In our everyday lives, surprises are not always welcome - but there's nothing that lifts a book or a movie more than a plot twist we didn't see coming.
Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense (1999) - a movie with one of the great twist endings. Photo: Buena Vista Pictures
Vera Tobin spends a lot of time considering stories with surprises - not as a literary expert but as a cognitive scientist.
Photo: CARRIE GABELLA
Her book, Elements of Surprise, looks at what's going on in our brains when we read a novel or see a film with an unexpected ending, and shows that building a good plot twist is a complicated art.
In real life, it’s extremely satisfying when we get insight into something, says Tobin, assistant professor at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio.
In fiction, too, the best surprises give an insight into earlier elements of the story – rather than slotting into place the final piece of puzzle you basically understand.
“[If] you feel there are early clues that satisfyingly make fresh sense - that’s the really gratifying thing in the surprise twist.
“But authors do have a bit of wiggle room where they can take advantage of certain tendencies in the way we think to make things feel fair while stacking the deck in their favour.”
A famous study, the ‘invisible gorilla’ test, shows how selective our attention is and how we can be directed to pay attention to some things, so that we miss others.
We’re also not great at keeping track of the source of information in a plot, she says.
And selective use of “anchoring information” can steer our speculation. Tobin says a good analogy is that of people deciding on a price - as soon as someone mentions a number, it influences other people’s estimation of what a thing is worth.
“That’s why red herrings work so effectively on us.”
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories seem to have played fair, and given every opportunity to guess the twist – but not so, she says.
“You’ve been given partial information that has the form of a clue, and looks like a clue, and points you in the direction of what will ultimately be the critical piece of information, but it's not actually until the solution that you get all the pieces you would have needed to solve the mystery.”
Knowing there’s a twist in a movie or TV show – even if the surprise itself hasn’t been revealed – puts us on alert in a way that changes our relationship with the story, she says.
But her book is full of spoilers, she says, “because you can’t talk about surprises without spoiling them”.
So, she developed an elaborate list of increasingly elaborate spoiler alerts, including: 'you learn the brute fact that something surprising happens in this work', 'a minor plot point is revealed, but in rather vague terms, or perhaps the terms are so very vague that you can't even tell how minor it might or might not be' and 'surprises large and small are discussed in exhaustive, mystery-obliterating detail'.
One of her warnings - 'the big surprise is not only revealed, but also discussed in some detail' - applies to the 1999 movie The Sixth Sense, (and yes, there’s a spoiler coming up).
Tobin says the movie is an example of a satisfying twist. When Bruce Willis’s character, a psychologist working with a child who can see dead people, is revealed to have been a ghost all along, scenes that were understood in one way for the first part of the movie suddenly make a great deal more sense.
Tobin finds TV shows can be especially beguiling and surprising; she singles out The Good Place for moving at an “incredibly brisk pace through reversals and reveals".
