On the edge of our seats

Damien Chazelle’s new film, First Man, achieves an unexpected effect. The 1969 moon landing is one of the most famous events in world history, and yet Chazelle’s retelling of the story somehow feels suspenseful.

Other films and novels can also seem suspenseful even when we know how they end. For example, we may feel suspense during an account of a near-death experience despite knowing that the narrator survived to tell the tale. This effect is what psychologist Richard Gerrig calls ‘‘anomalous suspense’’.

Various explanations have been proposed for ‘‘anomalous suspense’’. Perhaps the simplest is that we may not be feeling suspense at all. We might be experiencing some other state, such as dread or anticipation, which we confuse with suspense.

A possibility is we are failing to recall the story’s conclusion. Gerrig suggests that we don’t ordinarily expect to know exactly how an experience (or story) will end. When we are absorbed in a story, we may revert to this expectation of uniqueness rather than recalling our prior knowledge of the ending.

In a 1989 study, Gerrig asked US university students to read short stories about well-known historical events. Some of the stories were crafted to generate suspense.

When participants had almost finished reading such stories, they were interrupted and asked to verify the relevant historical outcome. Participants were slower to correctly verify the outcome when they were reading the suspenseful versions of the stories. This result might mean that it is more difficult to access some of our prior knowledge when we are absorbed in a good story.

Yet another possibility is we do indeed feel suspense despite knowing how a story ends. Film scholar David Bordwell proposes we are reacting involuntarily to storytelling techniques that evoke suspense, such as suspenseful music. Feeling suspense in response to a well-crafted story may be no more voluntary than feeling disgust when confronted with a piece of rotting meat.

For now, the problem of anomalous suspense is unresolved. We need to wait on the edge of our seats for more research.

Response: Dr Jarrod Green, science writer

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