SPICE

Without Spice, a work may still matter, move and cohere, but it loses exhilaration.

Spice is charged fascination.

It is the dimension of a story that makes something feel unusually vivid, magnetic, stimulating, desirable, frightening, strange, exciting or worth attention.

That does not mean Spice is simply salience.

A sudden explosion after a long silence is salient because it seizes attention. It may also be Spice, but it does not become Spice merely by being loud, abrupt or impossible to ignore.

Spice is salient, but salience is not Spice.

The difference is charge.

A scream can seize attention. A broken edit can seize attention. A flashing light can seize attention. A confusing sentence can seize attention. A threat can seize attention.

But Spice carries fascination.

Sometimes that fascination is pleasurable. Sometimes it is frightening, repellent, taboo, uncanny, seductive or grotesque. The common property is not that we like it. The common property is that attention becomes charged.

Spice: Jurassic Park

This one is almost embarrassingly clear: the Spice is the dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are not normal things to see. They are strange, spectacular, immediately noticeable and intrinsically fascinating. The film understands this and does not give them away cheaply. It builds anticipation, lets us discover them gradually, gives us different species to encounter and repeatedly makes the act of seeing them an event.

The theme-park premise intensifies the point. A theme park is already a machine for producing stimulation, novelty and exhilaration: things designed to be noticed, anticipated and enjoyed. Jurassic Park places dinosaurs inside that structure and then breaks the structure apart. The attraction becomes danger. The dinosaurs stop merely being exhibits and begin chasing people, hunting them, appearing where they should not be. The film keeps finding new ways to renew their salience.

That is why it is such a clean Spice example. The object of fascination is enormous, visible and difficult to confuse with anything else. The exhilaration associated with Jurassic Park is not accidental. Spice is sitting directly at the centre of the experience.

Anything can carry Spice

Spice is not a type of object.

A character can be Spice. A color can be Spice. A gesture can be Spice. A relationship, a rule, a place, an idea, a line of dialogue, a visual texture, a sound, a concept, a costume, a mystery, a style, a story inside the story or a meta-level pattern can all carry Spice.

Anything perceivable or conceivable can participate in it.

This is why it is a mistake to think of Spice as something floating around an object.

The thing itself can be Spice.

In Schindler’s List, the girl in red can function as Spice. The red, the contrast, the surrounding horror, the meaning of the image and everything else in the scene help determine why she carries that charge. But the Spice is not some halo surrounding her.

She is the Spice-bearing element.

Context determines what becomes Spice and how strongly, but the Spice can belong to the thing itself.

Spice needs appetite

One of the easiest ways to weaken Spice is to deliver it before desire has time to form.

If a work repeatedly creates something potentially fascinating and immediately reveals it, explains it or exhausts it, the audience may still notice the reveal.

But it is less rewarding.

No appetite was allowed to form.

Spice needs appetite.

That does not mean maximal withholding.

If a story keeps all of its Spice hidden for too long, there may simply be too little reason to stay alert. A spectacular reveal at the end does not retroactively make the previous hour stimulating.

Spice helps tell the mind that something here is worth attention.

So the problem is not reveal versus withholding.

It is distribution.

Promise, anticipation, partial access, delivery, surprise and renewal can be arranged in countless ways. What matters is that the work feeds attention while preserving fascination.

Delivering the Spice should not mean exhausting it

A story can absolutely give us the thing we wanted.

The mistake is assuming that fulfillment must end desirability.

Harry Potter is a clear example.

At first, magic is distant. It appears through impossibilities, strange visitors, letters, rumors and things Harry cannot explain. The magical world itself becomes charged before we enter it.

Then the story delivers.

Harry reaches Hogwarts. Magic is everywhere.

If that were the end of the Spice, the original fascination would collapse. The audience wanted magic, and now it has magic.

But the geometry changes.

Magic becomes integrated enough to inhabit while new concentrations of fascination emerge inside it: spells, creatures, houses, hidden rooms, forbidden areas, strange rules, artifacts, rivalries, histories, secrets, teachers and figures such as Dumbledore whose meaning remains partly withheld.

The audience is allowed to enter the desired world without exhausting its fascination.

The original Spice is fulfilled, then renewed.