by Adam Alter
As with Tetris and 2048, humans find the sweet spot sandwiched between “too easy” and “too difficult” irresistible. It’s the land of just-challenging-enough computer games, financial targets, work ambitions, social media objectives, and fitness goals. Addictive experiences live in this sweet spot, where stopping rules crumble before obsessive goal-setting. Tech mavens, game developers, and product designers tweak their wares to ensure their complexity escalates as users gain insight and competence.
8.
Cliffhangers
A minibus veers off a mountain road and teeters on the edge of a cliff. The minibus is an empty shell without seating. Inside are eleven thieves and their pile of stolen gold. The men hug the back wall as the gold slowly slides away from them, tipping the minibus toward oblivion. One of the men crawls slowly toward the gold. The only sounds are his shuffling, the creaking minibus, and the whistling of alpine winds. He moves within two feet of the gold, but the bus tips farther forward and it slides beyond his reach. Then, he rolls onto his back, faces his companions, and says calmly: “Hang on a minute, lads. I’ve got a great idea.” The story ends.
In the summer of 1969, thousands of cinemagoers enjoyed the first ninety-four minutes of The Italian Job, but many hated this, the final ninety-fifth minute. In their own words, the ending was “ridiculous,” “pretentious garbage,” “horrible,” “crap,” “frustrating,” “not funny,” “without morals,” “without heart,” “a turkey,” “like a soft drink that’s gone flat,” “enjoyable maybe if you’ve had a lobotomy.” It takes a special ending to inspire this sort of vitriol, and that ending turns out to have been no ending at all: a literal and metaphorical cliffhanger. The problem here was that viewers had committed an hour and a half to the story, and like all humans they were wired for closure. If you’ve ever been denied a joke’s punchline, you’ll know that it’s better to hear no story at all than to hear all but the story’s final beat.
—
Forty years earlier, a Lithuanian psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik stumbled on the power of cliffhangers. She was sipping coffee at a small café in Vienna when she noticed that her waiter remembered his customers’ orders with superhuman clarity. When he approached the kitchen, he knew to tell the cook to prepare eggs Benedict for table seven, a ham and cheese omelet for table twelve, and scrambled eggs for table fifteen. But as soon as those orders landed at tables seven, twelve, and fifteen, his memories of them vanished. Each order presented the waiter with a miniature cliffhanger that was resolved when the right meal reached the right customer. Zeigarnik’s waiter remembered his open orders because they wouldn’t leave him in peace—they nagged at him in the same way that the teetering bus nagged at The Italian Job’s frustrated viewers. When the waiter served each order, the cliffhangers were resolved, and his mind was free to focus on the new cliffhanger presented by his next order.
Zeigarnik designed an experiment to uncover the effect more carefully, inviting a group of adults into her lab to work on twenty different brief tasks. Some of these were manual, like creating clay figurines and building boxes, and others were mental, like arithmetic sums and puzzles. Zeigarnik allowed her participants to complete some of the tasks, but she interrupted them before they could complete others, and forced them to move on to the next task. The subjects were loath to stop, and they sometimes objected quite strenuously. Some were even angry, which showed how much tension Zeigarnik introduced with her interruptions. At the end of the experiment, she asked them to remember as many of the tasks as they could.
The results were striking. Like the waiter in Vienna, her participants recalled about twice as many unfinished tasks as they did finished ones. At first, Zeigarnik wondered whether the unfinished tasks were more memorable because participants experienced a small “shock” when they were interrupted. But when she ran a similar experiment, again interrupting her participants as they completed some tasks but then allowing them to complete those tasks later, the effect vanished. It wasn’t interruption that made the tasks memorable, but rather the tension from not being able to complete them. In fact, the interrupted tasks that were later completed were no more memorable than the tasks completed without interruption. Zeigarnik summarized her results: “When the subject sets out to perform the operations required by one of these tasks there develops within him a quasi-need for completion of that task. This is like the occurrence of a tension system which tends towards resolution. Completing the task means resolving the tension system, or discharging the quasi-need. If a task is not completed, a state of tension remains and the quasi-need is unstilled.” So the Zeigarnik Effect was born: incomplete experiences occupy our minds far more than completed ones.
Once you look for it, the Zeigarnik Effect is everywhere. Take the case of earworms—catchy songs that stubbornly play over and over inside your head. Jeff Peretz, a guitarist and music professor at New York University, told me that some earworms achieve cult status because they plant cliffhangers that never resolve. He pointed to the colossal 1978 hit song “September,” by Earth, Wind & Fire, a combination of percussive bounce and brassy punch that begins with the line, “Do you remember the twenty-first night of September?” In 2014, as the song turned thirty-six, longtime band member Verdine White told an interviewer that, “People now are getting married on September 21st. The stock market goes up on September 21st. Every kid I know now that is in their 20s, they always thank me because they were born on September 21st. They say it’s one of the most popular songs in music history right now.”
This was the golden age of disco, and in many ways, “September” is a model disco classic. But in other ways it’s very unusual. Many pop hits follow a standard circular chord progression—they launch like a rocket ship, hover for a time above the launch pad, and ultimately close the melodic loop by returning to Earth. In the world of Bluma Zeigarnik’s waiter, these tracks are fulfilled orders: they’re satisfying, but your mind leaves them behind when they end, and another song begins.
Not so for “September,” according to Peretz. “One of the amazing things about the chord progression in ‘September’ is that it never lands. It makes this loop that you never want to stop hearing. And that’s why it’s so popular still, to this day. This same approach is used for the song’s main theme, its chorus, and its hook. It keeps going on and on. Without a doubt this contributes to its longevity. It has all the makings of an earworm. And this looped feature only makes it harder to leave once it does get stuck in your head.” Long after we’ve forgotten other songs, the endless loop continues to demand our attention. Almost forty years after its release, “September” remains a staple at parties and weddings. (By coincidence, my wife and I were married on the evening of September 21, 2013, and our D.J. was under strict instruction to include the song in his playlist.)
“September”’s cliffhangers never quite resolve, but some songs endure in our minds because they resolve their cliffhangers in unexpected ways. In the summer of 1997, Radiohead released their cult track “Karma Police,” which showcased the band’s musical sophistication. The song uses two subtly different versions of the same melody, and until you’ve listened to it many times, you have no idea which version you’re about to hear. There’s no rhyme or reason that guides you, and so, Peretz explains, it keeps you on your toes. “The song has you wondering which version of the loop you’re going to hear. It seems too sophisticated to be an accident, and I imagine when [lead singer] Thom Yorke was writing the song, he had in mind the idea of karma being a cyclical thing. He totally rung the bell with that one. It’s an iconic song. Stevie Wonder’s song “Evil” is similar. It has a sequence that starts out in C major, but when it brings you back around to where you started, you’re in a new place. It doesn’t bring you home.”
“September” runs for a gripping three minutes and thirty-five seconds, but it pales next to a category of addictive experiences that grip audiences for months at a time.
—
In October 2014, National Public Radio began broadcasting Serial, a twelve-part podcast that ran for two and a half months. A team of journalists led by NPR’s Sarah Koenig were investigating whether a Baltimore high school student named Adnan Syed had been wrongly convicted for his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee’s murder in 1999. Other podcasts had developed a following, but Serial was wildly and uniquely popular. (When I emailed Koenig for an interview, she very politely declined my request. “I’m afraid I just can’t,” she told me. “I’m sort of deluged at the moment.”) For three months, countless conversations included the question, “Have you heard about Serial?” I discussed the podcast with friends and strangers everywhere, and I wasn’t alone. A number of major publications wrote about Serial’s success, and many of their titles and opening paragraphs focused on the podcast’s addictiveness:
The host of this compelling, addictive nonfiction murder-mystery talks about the show’s origins and why it’s okay to “like” her interviewees.
—Rolling Stone
The thirteen stages of being addicted to “Serial.”
—Entertainment Tonight
“Serial”: The Highly Addictive Spinoff Podcast of “This American Life.”
—NBC News Online
Ira Glass and the folks behind This American Life radio recently launched “Serial,” an addictive podcast about a gruesome murder and the curious court case that convicted a 17-year-old kid. And it’s better than the best episode of Law & Order because it features the actual people who lived through the tragedy—plus, you have no clue how it’s going to end.
—Entertainment Weekly
This last quote nails Serial’s magic ingredient: Koenig and her team opened a Zeigarnik loop, but none of her listeners knew when (if ever) the loop would be closed. Would the true murderer be revealed in episode three? Episode nine? In the final episode? Never? Halfway through the series, Koenig admitted that she had no idea how the podcast would end. After a year of interviews and careful research, she and her team were no closer to resolving the only question that really mattered: who killed Hae Min Lee? The audience was rapt because the answer always seemed within reach. Many episodes included one or two interviews with Syed, the convicted murderer. He always seemed to be on the verge of saying something incriminating—or of saying something that would prove his innocence beyond doubt. And the same was true of countless other interviews. One of Syed’s acquaintances provided an alibi that seemed to place him at a library precisely when the murder was supposed to be occurring several miles away. But that lead broke down, and the loop remained open.
Thousands of listeners downloaded the final podcast on December 18, 2014, hoping for an answer. But none came. Koenig believed Syed was innocent, but she admitted she wasn’t completely sure. The show ended, but the cliffhanger remained, and the listeners refused to move on. They established vibrant online discussion groups. The guilty camp scolded the innocents for being naïve, and the innocents called the guilties jaded skeptics. Almost fifty thousand Serial fans shared their views on a Serial page (or subreddit) established on the Reddit website. The best evidence that their engagement rose above simple interest came on January 13, 2015. This was the sixteen-year anniversary of Hae Min Lee’s murder, and the subreddit’s moderators honored Lee by suspending the site for twenty-four hours. In its place was a short message:
On January 13, 1999 life would be changed forever.
Hae Min Lee was an extraordinary individual.
. . .
It was 16 years ago today that her life was ended tragically, and her family and friends’ lives would never be the same.
While Hae’s murder was the basis of the podcast Serial, let us never forget the tragedy itself.
Out of respect for Hae’s memory, this subreddit will fall silent for a day so that we can all reflect on the true injustice at the center of a heated debate.
Many users applauded the tribute, but others went into Serial withdrawal. A user named hanatheko admitted, “Wow, I am addicted . . . the past 24 hours were painful and I fell ill with depression.” For hanatheko, a day without the site was a day too long. Others felt the site’s moderators had no right to shutter the site for any reason at all. One user suggested these angry users were “acting like the Westboro Baptist Church of the fucking Internet right now.” Another named Muzorra pointed out that “all the commentary . . . that the victim always gets lost and becomes a point of data and little more . . . gets forgotten the moment someone makes it a little harder to get at their toy for a little while.” When the site went live again at midnight, hanatheko, Muzorra, and thousands of other users went back to attacking and defending Camp Guilty, Camp Innocent, and Camp Undecided.
NPR’s release of Serial heralded a flood of unsolved real-life crime documentaries. In February 2015, HBO released The Jinx, which tracks the life of Robert Durst, a man who was associated with a number of unsolved murders. The day before HBO released the documentary, Durst was arrested for one of those murders—fueled in part by some of writer Andrew Jarecki’s discoveries. Then, in December 2015, Netflix released a ten-part real-life murder documentary called Making a Murderer. The documentary’s filmmakers, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, spent ten years tracking a man named Steven Avery, who had been convicted of murdering a young woman in small-town Wisconsin. The Jinx and Making a Murderer were just as addictive as Serial, and both attracted waves of acclaim and millions of viewers. All three programs are produced with skill—but much of their popularity is baked into their ambiguity. In Slate, Ruth Graham wrote about Making a Murderer:
“This is the perfect Dateline story,” a Dateline producer says of the Avery case in Making a Murderer. “It’s a story with a twist, it grabs people’s attention. . . . Right now, murder is hot.” . . . But if Dateline leaves viewers hanging over commercial breaks, the multiepisode format of shows like Making a Murderer dangles us over much deeper chasms. The series may be more prestige than pulp, but it delivers the same pleasure-pellets of any crime story: “That poor woman!” “Who really did it?” “Someone must pay!”
Take Episode 4 of Making a Murderer, which ends with a whopper of a plot bombshell . . . Cue my husband and I freaking out on the couch and agonizing over whether to stay up late to watch another episode. With a cliffhanger like that, how could we not?
As I write this, people are still feverish about Serial and Making a Murderer. (The Jinx has a devoted following, too, though it’s perhaps tempered in part by Durst’s arrest and the documentary’s more limited release.) The Serial and Making a Murderer subreddits continue to attract new posts each day. But if someone can prove Steven Avery’s innocence, or who murdered Hae Min Lee, the loops will close, and the subreddits will wither. A cliffhanger only lasts until you know whether the bus plunges, a waiter only remembers an order until the plate reaches his customer, and the fate of a mobster from suburban New Jersey remains interesting only as long as you don’t know whether he lives or dies.
—
When David Chase wrote the eighty-sixth and final episode of The Sopranos, he posed a question that he refused to answer: was Tony Soprano dead? For eight years New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano evaded death while ninety-two of his enemies and friends faded away. They died from gunshot wounds and beatings and drowning and natural causes; from stabbings and heart attacks and strangulation and drug overdoses. Their deaths captivated viewers, but nowhere near as much as Tony’s purgatory absorbed them.
The scene is legend. On June 10, 2007, twelve million Americans watched as Tony Soprano and his family gathered at Holsten’s diner. A man in a brown leather jacket enters the restaurant, and sits at the counter. He glances back at the family, briefly, and heads for the restroom. In the show’s final seconds, a bell on the front door dings, Tony looks up toward the door, and the screen cuts to black. For eleven seconds it remains that way, eight years of action reduced to a profound quiet. Many viewers wo
ndered whether their TVs or cable boxes had cut out at exactly the wrong moment, but this was Chase’s vision.
Fans of the show were perplexed, so they took to Google. The search engine hosted a flood of searches for “Sopranos final episode” beginning at 10:02 P.M. on the East Coast, which continued well into the night. In their desperate search for some kind of resolution, viewers hoped someone out there on the web was more sophisticated than they were. (Eight years later, Serial fans would do the same when they took to Reddit.) Media critics either loved the episode or hated it, and without fail saved most of their energy for its closing five minutes. What had happened? Why had Chase cut the story short?
Two competing theories surfaced. On the one hand, perhaps Chase was trying to suggest that life for Tony and his family would continue beyond the show’s end. Early in the final scene, Tony had popped a couple of coins in a small jukebox at his table, and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” began to play. The last thing viewers heard was singer Steve Perry launching into the song’s chorus, “Don’t stop . . . !” Chase refused to let Perry complete the phrase, and perhaps the two words that closed the show served as a message: the show had ended, but the lives it depicted wouldn’t stop.