If you've read this blog before (or have been around me for any length of time) you'll know that I'm a fan of professional wrestling. What is more, I'm blessed enough to have a girlfriend, Sarah (her very wonderful blog can be found here - http://genericenglishgrad.wordpress.com/), who is also a fan . Living 220 miles apart from each other is bitterly fucking annoying for many reasons, and among these reasons is the fact that due to the big WWE events going out at 1am on a Sunday night, we have to wait until the following weekend if we want to watch them together. This necessitates avoiding spoilers. At least, that's the idea.
There's a very famous episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? in which the titular characters spend all day trying to avoid any news of an England football match, so that the result is still a surprise when they arrive home to watch the highlights on TV (this was, of course, in the days before Murdoch and blanket coverage of any sport you can care to name). The Likely Lads were much more successful in this than we were last week. The Royal Rumble is one of the biggest events of the year, and Sarah's favourite type of wrestling match by quite some way. We made our usual pact to avoid the results until we could watch the show together, and then things went wrong. Sarah didn't make it 4 hours before spoilers reared their ugly head. She made the mistake of checking Twitter on her way to work in the morning, and made the similar mistake of going on Facebook, and chancing upon the statuses that one of her brother's mates had been making in the wee small hours. So by 7:30am on Monday morning I knew that Sarah had learned the results, but I was determined not to join her in this. I lasted until 2:30pm. Yup, 2:30pm on Monday.
It was a sort of death by a thousand spoilers. At 8.30am I received a Facebook message from my friend Kyle, simply saying 'oh dear'. Not a direct spoiler, but one from which it could be inferred that people's favourite Daniel Bryan had failed to win the Rumble. Still, nothing confirmed. By lunchtime I'd stayed off all wrestling-related websites (and for me to go even a morning without them is very difficult!), whereupon I went on the BBC site, and the 2nd most popular story was 'WWE star apologizes for Rumble no-show'. In my defence, wrestling hasn't been mainstream for over a decade, so the BBC was the last place I expected to find spoilers. Yet spoilers there were. My will deserted me for a second, and I clicked on the link, to discover that not only had Bryan not won the Rumble, but that he was not even in the match, which had prompted fury amongst fans in the crowd and on social media alike (clearly, enough fury to engender the aforementioned mainstream coverage). I then closed the window. Okay, I thought. I know Bryan hasn't won, but that's the only spoiler I've encountered. It's not the end of the world. I went back to the office, worked for a bit, then opened up Facebook, which in its infinite wisdom has created a sidebar of what is 'trending' worldwide, a sidebar which links to other websites. It was there that I saw the story; 'Batista wins Royal Rumble' (the Likely Lads eventually discover, after all their efforts, that the match was abandoned due to flooding; the mediocre, overrated, out-of-shape and middle-aged Dave Batista's triumph can be said to be an equivalent disappointment). Arse.
Now, I didn't let this deter me. I studiously avoided all other Rumble spoilers, and so by Saturday the only things I'd learnt were that Batista had won the Rumble, that Bryan wasn't in it, and that the crowd reaction was adverse. I was still none the wiser as to who was in the Rumble, or who had triumphed in the other matches on the card. But on Monday this was very far away, and I was extremely pissed off, not just for myself, but for Sarah as well, as she'd been looking forward to the show immensely. However, Sarah, I soon found out, really isn't the type to mind spoilers all that much. To give an example, she's already looked up what happens in the Game of Thrones books that haven't been turned into TV episodes yet, because she was desperate to know what happens to the characters in the end. And as soon as spoilers emerged for the episode of Monday Night Raw we'd planned to watch following the Rumble, she was on them in a flash. Her attitude is that it's the journey that matters more than the destination.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing this attitude at all. In fact, I think it's a rather nice philosophy to have, and there's certainly a great deal of thought behind it. After all, no less a writer than William Shakespeare spoiled his own play, by having the Chorus to Romeo and Juliet summarize the plot of what was about to unfold in a prefatory sonnet. So clearly Shakespeare was of Sarah's opinion. Certainly taking her view would relieve a lot of stress, because I'm one of those people who pathologically avoids spoilers if I'm planning to watch something on delay, and it's so difficult to avoid them in today's internet-suffused world. Or even offline - going back to Game of Thrones, I once absent-mindedly glanced at the blurb to one of the books (which I am never, ever going to read) and spoiled several major plot points for the TV show. Furthermore, I feel that my enjoyment is lessened if I know what's going to happen. I had very little time for what I felt to be a cowardly act on my mum's part in reading the last page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before any of the others, to check that he didn't die, and have never had any interest in watching The Sixth Sense, which I understand to be a very good film, simply because I (along with everyone else in the world) know the twist. Put simply, I love the experience of reading or seeing something for the first time, of not knowing what's going to happen, and it's a sensation that, once felt, can never be recaptured. It's created a lot of problems for me on occasion; at an academic conference last September, I was chairing one of the panels, and couldn't enjoy what was probably a very clever and interesting paper on electronic textual analysis of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (i.e. the books that Game of Thrones is based on), because I was terrified of spoilers, and the fact that I was speaking on the same panel as a fellow speaking on Aristotle's theory of tragedy and the video game Bioshock Infinite led me to spend two full days before the conference trying to complete the game so I wouldn't have anything spoiled. I then got stuck on the last bit. Double arse.
So basically what I'm saying is that I should probably cool it with the spoiler-avoiding and let myself just be swept along for the ride, and yet I'm fundamentally unable to. It might be hypocritical to say so, but I think life would be easier if I followed Sarah's viewpoint. After all, spoilers are nigh-on impossible to avoid, and people can give them without thinking - the day after the Rumble, myself and Sarah were chatting with a friend who was still avoiding all the news (clearly a damn sight more successfully than we managed!), and we both had to bite our tongues a few times. As with many things in life, the answer can be found in Shakespeare. I've enjoyed productions of plays I've never read or read so long ago that I've forgotten the details, but there's also interest and enjoyment to be found in a particular staging of a familiar text, such as Macbeth or Hamlet, or even Romeo and Juliet. And it turns out that when we finally got around to watching the Rumble, we enjoyed the match just fine. In fact, knowing of Big Dave's victory well in advance probably helped us prepare for the disappointment. So clearly there's a middle ground to be struck, and I should try to enjoy spoiled and non-spoiled entertainment alike. We all know that Vader is Luke's father, and we enjoy The Empire Strikes Back anyway. And yet I regret that I can't remember what it was like to know that fact for the first time.
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