by Jonah Lehrer
One day, a bound galley of a British children’s novel landed on Jason’s desk. He was told there was a little “heat on it”—the book was getting buzz—so he added it to his pile. The cover looked cute, but not particularly promising, at least for a movie studio. “I mean, it had philosopher in the title,” Jason remembers. “That doesn’t scream blockbuster.”
But then he began reading. By page five, he was entranced. By the end of the third chapter, he was in love. Jason finished the book a few hours later and immediately wrote a rare review. Here are the key lines from his coverage:
“A wonderful, creative children’s fantasy that is bursting with imagination and big screen potential. It has the appeal of a classic fairytale combined with an eye-popping visual environment.… Ultimately, all of these elements work together to create an incredibly engaging narrative.”
Jason’s praise grabbed the attention of his boss, who called him on the phone. “She asked me if I was serious about this,” Jason remembers. “I told her I was dead serious, that it was really great. So she went in to her boss, who was a senior vice president, and her boss thought it sounded strange. But she also knew that I didn’t give very many positive endorsements, so she canceled her lunch and read the book.” The senior vice president also fell in love and rushed into the office of the head of production. She slammed the book down on his desk and told him that they had to buy the rights immediately. “He glances at the book and reads the jacket copy,” Jason remembers. “Then he shakes his head and says, ‘I don’t know… wizard school?’ ”
The book was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. (The title had been tweaked from the original British version, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.) When Jason and the other executives tried to convince the head of production to change his mind, he responded that even if the book was good, the reported asking price of $500,000 was way too high for a first-time fantasy author.
He was wrong. The movie adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has grossed more than $1 billion, with the total series bringing in more than $7 billion at the box office. “The head of production is a smart guy, but he said no to buying one of the most popular story franchises in history,” Jason says. “And all because he didn’t think wizard school sounded interesting.”
Jason Hallock is now the top story analyst at Paramount Pictures, tasked with identifying blockbuster plots and fixing those broken ones that have already been paid for. I met him on a late-spring day at the sprawling studio on Melrose Avenue; he gave me the full tour, showing me the New York City back lot and the massive Blue Sky Tank, which allows filmmakers to shoot elaborate water scenes in the middle of Los Angeles. To see the sets up close is to learn how much the camera can hide, and how easily we overlook its tricks. The streets of Manhattan, for instance, are all stucco facade—even the bricks are hollow—while most of the cinematic backdrops are just garishly painted walls. “It’s a bit much in person, but it works on film,” Jason says. Prop artists hustle fake furniture around; we peek into a soundstage and watch as an imaginary paradise is disassembled. Plastic palm trees are loaded on trucks. Golden sand is shoveled into wheelbarrows. A lonely tiki hut waits in the corner.
When it comes to movies, Jason is one of the last romantics. Although he’s been a studio insider for years, his voice still vibrates with delight when he discusses Fredric March’s performance in The Best Years of Our Lives—“Maybe the best drunk acting ever,” Jason says—or the perfect comic notes in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Movies have always been a hard sell. You’re asking people to spend fifteen dollars a ticket to sit for a few hours in a dark room with strangers,” Jason says, a few months before a pandemic would shut theaters down. “They’re an even harder sell now, when everyone has all this content available on their phones. The only way that ticket is worth it is if you give them something enthralling.”
Jason cites the beginning of Harry Potter as an example. “What is it about those first pages that sucked me in? J. K. Rowling doesn’t begin at wizard school, which would be the obvious place. She begins instead on a very ordinary suburban street, but it’s an ordinariness that highlights these little details we don’t understand.” There’s a cat reading a map, and tawny owls flying around, and these odd professors in long robes talking about someone who can’t be named. None of it makes sense, at least not yet, but these puzzling specifics activate our curiosity. Who are these people? And what are they doing on Privet Drive?
These questions are mystery boxes. Like Star Wars, which also throws us into a strange world full of unknowns, Rowling triggers our curiosity by depriving us of explanation.III “My job is to read fiction, but there are a lot of books and scripts where by page three, I’m like, ‘I already know what’s going to happen,’ ” Jason says. “ ‘I have no more questions.’ But with Harry Potter it was the opposite. I just kept turning the page.”
Rowling’s use of mystery boxes is not an accident. In interviews, she’s described the Harry Potter novels as obeying the basic detective-story structure: “I think the Harry Potter books are in many ways whodunits in disguise,” Rowling said. (Since completing the Potter series, Rowling has written a series of adult detective stories under a pseudonym.) Like a good crime mystery, a central unknown propels each Potter novel, whether it’s the bad guy searching for the philosopher’s stone, or the location of the last Horcrux. The reader is led to a certain suspect—it must be Snape!—before Rowling delivers a reversal worthy of Agatha Christie. (It’s Quirrell! And Harry himself is the last Horcrux!) In retrospect, the necessary clues have been there all along. We just didn’t know how to read them.
These surprising reversals are made possible by a narrative style that Rowling also borrows from detective fiction: the “third person limited omniscient view.” She describes her characters in the third person—Harry Potter is not the voice of Harry Potter—but her narrative voice shares their limited, blinkered perspective. The style allows the writer to draw out the mystery, tricking readers with errant suspects and other prediction errors. We never know more than Harry, and he never knows very much.
The power of these mystery boxes is temporary. We eventually learn that the cat is Professor McGonagall, and that Voldemort is hiding inside Quirrell. To create a more meaningful mystery—to invent an infinite game—it’s essential to include mysteries that aren’t unboxed at the end. These questions persist, no matter how many times we reread the novels.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone starts creating those kinds of mysteries in chapter 2, which jumps ten years into the future. Harry is now a small and skinny boy, living in a dark cupboard under some stairs. His glasses are held together with tape. “On the one hand, Harry is a character you’ve seen a million times before,” Jason says. “He’s the frog who turns out to be a prince. In the hands of a lesser writer, he would be a boring cliché. But what makes him so compelling are those little particulars. The glasses. The strange scar. The snake in the zoo.” These are iconic details because they perfectly describe a character while also filling in his world; we get a glimpse of Harry, but also his precarious existence. He’s a wizard messiah who doesn’t even know wizards exist.
As the story unfolds, Rowling complicates Harry’s character. He might be the hero, but he’s got some uncanny connections to Voldemort, the villain. Harry, too, can speak with snakes, and the wands of the two are brothers. They can eavesdrop on each other’s thoughts. The result is a blurring of the boundaries between good and evil. While Rowling could have given us the flat characters typical of the fantasy genre, she instead gifts us a rounded cast, each with surprises and opacities.
Just look at Severus Snape, the potions teacher at Hogwarts. On a first read, Snape is an obvious nemesis, a bad guy from the bad house. He is cruel toward the kids from Gryffindor. He murders Dumbledore. He gives away Harry’s escape plan. (Are you worried I just spoiled the book for you? Keep reading.) However, once we know how Snape’s story ends—in one of the
most stunning reversals, he turns out to be a brave double agent—we’re able to see the sly logic behind his sins. His mean streak might be sincere, but it might also be an act for Voldemort. It’s a question that never gets fully resolved. The result is that Snape becomes more interesting with each rereading. His opaqueness increases.
As Jason notes, complicated characters are a defining feature of all replayable stories. He cites The Godfather trilogy as an example of another epic that highlights the mystery of its imaginary people. “People can see The Godfather twenty times because it’s an incredible world, populated by these really interesting people,” Jason says. “And when you rewatch it, that means you keep noticing new things. The characters keep changing.” Take a scene from the first Godfather. Michael is meeting Sollozzo and McCluskey at a popular Italian restaurant in the Bronx. A gun has been hidden in the bathroom. (Michael is planning on killing Sollozzo and McCluskey since they tried to kill his father.) Michael excuses himself, retrieves the weapon, and—just as an elevated train comes to a loud halt—fires three bullets at point-blank range. His face is panicked as he drops the gun and runs out of the restaurant.
It’s an iconic few minutes of cinema, and not just because it’s the pivotal moment when Michael crosses over to the dark side. (David Chase was heavily influenced by this scene when creating the last moments of The Sopranos.) What makes this suspenseful scene so rewatchable are the revealing details—McCluskey, the corrupt cop, distracted by his veal chop, Sollozzo’s obvious contempt, Michael struggling to contain his nerves. As the film and sound editor Walter Murch observes, one of the reasons we pay such close attention to these character details is because Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the Godfather movies, had Michael and Sollozzo speak in Italian but refused to provide subtitles. “It’s very bold, even today, to have an extended scene between two main characters in an English-language film speaking another language with no translation,” Murch said in an interview with the writer Michael Ondaatje. “As a result you’re paying much more attention to how things are said and the body language being used, and you’re perceiving things in a very different way.”4
Coppola also focuses our attention by not using music during the scene. “Most movies use music the way athletes use steroids,” Murch says. “It gives you an edge, it gives you a speed, but it’s unhealthy for the organism in the long run.”5 The reason it’s unhealthy, according to Murch, is that music in movies is often used to strip away the mystery. Instead of having to decode the subtext for ourselves, the music dictates our feelings, telling us to be scared or happy, nervous or sad. By denying us this emotional shortcut, Coppola forces the audience to grapple with the complexity of his protagonist. The silent soundtrack heightens the suspense; we have no idea what Michael will actually do. “I feel differently about these characters every time I rewatch the movie,” Jason says. “That’s the genius of it. I’ve got the shots memorized, but it’s always a different experience watching it.”
The infinite games of Harry Potter start with mystery boxes and opaque characters. But Rowling doesn’t stop there: she also makes extensive use of the ambiguity hook. Consider the famous prophecy that sets the story in motion, leading Voldemort to murder Harry’s parents. Rowling was inspired by Macbeth. In that play, Macbeth receives a prophecy from the witches that “no man that’s born of a woman / shall ever have power upon thee.” This prediction gives Macbeth a reckless confidence, but only because he ignores the ambiguity of the words. In the end, Macbeth is vanquished by Macduff, who was born by cesarean section. (He was “from his mother’s womb / untimely ripped.”) For Rowling, the moral of Macbeth is that prophecies are full of ambiguities. They require interpretation, just like a literary text.
In Harry Potter, the prophecy is revealed by Professor Sybill Trelawney, a rather unreliable professor of divination. A few months before Harry was born, Trelawney announces that “the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord [Voldemort] approaches… Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies… and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not… and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.”
Like Macbeth, Voldemort misinterprets the prophecy by ignoring the ambiguity. He assumes that the prophecy is about the newly born Harry Potter, which is why he tries to kill the baby boy. (He ends up killing Harry’s parents instead.) It’s not until the sixth book that we fully learn the prophecy wasn’t prophetic at all. Dumbledore explains:
“Harry, never forget that what the prophecy says is only significant because Voldemort made it so.… Voldemort singled you out as the person who would be most dangerous to him—and in doing so, he made you the person who would be most dangerous to him!”
In an interview, Rowling refers to the ambiguous prophecy as “the Macbeth idea: the witches tell Macbeth what will happen and he then continues to make it happen.”6 And so Trelawney’s prediction becomes a lesson in interpretation. Rowling (via Dumbledore) is reminding us that the most interesting texts must be unpacked, that they contain ambiguities that can’t easily be solved. As Shira Wolosky, a professor of English literature at Hebrew University, writes in The Riddles of Harry Potter, “In many ways the Potter books are classically patterned as quests, but in the broadest sense, what Harry and those around him pursue are secrets and riddles. In this sense the ‘quest’ is the act of interpretation itself.”7
“Why did you have to make it so difficult?” Harry asks Dumbledore, near the end of the series. This question could also be asked of Rowling, who fills her young adult novels with mystery boxes, prediction errors, opaque characters, and ambiguity. She makes it difficult, of course, because the pleasure resides in the search. It is not the solution that entertains and edifies—it’s the mystery. This, perhaps, is Dumbledore’s greatest teaching. After he dies, the headmaster leaves behind a final will dense with riddles, gifting his favorite students with items that, at first glance, seem rather useless. (Ron, for instance, is left with a deluminator, an object that can suck all the light from a room.) Not until Voldemort is defeated do the students understand the point of Dumbledore’s bequest. It was never about the things themselves. The real gift was the interpretative journeys they inspired.
The same could be said of the Harry Potter novels. They are densely plotted whodunits—our first read is inevitably rushed, as we race to open all the mystery boxes. However, the true genius of the novels is that they exceed their intricate plots. Even after we know how the stories end, we are still compelled to reread them, parsing the text the way Dumbledore taught us to.IV We realize that everyone is more complicated than we thought, and that the prophecies are not actually prophecies at all. As Wolosky writes, what the Harry Potter books show “is that such interpretation is never-ending, since the world we live in is one of inexhaustible meanings.”8 And so the text remains an infinite game, full of mysteries that never get old. Not bad for a book about wizard school.
Spoiler Alert
There is a simple test to determine if a text is an infinite game: spoil it. Tell an eager nine-year-old that Harry defeats Voldemort. Does she put down the book? Whisper to a seatmate that Hamlet is a tragedy—everyone dies. Does he leave the theater? Put on The Godfather and announce that Michael can’t escape the family business. Is the movie ruined?
The answer is that these spoilers don’t matter. The best art is unspoilable, an infinite game that doesn’t require an ignorant audience. It’s a basic fact of entertainment that we seem to have forgotten. We live in a time of constant spoiler alerts: it’s nearly impossible to read a review about a piece of entertainment without encountering the requisite warning.V The logic behind such warnings is straightforward: If we know what will happen, then we’ll lose interest in the story. The power of Harry Potter depends on the secrets of its end.
The good news is that there’s solid scientific evidence that spoilers are not nearly as ruinous as we think. In
a study published in Psychological Science, Jonathan Leavitt and Nicholas Christenfeld gave hundreds of undergraduates twelve different short stories.9 The stories came in three different flavors: ironic-twist stories (such as Chekhov’s “The Bet”), whodunits (“A Chess Problem” by Agatha Christie), and “literary stories” by writers such as John Updike. Some subjects read the story as is, without a spoiler. Some read the story with a spoiler carefully embedded in the actual text, as if Chekhov himself had given away the end. And some read the story with a spoiler disclaimer in the preface.
Here’s the shocking twist: the scientists found that almost every single story, regardless of genre, was more pleasurable when prefaced with a spoiler. Although we’ve long assumed that our pleasure depends on not knowing the ending, this new research suggests that the tension actually detracts from our enjoyment. An easy way to make a good story even better is to spoil it at the start.
When I first read this study, I was skeptical. Wasn’t it the suspense that kept us engaged? How could our intuitions about spoilers be so incorrect? Christenfeld assured me that such skepticism was quite common: “I’d say ninety percent of people, when I tell them our results, just don’t believe it. They all tell me about the time someone spoiled this or that for them.”
However, as Christenfeld points out, his spoiler study wouldn’t be nearly as counterintuitive for premodern audiences. For thousands of years, mass culture consisted entirely of stories whose endings were foretold, from the Greek tragedy to the Shakespearean comedy. Homer’s audience knew who won the Trojan War (and what happened to Achilles), while Jane Austen’s readers never doubted that her books would end with a wedding. Even George Lucas wasn’t afraid of spoilers: in 1976, a year before A New Hope was released, he told the New York Times that the Death Star would be destroyed at the movie’s end.10 “Genre fiction is, by definition, very predictable,” Christenfeld says. “But nobody complained that Shakespeare spoiled All’s Well That Ends Well with his title.”VI