> A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”
The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring, unless you're hyper-motivated. Before mobile phones, you didn't have any choice but to sit through it. Now you have a choice. I suspect that film students 30 years ago, despite having a "full attention span", would also have been entertaining themselves on phones if they'd had them.
I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to. There's no virtue in suffering through boredom.
You're not the first person I've seen say that they do that with movies and I just can't put myself in your shoes. If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it, if I felt like juggling the fast forward for a movie I would just turn it off. It's like cropping the intentional negative space around a painting or skipping over dramatic silence in a musical piece. Tension and mood are built during those slow sequences. Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?
> If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it
To the contrary, the rest of the movie can be great. I'm not going to skip a movie entirely just because a couple of sections could have been a lot tighter, that would be silly.
> Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?
Not a movie, but I found myself doing it a huge amount across both seasons of The Last of Us. It's a great show, but I watch it for the personal relationships and stories and imaginative element. The "haunted house" parts feel like switching from a fascinating TV show to an amusement park ride, which has no interest for me. After 15 seconds of it, I've already got the tension and mood. I don't need 5 more minutes of it. It's incredibly repetitive.
But that's just me -- I'm sure there are other people who watch it for the suspense and zombies, and get bored when the personal relationship parts go on for too long. I'm not judging or even saying that the haunted-house suspense parts are bad, just that they don't have much interest for me.
Nobody watches the same movie, the same way no man steps into the same river twice.
Some people have trouble following plot. Some people excuse themselves to use the bathroom. Some people have trouble catching all the dialog. Some people close their eyes during the scary parts. Different elements call up totally different associations in different people's brains. If you watch a movie a first time and then a second time, they're different movies. So I'm OK with watching a different movie, same as everybody else.
Often, when there's a really powerful scene, I'll rewatch it two or three times before continuing, too. Because there's more richness than I can capture with just one viewing, and I want to feel like I experience it fully before moving on. So that makes it a different movie too. I'm not going to let someone else dictate my experience.
Movies aren't consumed as bit-perfect binaries to begin with. They're distributed as files that way, maybe, but even the basic viewing and sound conditions are different for everyone. Color fidelity, detail, acoustic muddiness due to room reverb. Literally everyone's watching a "differently patched binary" if that's how you want to think of it.
I skip forward whenever someone starts singing, or there's a prolonged dance scene, or pointless montages with music. For example the Zion dance party in The Matrix Reloaded. Or the many movies showing people dancing at the wedding party for several minutes.
Taylor Sheridan shows: let's show a bit of nature with some country music playing for 20-30 seconds for no reason at all -- five times in a 42 minutes episode.
I watch almost every movie at 2x and I think it usually makes the whole experience better for me. You can tailor your own media experiences however you want. If you disagree with a director's vision for a movie you can bring your own perspective, there's no right or wrong way to watch a movie. It's no different to picking out a specific track in an album, or finding a hook you really enjoy from a specific track and playing it on repeat.
One of the most recent movies I watched and really enjoyed was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was an animation masterpiece, but I still skipped forward in a couple scenes because I don't care about the characters. Some of the animation sequences were interesting enough to merit slowing down to 1x and even going back to rewatch and analyze them in-depth though.
Sometimes I'll encounter a seasonal anime that's quite terrible among multiple dimensions but which has few interesting aspects like creative art design or a couple interesting sequences, so I skim through it to look for those details in order to take them in. It's possible to appreciate various components of a work without caring for the combined result.
One of the things which helped break me out of the normative movie-watching perspective was encountering this art project where a social media page would post every Spongebob frame in order [0]. It made me really start paying attention to a ton of minor details that I hadn't noticed previously, increasing my appreciation for the work that went into making it happen.
In the past you really had no choice but to submit to the director's vision of a work, and you were forced to experience it the same as everyone else in the theater. Now we have more control than ever to enjoy works however we want. Game modding is another variation on this same principle: if I think a game has some bullshit mechanics, I should be able to patch it and play it however I want.
> I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span
No, I'm sorry, I do think this is an attention span issue. You say there's no virtue in suffering through boredom, but a few minutes of scene-setting should not feel painful.
Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies. Turn them off. Good movies are made by skilled directors who know better than to stick a big boring part in the middle. Taste is subjective, of course, but the middle & the end get made by the same person. If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either; by the same token, if you consistently need to skip through the middle parts of movies with great endings, you're probably skipping good stuff which you might enjoy if you had a greater tolerance for slower, more atmospheric cinema. It might seem like sitting through the slow parts of a movie would make the experience of watching it worse, but I've found that resisting my urge to pull out my phone during slow bits has made me enjoy movies more.
Habitually, I spend a lot of time with headphones on, listening to podcasts and videos and such. I find that if I do too much of this, though, it starts to get me down. Often the best thing for my mood is to take off my headphones and just sit with my thoughts for a while. I know what you mean by "suffering through boredom," but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.
> Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies.
Actually, in real life, otherwise good movies can have some less-good parts, and otherwise bad movies can have some individual scenes that are great. Life, and art, isn't black-and-white.
> If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either
You've clearly never taken taken a screenwriting course, or analyzed the many many movies with a saggy middle but a great ending -- which is actually an extremely common pattern. There's even a name for it, the "second-act slump".
> but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.
Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable. It's just making better use of your time.
A saggy middle is relative. It's one thing for the middle of a movie to be the least compelling part; it's another for the middle to be so dull that you have to skip it entirely. If a movie's longer than 90 minutes, then they had room to cut stuff, and they chose not to.
> Your analysis is extremely simplistic.
It's extremely general, is what. That's by necessity; we're not talking about any particular movie. Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
> Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable
"Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
> Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
That's what I'm 100% disagreeing with. It might actually be worth fast-forwarding through some dark suspenseful parts with no dialog or meaningful action.
> "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
Right. It's boring. Boring isn't pain or discomfort. It's boredom, its own category. Why suffer that? Just speed it up and improve your experience.
There's no moral virtue in forcing yourself to watch every single shot at 1x speed, or deciding that if it isn't worth watching fully at 1x it isn't worth watching at all. That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
Suffering is painful and uncomfortable. The pain and discomfort are what make it suffering.
It's not a question of moral virtue. There's no moral virtue in cooking with spices, either. Watching a movie at 2x may make it worse, but it's not immoral.
> That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
Unhelpful to what? What's the goal here? Simply getting to the end of the movie? They put middles in movies for a reason—they're a load-bearing part of the experience. Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good? Of course, if you're fast-forwarding through pieces of everything, this doesn't work, but that's a red flag in and of itself, and it should prompt you to ask yourself why you can't sit through a whole movie. Do they all have unacceptably slow pacing? Or is there a problem with your expectations?
I should point out, also, that I don't mean this in a black-and-white sense. I'm not saying that fast-forwarding through one scene one time is some sort of mark against you. But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end? The point of holding yourself to standards isn't finger-wagging; it's to provide an objective lens to view yourself through. How would you know if you did have a problem with your attention span, if not by monitoring yourself for the coping strategies which a person with a low attention span would use?
Why are you even trying to argue this? You're repeatedly saying things like:
> Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good?
That's nonsense. You don't know if a movie is mediocre or consistently good until you watch it. Or it might be mostly very good with some not-so-good parts, in which it's better to watch it but watch the obviously not-so-good parts at 2x speed.
> But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end?
The fact that I've written screenplays, learned acting, done script analysis on literally hundreds of scenes from movies and television shows in educational contexts, lit scenes, shot scenes with actors, and edited them together?
I'm fast forwarding because I have a halfway decent knowledge of some of the craft and I don't feel like wasting my time with segments that exist purely for emotional heightening but little else. Empty calories, if you will.
There's no problem with my expectations, I assure you. I suggest you look in the mirror and ask why you feel so compelled to insist, judgmentally, that your way of watching movies is the right way, and speculate that a different way is somehow a sign of a problematic attention span. You're trying to insist you know some superior way of watching movies. Consider that, just maybe, you don't know as much as you think you do.
The person you're responding to argued that you have an attention span issue. That's not really the same as telling you what you should do.
And "It's boring. [...] Just speed it up and improve your experience." comes across pretty close to telling people what to do, at least as much as what bccdee said.
> But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Do you do this for movies you're watching on your own for enjoyment or that you're required to watch for some reason? I'm not particularly interested in film, and have adhd, but can't think of a time where I've ever done this, so it's hard for me to read your comment and think that while you may not struggle with attention per se, such a level of discomfort and impatience is like not being able to walk around without earbuds in, or go for a hike without a Bluetooth speaker or phone
> interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
The few film studies classes I took in high school and college taught me so much about the hows and whys of film, that I can't possibly now watch a sequence like that and think "just someone walking through a dark environment". So much going on in those scenes that you'll miss if you're not interested in looking. That's not to say that everyone will be interested in, say, how the scene is framed, choice of camera focus and depth of field, where the lighting is coming from, or where the characters placed in relation to each other, but it's all there to observe and enjoy if you like it.
That's why I'm "pro-boredom," in a sense. If you let yourself dismiss a scene when you're not enjoying it, you may never discover what's enjoyable about it. Putting in the work of paying attention pays dividends. Of course, sometimes it yields nothing, but that's why you need to get good at it. If paying attention to something boring feels like pulling teeth, you'll never do it, and you'll miss a lot of great stuff.
And it's not like you're "wasting your time" by properly paying attention to ten minutes of atmospheric scene-setting in a two-hour movie. You've set aside two hours already. Make the most of them.
How about all those movies where the critical consensus is that it's overlong and needed to be tightened? That the mediocre 2:10 movie could have made for a great 1:40 movie?
Directors aren't infallible. They frequently make movies that are too long. Making the most of my two hours sometimes requires playing some of the overlong parts at 2x speed, because they often don't pay dividends at all. It has nothing to do with "putting in the work of paying attention", it's just not worth it.
And if I had great interest in the minutiae of set design, or if I were a score composer interested in the exact musical instrumentation, or a director studying suspenseful timing, then sure I'd be interested.
But I'm not any of those things. I prefer to spend my time on things I'm actually interested in, rather than on things I'm not. If I can fast-forward the "not" part, it makes life better.
If people are feeling entitled to a certain pace of spectacle and action as they write off everything in between as virtueless boredom, that's more damaging to the culture than a certain percentage simply no longer watching movies. That's how we get Netflix dumbing down their movies for everyone. There's nuance and value to a scene you may not immediately and consciously notice. And on a more meta level, pacing contributes to the overall experience of a movie even if there's not necessarily important subtext to a given scene that doesn't have action or explicit plot development.
Agreed. There are lots of movies that are hard to watch. A modern one for many people is "The Green Knight". I made it to the end but personally the movie didn't do anything for me and I don't agree with the praise.
I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler and after the first episode or so where they stuck out it just got tiring. Made up example (Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport, wait in lounge, board plane, sit in plane, de-board plane, pick up rental car, drive toward city, shots of city, get out of car, see lobby, get in elevator, arrive on floor" for 2-3 minutes. You could argue a segment like this is supposed to convey tedium or the fact that the character is the only person in all of these shots, but that was established 3 episodes ago. Now it's just filler. A good editor would have cut it but a series like Pluribus has a contract to provide X hours of content, and so they fill it up.
Some movies I watched recently:
"The Long Goodbye" (1973) - I'm not recommending it but I found it interesting/different enough that I'm glad I watched it.
"Madame De..." (1953) - This one was too slow for me. I stopped about half way through. Nothing iteresting had happened.
"The Enchanted Cottage" (1945) - I enjoyed though it was as little cloying
"Marked Woman" (1937) - It was overly melodramatic but Betty Davis was great at being strong and, I had no idea hostess culture was ever a thing in the USA which I found fascinating. It's still a thing in many parts of the world (and I have no issue with it to be honest)
> Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport
That is classic Vince Gilligan. He does that several times in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It's not filler, it's done with intentionality. You might not like it, but to say that an editor should cut that out is simply wrong. That's his distinct style, just like Wes Anderson has his own style, etc.
I disagree. It's only there because he has to fill the time of a TV show. I strongly believe he'd pull those out in a movie. In other words, they aren't there to help the story, they are there to pad the production to the contract's content length requirements.
He's not the only one. Almost all current long form TV series do this. There are a few exceptions but it's now the norm.
A couple of years ago, I rewatched some episodes of a 70s BBC drama called "Survivors" (the plot etc. is irrelevant in the current context). In the very first episode there's a scene where a woman who is looking for her son but has no idea where he might be walks across a very small wooden bridge over an even small creek. She stops in the middle, holds the rail on the bridge and looks down at the water. The camera shows us what she sees. For somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds, we just see the water in the creek flowing. It's not even particularly beautiful.
Aesthetics sure can change a lot, even within a single lifetime.
> I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler
When I read the post you're replying to, my first thought was, "sure, some movies are boring. But I bet they're talking about stuff like Pluribus, not actual boring movies."
Pluribus has no filler. Sure: the plot moves slowly, the cinematography is artsy and sedate, and it's all very character-driven. So what? It's beautiful. You may as well go to an art gallery and say the story moves too slow. Look at the stuff on the screen. Take it in. You don't have to like it, but maybe don't assume that Vince Gilligan is wasting your time with filler to make a quick buck. Consider that you might be holding it wrong.
I regret watching that series, it was immensely disappointing. Some aspects are really well executed like the coloring and framing, but that's not enough to carry a series. Pluribus is a concept that works for a single season, anything beyond that is dragging its feet.
Screw off with this "you're holding it wrong" nonsense. Sometimes the work is bad, but it has good components or elements and you can still enjoy those however you want. I stuck with the series because I was hoping there would be some redeeming aspects by the end, but it didn't pay off.
I think you're projecting your personal perferences onto everyone else:
> genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring
> there's nothing to pay attention to ... suffering through boredom
They are genuinely that way for you, which is fine. Others feel differently and that's just as genuine and valid. For many, the film school movies are works of genius, wonders to behold and genuinely enjoy. Where you see 'nothing to pay attention to', others may see and feel quite a bit.
I can't acquire the sophistication to understand everything in the world - there is not nealry enough time in life. But if I don't have the understanding to taste the wonders of fine wine doesn't mean they don't exist or that the $10 bottle is just as good. I'm just missing out and others know more - that's most of life (and I listen to them and try to learn a little).
>I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Did you always do this or did you start doing this in the past, say, 10 years or so?
Once you know about "Save The Cat!" it becomes boring to watch a movie that follows the formula.
I noticed even back in the 80s that too many movies ended in the "chase through the darkened warehouse". The movie will be doing fine, until somehow the hero and villain wind up in a dark, abandoned warehouse, ship, factory, whatever. Then they have a long, drawn out fight. Then the bad guy gets killed. Movie over? Nope. The bad guy rises from the dead and has to be killed again. Sometimes even a third time.
Then there are movies with the party of 10 people or so. The point is to kill them off one by one, each in a gruesomely different way, until the star is the only one left. Movies also telegraph who in the party is going to die next. It's the person who reflects on something innocuous, like "isn't it nice to hear the birds singing!". Dead meat, every time. The only interesting thing to do with these movies is make bets on the order of the deaths.
"Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern, except for the last two seasons.
I try not to think too much in those circumstances. It's often better not to know, not to notice, though it's not always possible.
People like genre and formula; it's not necessarily a negative - pop songs follow structures and formulas over and over. Also, creative artists can innovate by varying those structures and playing with expectations that don't exist in less formulaic creations.
There is plenty of non-formulaic film (and other arts) if you want it? I'm sure you must know that.
Almost every movie has a plot. How formulaic. How droll!
I find these sorts of discussions to be strange. Yes, stories follow specific methods to convey them. Yes, conflict is part of that.
I will agree that too formulaic is a sign of the times. I find that many 60s and 70s movies were the most creative this way.
The 30s often had movies that were just plays on film. The 50s were where the process of filmmaking gelled into reality. Not just how to make shots, but also the gear like steady cam, and an entire special effects industry, stuntmen, whole crops of professionals becoming uniquely skilled.
The 60s and 70s were the first generation of those which grew up with film as kids. The new medium was more understood. Experimentation ensued.
Then it became more formulaic. At least, it seems the way to me.
I only watch movies that are a series of randomly seeded intervals of tones at various pitches, random colors, with static added in. This ensures I never watch anything formulaic or predictable.
More seriously, it is interesting when a movie breaks out of a formula, especially in well established tropes, like Disney movies. Moana or Encanto come to mind as they convey stories where there either isn’t really a villain (spoilers, Te’Ka is not the villain), and especially in Encanto the conflict is more internal family issues than anything else.
But sometimes it feels good to just watch those archetypal stories. I know people hate on Marvel but the Thanos arc with the infinity stones and the snap was such a fun ride, over the course of many years. These stories are extremely formulaic but still enjoyable because on some level we are wired to enjoy these stories.
> But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Those are typically the movies where I just end up turning it off and reading a synopsis. Some movies just aren’t that good.
Here's the thing: the overall movie isn't good, but it might contain some really good elements. The point of skimming and controlling your media experience is to appreciate the good parts while discarding the bad.
It's the equivalent of going to a restaurant and being served a nice steak with a side of shit. You can just eat the stake and ignore the shit. The dish would be better if they replaced the shit with something good like mashed potatoes, but you can still enjoy the steak. This is how the contrarians read to me: "Noooo, but the shit side dish is an essential component to the culinary experience that the chef's team prepared, it's their vision."
This comment is profoundly tragic to me, for as absurd as it sounds to us now, I imagine it will eventually become common sentiment. Our culture is changing so rapidly.
The first time someone encounters 2001, they will almost certainly come away with some WTF? vibes, at least if they're being honest with themselves.
For my first time, I made the mistake of renting a VHS and watching it on a 19" TV. Heard this was a good SF movie, guess I'll check it off my list. Yeah, no. What I saw later in a 70mm cinema was the same content, same story, same words and images, but a very different movie. The setting and presentation made all the difference between a seemingly-pointless waste of time and a profound life experience.
That said, what we saw isn't what Kubrick filmed. Bowman's exercise sequence was originally a full 10 minutes long, just pacing around in circles, and a few other sequences including the Dawn of Man prologue were also much longer. Audiences in 1968 weren't buying it. Kubrick had to tighten things up, because complaining about the audience's attention span wasn't the option back then that it apparently is now.
> A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”
The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring, unless you're hyper-motivated. Before mobile phones, you didn't have any choice but to sit through it. Now you have a choice. I suspect that film students 30 years ago, despite having a "full attention span", would also have been entertaining themselves on phones if they'd had them.
I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to. There's no virtue in suffering through boredom.