What's the fun if you know the ... ahem ... denouement?

Tell me, did Harry Potter die? Wait, no, I don't want to know. Well, yes, go ahead, I'm going to find out anyway. But, no, forget it, it'll spoil the book for me. But did he? And Voldemort? Really? No? What? Tell me! No, don't, please don't.

The Morning File is feeling a little conflicted this morning. We're Harry Potter fans, but there was no way for us to get to or through the 784-page "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" over the weekend. (Just how many amphetamines are you parents giving your tweeners to enable them to do that?)

So now we're caught in this gray, discomforting, twilight world, eager to learn what happens at the end of J.K. Rowling's saga, but not sure when we'll open the pages. Meanwhile, we live on a planet where thousands more people every hour reach the climax and want to discuss it publicly. We can't avoid them all, but neither can we round them up and euthanize them like North Park geese. At least, not legally.

Presumably, the matter will be settled for us when some young spoilersport who thinks it's funny -- I can sense 15-year-old Stacey from Blawnox starting to type now -- hears of this column and sends an e-mail laying out the whole plot and denouement. (Note to Morning File: Look for ways to work "denouement" into more columns. It makes us seem more book-smart, like someone who reads even more than just a Harry Potter book annually.)

Saboteur among us

Of course, the whole legion of Potter fans went through all this last week, as Internet spoilers tried to undercut the book before it reached anyone's hands on Saturday. There was even a Pittsburgher (gasp!) helping to lead that sabotage. USA Today contacted that 17-year-old, who was not identified, after he posted alleged knowledge about the book's contents beforehand on his Facebook Web page.

"I am a bored, sadistic loser who doesn't play sports, have a job or have a girlfriend, so I posted Harry Potter spoilers," this very non-Pittsburgh-sounding (except for the job part) teen told the newspaper. "It was fun for myself at the expense of others."

Hmmm, roger that. This is much trickier, after all, than that "Sopranos" finale so many of us just went through. Once that aired, everything was open season at the water cooler. TV critics and friends blabbed everything. If you missed it and had to catch a rerun later, tough luck in the interim. This Potter is a different piece of business.

It's all about power

Harry Potter fans are not taking all of these attempts at spoiling their fun lying down, especially after Ms. Rowling and her publisher went to Fort Knox-level security procedures to keep the book under wraps. One fan site announced: "We own pitchforks, hot wax and feathers. And we're not afraid to use them."

But in the modern media age, they're fighting an uphill battle. In the 1990s, you could tell your stupid friends apart from your other friends when movies like "The Crying Game" and "The Sixth Sense" came out. Your stupid friends opened their mouths about the plot surprises before you saw them.

They just couldn't help themselves. Or maybe they wanted to feel they held a little bit of control over you.

"Spoiling can be a form of cultural guerrilla warfare," ubiquitous media observer Robert Thompson of Syracuse University told The Calgary Herald. "Knowing how 'The Crying Game' ended early on its release was really a sense of power in that, number one, you were in on all the jokes, and number two, it was an opportunity to use it as a bit of weaponry if you wanted to destroy the film for someone else."

Go spoil these for someone

Winnipeg Sun film reviewer Kevin Williamson lists other films among his top 10 for plot twists that someone might have spoiled for you, if given the chance. Maybe you remember punching out such a person before you could get to "The Empire Strikes Back, " "No Way Out," "Chinatown," "Fight Club," "Primal Fear, " "Seven" "The Usual Suspects" and "Angel Heart."

Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" might have outdone all of those for a wallop at the end, however, in revealing the truth about Norman Bates' mother. It was publicized in 1960 with the tagline: "Don't give away the ending. It's the only one we have!"

One that slipped through

Jon Hopkins, to his credit, wasn't spoiling anything for anyone last week. Though he has a highly suspicious name for someone living in Maryland, the 25-year-old software engineer kept everything about the book hush-hush when his mail-order copy of it showed up at home, inexplicably, four days early.

A spokeswoman for the book's publisher, Scholastic Inc., was apoplectic to know such a thing could happen, evidently through some mistake by the online vendor, www.DeepDiscount.com.

"It's a freak accident," an official from the mail order firm told The Baltimore Sun. "I would say all we ask is for it not to be read or to keep the ending to yourself."

Mr. Hopkins gave the vendor, publisher, Ms. Rowling and fans no reason to worry, however. He couldn't believe he got the book when he did, but had no intention of disclosing anything -- not even the denouement.