spoilt milk regularly spills over into the mainstream press, whether Entertainment Weekly or The New York Times. Therefore, despite its etymologically ugly roots, spoiling is becoming acceptable and working its way into the mainstream, requiring a reevaluation of what “normal” narrative engagement might look like in the digital age.

 

The Epistemology of the Spoiler

Spoilers have arguably been most notable concerning books or films –  Who Murdered Roger Ackroyd? Who is Kaiser Sose? Where is the Planet of the Apes? What is Soylent Green? Who dies in the newest Harry Potter book? From the act of reading a book’s last chapter first to an overly revealing detail in a movie trailer or review, a number of spoiling practices and boundaries have developed surrounding the self-contained stories of novels and films. However, as television stories have become more elaborate and serialized in the past decade, television spoilers have begun to flow fast and free, complicating the ways narratives are consumed and promoted. The definition of “spoiler” varies somewhat in the eyes of the beholder, as any revelation of yet-to-unfold narrative developments could be viewed as a spoiler by some, ranging from a leaked script of an unfilmed episode to a network preview of next week’s program. Spoilers can result simply from programs “time-shifting” across time zones and exhibition dates, whereby episode content is revealed hours or months before airing locally, or from information gleaned through back channels that stands to spoil all viewers other than cast and crew weeks ahead of time. Lost spoiler boards include photos of the Lost set in Hawaii and testimonials from passers-by, casting information, and leaks from production personnel. Furthermore, producers join in the game themselves, often revealing snippets of information about upcoming episodes, playing with fans by offering Nostradamus-like, cryptically worded clues, or even blatant misinformation in the guise of a real spoiler (dubbed “foilers” by fans).

How viewers wish to experience narratives unfolding can vary. Some viewers consider the “Next week on Lost…” previews following episodes as spoilers, wishing to experience each episode with as little foreknowledge as possible, while others are comfortable seeing any “official” advance information like previews and producer interviews as sanctioned and thus not bona fide spoilers. Some spoilers pop up in everyday fan discussion – though etiquette demands that spoilers be clearly marked as such (“SPOILER WARNING”) – but many magazines like Entertainment Weekly and commercial websites like E! Online make a business of serving up spoilers. Most fansites have dedicated spoiler boards, where spoilers are not only circulated but exhaustively discussed, evaluated for veracity, and used for both community-building and group speculation. Importantly, though, while spoilers have spoiler fans, they also spread virally, “spoiling” non-spoiler fans and forcing advance information upon them; hence, their relevance extends well beyond the Internet enclaves that tend to circulate and even research them.

To explore the key questions of why people read spoilers, and what such consumption tells us about narrative texts, we entered the field in which such practices are carried out: Internet forums dedicated to the show Lost.[1] How might such pleasures and priorities become enacted through viewer habits? And how might viewers themselves conceive of their own practices – as aberrant or ideal, a game or a short-cut? These are empirical questions which warranted a closer look into the practices of a spoiler community. We designed an anonymous online qualitative survey addressing these issues (see Appendix 1 for full survey), and posted an invitation to participate on five discussion boards (televisionwithoutpity.com; lost-forum.com; thefuselage.com; abc.com; losttv-forum.com) and one listserver (LostGame@yahoogroups.com) dedicated to Lost and frequently the site of spoiler threads and discussions. Posted the week before Lost’s Season Two finale aired in the United States, the survey clearly attracted interest from the show’s dedicated fanbase: within a week, 228 people visited the survey, with 179 completing at least half of its questions. Around 80% of respondents identified themselves as American, with 17 other countries represented in the survey. 60% of respondents were female, and respondents’ ages ranged from 18 to 54, with a mean age of 29 and median of 27.[2] The survey combined open-ended questions with more guided choice questions, with topics ranging from the specific pleasures offered by Lost to the ethical implications of spoiling. While the invitation did not explicitly indicate that the survey focused on spoilers, as we wished to gather data from viewers both who consume and avoid them, the majority of respondents did indicate that they consume spoilers to some degree – 37% frequently consume spoilers, 32% sometimes read them, and 14% both consume and disseminate spoilers online, with only 16% of respondents indicating that they avoid spoilers as much as possible. Although this should not be mistaken for an accurate portrait of the spoiling tendency of all Lost fans,[3] or even those who frequent online discussion boards, clearly spoiler consumption is a central facet of a good number of active Lost fans.

The practices of spoiler fans come fully loaded with preconceptions about what it means to read spoilers, and judgments on the legitimacy of spoiler reading. For the spoiler avoiders in our survey, spoilers were seen as directly “ruining” the experience of watching Lost, and many expressed concerns of being accidentally spoiled by reading improperly labeled material online or coming across revealing entertainment news, like the announcement that an actor is leaving the show. As one spoiler avoider wrote about watching an episode that had been accidentally spoiled for her, “I spent too much time waiting for ‘the big moment’ and not enough time enjoying the show.” Some spoiler avoiders for Lost read spoilers for other shows, but find Lost’s presentation of suspense, surprises, thrills, and mystery so compelling that they wish to retain those pleasurable responses by remaining unspoiled. One respondent suggested that she only spoils programs that she doesn’t particularly respect or think are clever in their storytelling; for shows like Lost or House, “if I respect a show I’m more likely to watch it the way I was expected to – as a naïve or ignorant viewer.” While spoiler avoiders do not typically celebrate naiveté or ignorance per se, they do talk of suspense dramas like Lost as requiring that viewers give themselves over to creators to be manipulated and controlled through the storytelling process.

Our respondents all participate in online fan forums, so they are quite familiar with spoiler culture. When asked about how they regarded or explained spoiler fans, the avoiders generally seemed mystified and dismissive of the practice. A number of responses infantilized the practice, comparing spoiler fans to “kids on Christmas Eve who sneak a look at their presents,” or called them “bad sports.” Others suggested that spoiler fans lacked the maturity and patience needed to follow a slowly-evolving show like Lost “properly” as designed, regarding their consumption of narrative spoilers as character flaws. One respondent thought that spoiler fans were interested in the power spoilers give them, as “people get a bit of an ego-boost by thinking they know information sooner than everyone else.” While many avoiders had a live-and-let-live attitude toward spoiler fans – as long as they properly label spoilers online – there certainly was a sense of judgmental uncertainty as to why such viewers would undermine what they saw as the central pleasures of suspense and mystery that Lost offers.

We approached this research with a similar sense of uncertainty – both of us are dedicated Lost fans who avoid spoilers to the best of our abilities. Because we both explore and participate in the online fan communities around the show, we have seen the engagement around spoilers among hardcore fans, and wish to understand how such practices fit into larger norms of narrative comprehension, fan community, and textuality. Additionally, one of us is married to a dedicated spoiler fan of Lost, and thus the conflict and disconnect between spoiler avoiders and consumers plays out each week in front of the television. As academics trained to view texts as creative works within particular consumption norms, we certainly carry some degree of judgmental skepticism toward spoiler fans, regarding such practices as aberrant violations of normal viewing protocols. But as cultural scholars trained to examine fan practices not as a stigmatized “other,” but as legitimate forms of cultural participation and engagement, we turn to the practices and self-descriptions of spoiler fans to understand this alternative viewing practice within our midst. By asking spoiler fans to explain themselves, might we gain greater understanding of their practices? Might our own practices of narrative consumption be made a bit more strange and less of an unspoken norm? Might we too want to be spoiled?

 

Reading Spoilers and Extra-Textual Pleasures 

In the most in-depth study of spoiling to date, Henry Jenkins (2006) discusses numerous extra-textual pleasures to be obtained from spoiler consumption. Indeed, given that Lost spoilers are separated in time, space, and industrial context from Lost, it may seem logical to posit that many of the key spoiler-reading pleasures are extra-textual themselves. Jenkins focuses on Survivor spoilers, examining fan community responses to information that would seem to tell them who gets voted off next week, who will have a medical emergency, and so forth. Unlike fictional narratives like Lost, spoiling reality programs like Survivor entails rooting out what has already happened in “reality” (or at least its made-for-TV incarnation), rather than unveiling the elaborate machinations of a still-to-be-written scripted serial. Jenkins frames the act of spoiling Survivor as a move in “a giant cat and mouse game that is played between the producers and the audience” (2006: 25). Eager to work out what will be revealed next on the program, audiences draw from leaks with cast or crew members, satellite images of potential filming locations, and tales from travelers returned from the filming location, ultimately hoping to piece together the already-enacted reality before primetime beats them to it. Meanwhile, producer Mark Burnett and CBS play their own hand, bluffing by way of throwing out fake spoilers.

Jenkins sees spoiling in largely communal terms, drawing on Pierre Lévy’s (1997) concept of “collective intelligence” to argue that fans enjoy the camaraderie and groupwork of solving Survivor together. Interestingly, many of Jenkins’s spoiler fans speak of Survivor itself in disinterested or even hostile terms, as many of them are lapsed fans who think the show has gotten worse, and so their enjoyment as “consumers” comes largely from the act of spoiling, whereby watching the show serves to confirm or reject spoilers, rather than from the pleasures of “the text itself.” Indeed, we surround “consumers” and “the text itself” with quotation marks to signify the degree to which a markedly different model of textual consumption seems to be in place, whereby the text is already spoiled, and so the game of spoiling replaces the act of consumption for consumption’s sake. As Cornel Sandvoss points out, the objects (and let us add, practices) associated with fandom can become their own fan objects (2005: 90), supplanting the supposedly “primary” text – in this case, Survivor fans shift their dedication from the televisual text to the spoiler paratexts.  How might Jenkins’s account apply to the spoiler fans of Lost’s fictional narrative? We can extend his approach to offer four hypotheses regarding the potential extra-textual pleasures of Lost spoiler consumption:

·         Spoiler fans consume spoilers as a game in and of itself, a contest between fans and producers

·         Spoiler fans are anti-fans, resisting the pleasures of the text in an oppositional manner

·         Spoiler fans seek the communal relations of the spoiler-circulating community

·         Spoiler fans regard the spoilers themselves as enjoyable texts to be studied and parsed

Each of these hypotheses point to differing ways in which spoiler fans can enjoy spoilers and participate in a spoiler community outside the practice of watching Lost directly.

 

Spoiler fans consume spoilers as a game in and of itself, a contest between fans and producers

Jenkins suggests that the game between Survivor fans and producers, whereby fans try to solve Mark Burnett’s puzzle and “crack” Survivor, is a primary motivation for spoiler communities. By contrast, we found very few Lost spoiler fans who conceived of spoiling as an oppositional game played with the producers. Certainly, many wished to “crack” Lost – 66% of spoiler fans responded that they would read a hypothetical “master document” revealing all of Lost’s secrets if they had access to it. However, most felt they would do so guiltily, or out of undying curiosity, and far fewer wanted to share this document with others. On the whole, these fans seemed to exhibit considerable respect for Lost’s production team, and it was extremely rare to hear anyone voice a desire to “beat them” at any game. A few fans like spoilers because ABC (or their own national broadcaster) was seen to transmit the story at a snail’s pace, and thus we might see their interest in spoilers as a direct response to network scheduling practices – “I only read spoilers when I am really starved for Lost info,” wrote one respondent. But for the large part, our respondents were not oppositional fans nor engaged in battles against the production team (whether out of dislike or for fun). Rather, many spoiler fans repeatedly offer praise for the producers, the show’s writing, and its storytelling – a few outright “blame” the show’s quality for their spoiler addiction, as they want to extend their narrative experiences beyond their weekly installments rather than thwarting the show. This suggests that producer-fan “games” may be more prevalent in reality television shows with outcomes that have already taken place in the lived universe.[4] Nevertheless, we should note that our own study failed to attract any actual spoiler generators who infiltrate sets or leak preview copies, and so the differences between our data and Jenkins’s may also correlate to differences between spoiler readers and producers.

 

Spoiler fans are anti-fans, resisting the pleasures of the text in an oppositional manner

Alongside the notion that fans are locked into a game with producers is the suggestion that spoiler fans may actually be anti-fans or non-fans of the show. Jonathan Gray (2003) uses these terms to contrast, respectively, viewers with an active (and frequently paratextually productive) dislike of a text, character, or personality, with those who casually consume a text. One could certainly imagine those who do not watch a program but feel the need to keep up with the story via spoilers to participate in watercooler buzz; who view the show only occasionally and with marginal interest, thus using spoiler boards to stay up-to-date; or who, in a more malicious anti-fan vein, use spoilers as a way to thwart the pleasures of “real” fans by circulating “foilers” (fake spoilers) or spoiling other people’s pleasures by copying actual spoilers onto boards or conversations designated as “spoiler-free.” In all of these hypothetical scenarios, spoiler fans are seen as consuming, and interacting with, a text at its extra-textual margins, in order to avoid or actively reject its textual core; and they are contrasted with actual fans who consume Lost’s narrative “correctly,” following the designs of the show’s creators. Alas, the data in our survey do not point toward this reading of Lost’s spoiler fans in the least. A rare few wrote of spoiling other, “weaker” shows either so that they need not watch, or, as one respondent noted of Seventh Heaven spoilers, “to torture myself with how bad it is.” However, regarding Lost, 87% of surveyed spoiler fans claim they never miss an episode, and nearly half of them frequently rewatch episodes, while only 21% cited the ability to relate to other Lost fans among the many reasons they watch the show, with nobody selecting this as their primary reason. Although literature on anti-fans suggests that oppositional viewers often create meanings and engage with programs they dislike (Gray 2003; Mittell 2004), it would seem quite odd for anti-fans to be so dedicated to, effectively, researching a narrative they actively dislike. Only a few respondents suggested that they had an adversarial role toward Lost, engaging in parodying or mocking the show – but these comments actually came from fans who avoided spoilers! Throughout the surveys, spoiler fans made it quite clear that they were highly invested in Lost as a positive object of enjoyment, with some even noting that they would be less likely to read spoilers if the show were less pleasurable. While perhaps the specific pleasures that spoiler fans get from Lost might differ, this is clearly not a case of either anti-fandom, non-fandom, or the use of spoilers as a way to gain compensatory information – spoiler fans are passionate and engaged in their appreciation of Lost.

That said, some spoiler fans use them to manage their smaller disappointments with the text, and general apprehension regarding Lost’s potential fall from grace, suggesting another mode of fandom that may be termed cautious fandom. Watching a serial television drama is a huge time investment, especially with a show like Lost which seems to demand a degree of “processing time” outside of the viewing experience to research, theorize, and discuss its mysteries. For fans of such an ongoing series, there may be a question as to whether the temporal investment will be worth it – will I get the narrative payoff I desire? In numerous interviews and commentaries, Lost’s producers have frequently cited both Twin Peaks and The X-Files as influences, both for their clear precedents in narrative complexity and paranormal mysteries, and for their noted failures to deliver upon and sustain their initial promise. Producers recognize that with the ambition of crafting a highly complex puzzle narrative comes the curse of high expectations, noting that the payoff to the mysteries will inevitably be a let-down to the fans who devote hours each week to theorizing and speculation. Both Twin Peaks and X-Files succumbed to this curse – Twin Peaks resolved its central mystery with a less-than-satisfying revelation that left fans disinterested in what would come next, while X-Files dragged out and shifted its conspiratorial mythology beyond the point of most fans’ engagement and comprehension. Lost producers use the paratextual realm of interviews and commentaries to assure fans that they learned the lessons of earlier failures, promising that the mysteries will resolve without ambiguity or anticlimax. However, some cautious fans remain worried, hiding a touch of fear behind their pleasures, a tinge of apprehension that their show might start to decline or take an undesirable narrative turn to break their fannish hearts. For such cautious fans, spoilers work as a form of narrative insulation, revealing potential miscues in the less emotionally charged medium of online text. As one fan wrote, “You can prepare yourself for things you normally wouldn’t like. By reading spoilers, you will have the time to adjust to them by the time the episode airs (hopefully).” Another similarly suggested, “When episodes begin pointing towards a future plotline but take more time than necessary to unveil it, I’ll read spoilers to confirm the direction of the story before I start disliking the show.” While such practices do not fully eliminate disappointments from fan experiences, they shift the experience to both assess the worth of remaining a loyal viewer and to prepare for the eventual let down of watching the episode. A few respondents reported knowing other people who have grown disenchanted with the show, but still used spoilers to see if an episode would be worth watching, but this rationale was far less prevalent than explanations that assert that spoilers allow them to make a show that they love even more enjoyable.

 

Spoiler fans seek the communal relations of the spoiler-circulating community

Overall, opposition or even skepticism toward the text and/or producers proved extremely rare in our study, exhibiting little evidence of anti-fandom, viewer-producer games or battles, or fan caution; however, spoiler fans clearly enjoyed the utility of spoilers in informing their Lost speculation games and debates within fan communities. A commonly noted “added pleasure” of spoilers was that spoilers offer special status (via special acquired knowledge) to spoiler fans. “I’m a gossip – love to be the first to tell people what’s going on,” stated one respondent; another offered that “I know what’s coming up before my offline friends do and am better equipped to discuss the episode”; another “get[s] to tease my friends about knowing what happens when they don’t!”; while a fourth notes the “thrill of being one of the first to know what will happen.” Lost offers its viewers countless mysteries and puzzles, and several respondents, like these, enjoyed accumulating narrative capital, and gaining an “advantage” over spouses, friends, or online discussants, that spoilers gave them. This advantage was social, ensuring that spoiler fans would be respected either as those in the know or as savvy speculators; additionally, to a few, it was an internal pleasure, allowing them the personal feeling of supremacy. For instance, one man admitted that he liked reading spoilers, “telling people your ‘theories’ and then people saying wow, what a great guess, when it ends up being true,” while another’s desire for narrative capital appeared wholly internal, when she stated that she liked spoilers, “honestly so I can sit back and laugh at people making stupid posts and stupid theories.” Or, as another noted of spoilers’ added pleasures, “The only pleasure I feel is internal, and it’s not very strong. All I feel is ‘Ha-ha I knew something you didn’t know.’”

Some spoiler fans clearly enjoy being part of the specific community dedicated to circulating spoilers. The wealth of fan studies (see, for instance, Bird 2003; Brooker 2002; Harrington and Bielby 1995; Hills 2002; Jenkins 1992) have suggested that a considerable motivation of fandom is the social pleasure of being part of an often warm and accepting community that shares one’s passion. Our data revealed less overt statements of fealty to a fan community; nevertheless, many spoke of the joys of using spoilers to energize open and friendly speculation discussions with others, beyond merely “competing” with spoiler-informed discussion, as described above. Nearly all respondents engage in some social activities regarding Lost, whether online or face-to-face, as summarized in Table 1. It is clear that many spoiler fans specifically enjoy the communal speculation that goes hand in hand with spoiler circulation. Few sentiments were as uniformly stated as the notion that speculation with others is fun, and a rewarding part of watching Lost, signaling the degree to which spoilers in particular situate Lost and its mysteries at the center of considerable fan discussion, debriefing, and debate. One respondent, for instance, noted, “I love reading about all of the many theories and speculations out there. It doesn’t matter to me whether spoilers turn out to be true or false; I just enjoy the discussion,” while another stated directly that Lost spoiler boards can be “a good source of online community.” Such community interaction extends to face-to-face interactions, as one fan wrote, “[Spoilers] give me more to discuss with friends and family who also watch the show.” The puzzle nature of the narrative was singled out as generating a committed viewership for one respondent: “This fosters a community of watchers, and thinkers, and speculators, then spoilers.” While few respondents offered lengthy paeans to fan community building, the pleasures discussed tended toward participatory and interpersonal practices rather than the act of solitary viewing. Through spoiler-board discussion, then, Lost becomes a communally consumed text, and many spoiler fans appreciated spoilers for their role in this expansion of the text.[5]

Table 1: Spoiler fan practices – post-episode activities and how they communicate about Lost

Post-Episode Activities			Fan Communications
Read discussion forums about the program	92%		I speculate about mysteries and future episodes	86%
Discuss the program in a face-to-face conversation	73%		I compare newly revealed information to previous episodes	71%
Visit other websites dedicated to the show	59%		I analyze specific dialogue, images or sounds from episodes	52%
Post in online discussion forums about the program	56%		I compare newly revealed information to spoilers    I have heard about	51%
Read articles about the show online	55%		I ask questions to clarify confusing points	46%
Watch the episode or parts of the episode again	49%		I evaluate the quality of the episode	44%
Discuss the program using email or instant messaging	43%		I do not communicate with other people about episodes	9%
Read articles about the show in newspapers or magazines	33%		Other (please specify)	1%
Visit the official ABC.com site	27%
Discuss the program on the phone	25%
Post Lost-related material to websites besides forums	12%
Other (please specify)	3%

 

Spoiler fans regard the spoilers themselves as enjoyable texts to be studied and parsed

Speculation regarding Lost’s narrative mysteries is a central textual pleasure, but another extra-textual game seems to be played amongst spoiler fans – a considerable number of viewers were quite skeptical of the veracity of many spoilers, attributing them to either mischievous foiler posters or savvy producers trying to lure them off the scent, an increasingly prevalent strategy in today’s television environment. Thus respondents enjoyed a secondary game of speculation regarding the spoilers themselves. Many respondents had no experience of foilers, praising vigilant board moderators, and some hated foilers (leading to most boards’ stated policy that foiler posters would be excommunicated). But many others either adopted a “buyer beware” policy, or even saw foilers akin to “red herrings” in mystery novels (and on Lost itself), part of the fun of speculation and requiring thoughtful deconstruction and skeptical analysis. Therefore, for instance, one respondent noted that a foiler “keeps things very exciting and interesting, because you never know what you should believe or not. Speculating about the reliability of a spoiler can be as much fun as speculating about the show itself!” Another wrote, “I think fake spoilers are just as fun as ones that turn out to be true, especially if they’re well thought-out and believable. I love unraveling the mysteries and discussing the possible explanations with other people, and I’m never upset if any of it turns out to be false.” Clearly, for some spoiler fans, the foiler game is an active and motivating pleasure for their fandom – as one wrote, “I actually enjoy fake spoilers more than the real ones, because I think I know everything and then I'm shocked when something completely different happens.” Surprisingly, fully half of respondents who answered our question about fake spoilers described a positive or benignly neutral attitude toward them and how they add even more meta-mysteries on top of Lost’s already ample collection of enigmas. The presence of foilers renders all spoilers potentially false, hence demanding careful analysis and viewership, which only plays into Lost’s games of mystery and speculation.[6]

Admittedly, foiler speculation is often inherently intra-textual, forcing the viewer deep into the ur-text for corroborating evidence. However, in parsing through and discussing the veracity of spoilers versus foilers, spoilers also become separate objects of textual consumption and pleasure, important in their own right as texts, and in the ways in which they question the very binary of intratextuality and extratextuality. As a few respondents noted, watching Lost without spoilers might make it, for them, less “interactive.” For this and other reasons, spoiler fans talked of spoilers as entities that add layers to the televisual text. Certainly, the logic behind naming spoilers as such is a faulty logic behind many media studies examinations of the text, whereby textuality is confined to the flickering images on the screen. Many of these responses contradict such a notion by posing the idea of spoilers as themselves viable texts, that create or at least extend meaning outside the “primary text,” and that offer, as one respondent noted, “a puzzle, a fun game on its own merits.” Much as a young child, for instance, can consume a media text by playing with its licensed action figures, adding layers of meaning and salience to the text; or much as any “paratext” (see Genette 1997; Gray 2003) – from a spinoff to an interview, a review to DVD bonus materials, an item of merchandise to synergy advertising – can construct the text away from the text, so to speak, so too do spoilers continue the work of creating Lost. As C. Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby (1995) and Matt Hills (2002) argue, media fandoms often adopt the tone and character of their beloved texts, and so it stands to reason that Lost fans would be especially interested in mystery-style paratexts such as spoilers, more so than fans of other genres like family dramas would – hence explaining in part why Seventh Heaven spoilers are less plentiful in the fanosphere. But to acknowledge that spoilers are texts, or at least textual, in their own right, is to accept that they generate their own meanings and pleasures, independent of the “primary text.” Few of our respondents felt they “needed” spoilers, and many were aware of the tradeoff of sacrificing surprises at the moment of transmission by consuming them earlier, but our data suggests the increasing importance of such paratexts as a vital component of contemporary textuality. In the time between episodes, whether a week or a summer hiatus, spoilers fill the lull with active textuality.

As such, spoilers are texts to be enjoyed, studied, interpreted, and consumed like any other text. Given that 80% of participants who indicated how often they visit spoiler boards said that they read spoilers once a week or more, and that some checked multiple times a day, it would appear that many fans spend more time reading spoiler texts than watching Lost itself. Moreover, a casual perusal of popular spoiler discussion boards reveals long and involved commentary specifically addressing and analyzing spoilers, even outpacing non-spoiler discussions of the show itself at times. Such a perusal also reveals that many spoilers are enigmatic and oblique, begging interpretation and analysis rather than casual consumption. For instance, when Hawaiian board members post photographs of Lost’s sets, these photographs rarely tell a straightforward story; instead, they must be studied and discussed as intently as episodes of Lost itself, and the general excitement that follows this process speaks volumes regarding the textual pleasures of spoilers. At first sight, spoilers may seem nothing more than snippets and factoids designed to ruin Lost’s textual pleasures, but upon further examination, they appear as densely packed with meaning and their own pleasures as spinoff novels, comic books, official web sites, or DVD bonus materials. However, our research clearly showed that any extra-textual pleasures of anti-fandom, game-playing, fan community, or spoiler textuality were dwarfed by the specific ways that spoilers enhance the direct engagement with Lost’s textual and narrative pleasures.

 

Pleasures of the Spoiled Story

Spoilers, we have shown, offer a multitude of extra-textual pleasures, but as much as our research told us about activity and meaning outside of the text, it told us more about the text’s own internal pleasures. After all, while Jenkins’s (2006) interest in spoilers lies in examining the ensuing democratic form of communal consumption, both his close study of these fans and our own study reveal the degree to which “the text itself” is considerably more layered and multivalent than has often been presupposed in textual research. As Jenkins’s earlier work (1992) and that of many fan researchers (see Brooker 2002; Harrington and Bielby 1995; Hills 2002; Sandvoss 2005) has underlined, the pleasures of the text are numerous. At the core of the stigmatized perceptions of spoiler fans is a central assumption: spoilers disrupt storytelling and ruin the narrative. But might we need to reconsider exactly how spoiler fans envision the pleasures of the text, as well as their own narrative consumption and comprehension in the light of their preferred mode of reading? As Martin Barker has argued (see Barker, Arthurs and Harindranath 2001; Barker 2000; Barker and Brooks 1998), media studies (and film studies in particular) have been wholly biased toward the specificities of plot, as if this is the only element that matters to viewers, when in fact texts operate on many layers. The preeminence of plot in textual studies’ assumed hierarchy of narrative pleasures casts a long shadow over spoiler practices, yet Laura Carroll reverses the evaluative terms that lie behind much discussion of spoilers, provocatively wondering why spoilers are posed as a problem in the first place. She argues, “the underlying assumption doesn’t imply much respect for anything that a fiction might offer you except abrupt and sensational narrative developments, or much long-term durability of a story. […] A well-constructed story will stand up to decades of use and abuse, won’t it?” (Carroll 2005). Carroll reasons that literature professors have long “spoiled” texts in their classes without concern for actually ruining the text, precisely because a text is about more than just surprises and plot-twists. In fact, the long history of storytelling suggests that unspoiled narratives are far less common than spoiled ones – traditional drama and literature often retells well-known source material like myths and history, and many published works were preceded by summaries of each chapter or the entire narrative, ensuring that readers knew what to expect before encountering it.  

Thus, conceptualizing narrative and textuality as entailing much more than plot exposition led to our final set of hypotheses regarding the narrative pleasures of spoiler consumption – and to spoil our upcoming analysis, the most provocative and powerful set of explanations for the practices of spoiler fans:

·         Spoiler fans seek the pleasure and comfort of viewing the known, enabling the enjoyment of a familiar text even upon its first viewing

·         Spoiler fans see the revelatory aspect of the plotline and pleasures of suspense as relatively unimportant, obscuring more enjoyable textual qualities that they seek out such as narrative mechanics, relationship dramas, and production values

·         Spoiler fans view Lost’s narrative practices differently from traditional stories, using spoilers to participate in a puzzle-solving quest apart from typical storytelling

·         Spoiler fans aim to take control of their emotional responses and pleasures of anticipation, creating suspense on viewers’ own terms rather than the creators’

All of these ways of understanding the experience of watching Lost as a spoiled text weave together to suggest a mode of textual experience running counter to many of the assumed norms of media fandom and narrative consumption.

 

Spoiler fans seek the pleasure and comfort of viewing the known, enabling the enjoyment of a familiar text even upon its first viewing 

Instead of a plot-centric, “what happened” model of narrative consumption, we might look at a more phenomenological approach, which posits the text as an ongoing experience (see Fish 1980; Gray 2006; Iser 1978). Lisa Kernan notes the seeming conundrum of movie trailers: if a story must be revealed in order to be advertised, why doesn’t this risk spoiling or ruining the same story? Her answer, simply, is that trailers sell “the movie event,” offering “an atmospheric sampling” of a text (Kernan 2004: 54, 60). Thus, she suggests that not only the trailer, but the movie itself is as much a feeling and experience as it is a plotline. In this light, Gray (2005) has examined Blade Runner fan desire for and discussion of a “true” director’s cut DVD. Gray notes the oddity that these long-time fans have operated with the assumption that their beloved text isn’t the author’s chosen one, or even the best one possible; he concludes that they are fans more of an idealized environment and atmosphere of Blade Runner than of a set narrative. Carroll suggests a similar model of text as multi-level experience when she argues that spoiler fear “overvalues the first impression of a text – which often as not is rather superficial” (Carroll 2005), reasoning that a good text should offer much more than plot. Carroll underrates the importance of the plot, particularly to certain genres such as mystery or suspense – and to narrative forms that are offered serially and structured to create weekly installments of suspense and mystery, like Lost. Nevertheless, her insistence on the importance of the second reading – a reading, of course, where plot-as-revelation is de-centered – provides a window into understanding how spoiler fans may use spoilers: as performing a short cut to the second reading, getting the plot out of the way so as to concentrate on other issues and pleasures.

If such a strategy sounds odd, we should realize the remarkable power and centrality of reruns, particularly to American television (see Kompare 2005). Admittedly, many reruns are watched by those who missed the first airing, but whenever viewers watch the same episode of Law & Order or The Simpsons yet again, they are already “spoiled.” Examining the “different phenomenologies” of reruns, Jenny Nelson has argued that plot, suspense, and character development all give way to an interest in “codes” (1990: 86), as one concentrates more on how the story is put together, and on significance and signification. To this end, Steven Johnson (2005) notes that in an era of reruns and DVD releases, American television has been forced to get smarter and more complex, precisely so that shows can bear up to this sort of analysis and repetitive viewing – think of the endless background events in The Simpsons, purposeful use of imagery in The Sopranos, or subtle clues dropped throughout Lost. Similarly, Barbara Klinger’s (2006) recent examination of repetitive film viewing underlines the importance of familiarity in viewing. Experiencing otherness and difference may well be hallmarks of artistic viewing, long idealized in art and literature (see Horkheimer, Adorno, and Schmid Noerr 2002; Iser 1978; Marcuse 1991; Sandvoss 2005), but the pleasures of the familiar are also key to many viewers – from watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Star Wars two hundred times, to owning a painting and hanging it in the living room for endless repeat viewings. With so many viewing options at their fingertips, many individuals enjoy and welcome the “mastery and solace” (Klinger 2006: 155) of familiarity in viewing.

Consumption of the familiar, as Klinger (2006) and Derek Kompare (2005) remind us, constitutes a considerable portion of our film and television viewing, and media such as music and video games are even more repetitive for many consumers. We watch, listen, or read again, though, because of the pleasures of the familiar: knowing what will come next. Klinger, Nelson, and Kompare’s work on reruns and repetition stand out as exceptional and rare in media studies, due largely to the field’s focus on the first viewing, but they highlight the rich and common pleasures to be gained from a second viewing. Sandvoss (2005) draws an instructive distinction between “literary” strategies of reading and “fan” strategies, regardless of the texts themselves: literary reading brings us into contact with otherness and difference, whereas fan reading reverts to the familiar. Fandom, as such, can become a refuge from difference and the new. Might spoiler fans provide an exaggerated example of fan reading, whereby the difference of plot development is encountered before reading the text, at the level of the spoiler, in order to ensure a predictable, comfortably familiar reading experience of an episode itself? Might the act of spoiling be a clever way for impatient viewers to short-circuit the out-of-control experience of being taken for a narrative ride and go directly to the pleasures of repeated viewings on the first go round?

Our data offered no easy answer. Nearly half of spoiler fans claimed to watch Lost episodes more than once, suggesting an enjoyment of the familiar, and similarly, many fans discussed episodes online and consumed all manner of Lost-related products and paratexts, also suggesting a certain desire for the known. However, as has been mentioned, a clear majority of viewers loved the show’s suspense and surprises – as one respondent noted, when rewatching an episode, “you can remember how much you loved the episode the first time, and how shocked you were by the storyline. With a spoiled show, you almost feel cheated.” Spoiler fans highlighted how some surprises remain no matter how spoiled they may be, and a spoiled episode still offers new insights into the show’s mythology, mystery, and character development, all pleasures of newness and originality. Additionally, three-quarters of respondents highlighted Lost’s uniqueness compared to other programs, suggesting distinct pleasures of the unknown and unfamiliar. Thus, in Sandvoss’ terms, spoiler fans experienced Lost as both a literary and a fan text, exhibiting considerable pleasure in its difference, newness, and failure to conform to the predictable, as well as comfort in its familiarity and known narrative. While they may not have explicitly stated their pleasures in the terms of rereading these otherwise “new” episodes, many of the specific pleasures of rereading, such as being able to concentrate on background minutiae or knowing what to look for, were appreciated by spoiler fans.

 

Spoiler fans see the revelatory aspect of the plotline and pleasures of suspense as relatively unimportant, obscuring more enjoyable textual qualities that they seek out such as narrative mechanics, relationship dramas, and production values

Clearly the pleasures experienced by spoiler fans watching episodes in which they know what will happen are somewhat different from conventional viewers. How might this shift in experience account for the motivations of spoiler fans? As discussed above, Lost as a text seems particularly dependent on the emotional response of suspense – the entire series is predicated on an elaborate web of mysteries triggering suspense, surprise, and the desire to solve puzzles. One explanation for spoiler fans seeking out information is to lessen the experience of suspense throughout an episode, decreasing the emotional unease that most fans of suspense narratives find pleasurable. While a few respondents suggested that spoilers helped them enjoy episodes by eliminating feelings of tension and suspense that they found unpleasant, the majority of spoiler fans still find suspense to be a primary appeal of the show. The survey asked respondents to select all of the relevant reasons why they watch Lost from a long list, as well as to choose which single reason was most important. As summarized in Table 2, 90% of respondents selected “I enjoy the suspenseful plot” as one important motivation and 24% chose it as the primary pleasure of the program.  Other similar emotional responses were noted as among the numerous motives for watching the show, including “The show surprises me” and “I find it exciting,” among the five most frequently cited pleasures of Lost. 

Table 2 – Why do spoiler fans watch Lost?

Pleasures of Spoiler Fans (n=150)	Reasons to Watch	Primary Reason to Watch
I want to discover the answers to the island's mysteries	91%	28%
I enjoy the suspenseful plot	90%	24%
The show surprises me	77%	1%
The show is unlike anything else on the air	75%	9%
I find it exciting	71%	3%
I enjoy the innovative way the show tells its story	68%	9%
I am interested in the philosophical issues raised by the show	60%	5%
I like to discuss the show on websites or with people I know	59%	1%
I find some of the actors attractive	54%	0%
I want to solve the show's puzzles before they are answered	51%	3%
I am impressed by the show's production values	43%	1%
I am invested in the relationships that exist or that could form between characters	38%	4%
The show makes me laugh	37%	0%
It's a ritual that I watch with friends or family	33%	5%
It reminds me of playing a game	31%	1%
I find the show to be a good distraction from my own life	31%	1%
I want to see the characters escape the island	22%	1%
I want to be able to relate to other people I know who watch it	21%	0%
I find it scary	18%	0%
The show makes me cry	13%	0%
The show reminds me of other programs I enjoy	10%	0%
It teaches me something useful about the world	9%	0%
Other (please specify)	2%	3%

 

Spoiler fans recognize that learning about narrative events can potentially lessen these pleasurable responses of suspense, surprise, and excitement. A number of respondents discussed how much they enjoyed not being spoiled for big twists, like Michael’s shooting of Ana-Lucia and Libby, or having only partial knowledge (like knowing that the characters would die, but not knowing how) to create an additional layer of anticipation and suspense. When they do know the details of such events, spoiler fans can feel the sting of regret, wishing that they hadn’t known what was coming – although many suggest they cannot resist the temptation to seek out the spoilers for the next episode regardless.

Even though spoilers can undermine the surprises of an episode, most spoiler fans suggest that there are more pleasures within the text than to be found in the twisty plotting. Echoing the commentary of Carroll (2005), one spoiler fan writes, “The initial shock value may be ruined, but if a drama has nothing else to offer then it isn’t worth watching in the first place.” While such outright dismissal of shock is rare among respondents, many clearly allow their foreknowledge of events to attune their viewing to other pleasures of the text. Spoiler fans note that knowing what will happen does not take away from their enjoyment of the show’s performances, dialogue, production values, humorous moments, and focus on character relationships and development. As one fan wrote, “the words of a quickly written spoiler don’t do justice to the actual episode.” For some, the reduction of suspense enables greater attention to these details, and even enables a level of emotional connection with characters – one fan writes that he uses spoilers to avoid investing his attention to relationships or characters who are doomed. Thus, for some fans, learning the events of an episode in advance can yield greater access into the show’s other pleasures, allowing them to avoid being distracted by the moment-to-moment suspense.

One key pleasure of Lost involves its innovative storytelling strategies, taking nested flashbacks and limited narrative perspective to imaginative heights. As part of a larger trend of increasing narrative complexity in television, Mittell (2006) has argued that a key pleasure for fans of such programs lies in the “operational aesthetic,” encouraging viewers to watch the gears of the storytelling machinery while being taken for a ride, and thus balancing pleasures between the diegetic stories and their formal plotting. While viewers of narratively complex programs like Alias, 24, Arrested Development, and Scrubs maintain part of their focus on the stories being told, they also look beyond the question of “what will happen?” to consider “how is it being told?” For spoiler fans, having already discovered what will happen frees them to concentrate on the formal pleasures of innovative narration and inventive presentation – as one respondent wrote, “It’s like reading a book and then watching the movie even when you know the ending.” Spoiler fans were often quick to point out that spoilers reveal the “what” but not the “how,” and in doing so sidestep the risks of “ruining” the plot, at the same time as they increase anticipation. As one respondent offered:

When the Losties are going to discover something new about the island, and I already know about it, I still want to know HOW they find out. It’s still just as exciting, if not more so, to see how they’re going to come upon it. For instance, I knew about the Black Rock, and that it was a boat, before they found it. But that didn’t really TELL me anything about it, or why a boat would be in the middle of the jungle. It was even MORE mysterious to KNOW the “answer.” That’s why Lost is so fun, even with some spoilers. [emphasis in original]

Here, this respondent reverses commonsense logic regarding spoilers, arguing that they improve, rather than ruin, his experience of the text by focusing his attention on the unfolding story and its telling. For over two-thirds of spoiler fans, Lost’s innovative storytelling techniques are an active textual pleasure, and it ranked third among the choices offered as the primary motivation for watching. While such pleasures are not exclusive to spoiler fans, for many respondents the use of spoilers allowed them to concentrate on the process of revealing the plot, not just comprehending the story.

In this way, spoilers work to help fans concentrate on what they consider the most important elements of the show. Lost’s flashbacks, large cast size, complex narrative, and multiple concurrent mysteries clearly confuse – or at least run the risk of confusing – many viewers, and these viewers spoke of spoilers as focusing their viewing. Spoilers are enjoyable, notes one woman, “because you can pick up on subtle hints and clues between characters, and know what it means,” while another talks of the “peace of mind of not having to take all info in at once.” Here, then, we might draw a parallel to another established form of spoiler: study guide summaries of literary texts such as CliffsNotes, York Notes, and SparkNotes. Like Lost spoilers, CliffsNotes allow a window into future narrative occurrences, so that the individual reader can follow ongoing events more easily – once you know that Hamlet will kill Polonius, for example, you can pay closer attention to their dialogue together and how Shakespeare foreshadows these events.[7] Thus spoilers fans may not use spoilers to “skip ahead” as much as they use them to “catch up” as they are watching – “they give me an idea,” writes one fan, “of what to look for in an action filled show like Lost.” Although television programs have been traditionally considered by many as simplistic mass entertainments for passive viewers, even the most dismissive critic would have to acknowledge that the complexity of Lost demands an engaged and active mode of viewing that potentially exceeds the boundaries of each episode. For some, this leads to analytical discussions amongst friends and family; for others, websites like LostPedia.com or televisionwithoutpity.com allow for collective examinations to exhume details seen each week. But for spoiler fans, these resources and others allow information about the narrative future to inflect their ongoing viewing, providing a clarifying framework to understand and analyze the show’s complex storytelling.

In the act of consuming spoilers in advance of viewing a new episode, spoiler fans undertake a borderline practice between viewing an episode for the first time and re-watching it. Matei Calinescu’s (1993) study of rereading is instructive here, suggesting that a first-time reading is typically a forward-moving diachronic process, while rereading focuses on a text’s structural elements in a synchronic fashion. Calinescu does suggest the possibility of a “double reading” the first time through a text, as readers simultaneously experience the narrative’s pull forward through time, as well as a meta-reflection on the text’s construction and design – for literature, Calinescu attributes such reading techniques as typical of professional readers like scholars and critics whose expertise attunes them to the elements of design and authorship that more commonly become the focus of rereading. Aptly, he warns of potential drawbacks in such double reading: “the sharpened attention it demands may spoil the more naïve pleasures associated with a first, linear, curious, engrossing reading, which certain fictional texts keep in store for the happy ‘ordinary’ reader” [emphasis added] (Calinescu 1993: 19). While television programs may be subjected to such a double reading by professional media scholars, they are more commonly consumed by fans whose expertise enables simultaneous reading and rereading. The texts of narratively complex television often invite such consumption practices – as Mittell (2006) writes, “these programs convert many viewers into amateur narratologists, noting usage and violations of convention, chronicling chronologies, and highlighting both inconsistencies and continuities across episodes and even series.” If typical fan consumption practices for programs like Lost straddle the experiences of first and subsequent viewings, then spoiler fans are taking this process one step further, increasing their expertise to more fully embrace the logic of rereading, and, as one respondent noted, “allow[ing] for a deeper analysis while you are viewing it.”

 

Spoiler fans view Lost’s narrative practices differently from traditional stories, using spoilers to participate in a puzzle-solving quest apart from typical storytelling

This tendency to watch new episodes with foreknowledge of events makes more sense when considering Lost’s narrative mode as a puzzle. A typical story uses its techniques of storytelling and narration to create suspense, emotional engagement, and pacing – to break its narrative design by gathering advance information is to violate well-established storytelling norms. But if we think of Lost less like a conventional story and more like a puzzle or game, spoilers seem much more legitimate. In attempting to solve any large-scale puzzle or game, players are encouraged to gather as much information and research as possible, not relying on one limited source. Additionally, as Mia Consalvo (2007) discusses, the culture around videogames, a dominant form of play in contemporary culture, has legitimized so-called “cheating” practices of using strategy guides, walkthroughs, and online databases full of tips for circumventing the game’s ideal design for the naïve player. Consalvo suggests that the paratexts comprising the realm of game cheats and walkthroughs are constitutive of the game experience itself, whether individual players use them or not – the presence of cheats and walkthroughs shapes the practices of both game designers and end-users directly. Although Lost’s spoiler avoiders take great pains to remain “pure,” arguably the entire game-like experience of theorizing and speculating about the show is colored by spoiler culture, as producers release foilers, pepper interviews and podcasts with teasing red herrings or clues, and extend the discursive web of the show’s paratextual universe to match the passionate clue-gathering techniques of spoiler fans.

Lost inhabits an expansive media environment, with “official” narrative information distributed via television broadcasts, DVDs, talk show appearances, novels, websites, online video, podcasts, alternative reality games, cellphones, jigsaw puzzles, and voicemail recordings, as well as dozens of fan-created resources spanning across media. Given this cross-media information saturation, it seems odd to think that seeking out advanced knowledge of events to be presented on the television show would seem illegitimate – such information would be just another additional bit of data used to solve the larger mysteries. Yet Lost’s television series is certainly at the center of its narrative universe, with nearly every cross-media incarnation existing solely for its diegetic or meta-reference to the series. Spoilers, both as officially released by producers and unofficially posted on discussion boards, inhabit the same sphere as fans cataloguing information on LostPedia.com, players exploring the alternative reality game The Lost Experience, and people reading the meta-diegetic novel Bad Twin – as one fan wrote, spoilers are “one more piece of the puzzle.” Thus spoilers meld into a larger paratextual web that augments what fans see each week on ABC, all in service of solving the larger enigmas within its narrative universe.

There is no doubt that the chief reason that Lost fans consume the show and its cross-media experiences is to crack its secrets. Discovering the answers to the island’s mysteries was our respondents’ most commonly shared reason for watching the show and most cited primary rationale, and also factored significantly in their motives for consuming spoilers. By adding useful information concerning the island’s mysteries, most used spoilers as fuel for speculation and theorizing, both face-to-face and online. While for some viewers the end goal of solving the mystery is paramount, many revel in the process of puzzling and problem-solving – as one respondent wrote, “I am fascinated by figuring out the island’s mysteries, and I love reading about all of the many theories and speculation out there…. This is the kind of show where hearing possible speculation ahead of time makes it all more intriguing.”