Drowning in content
After the last year or so I’ve had enough Ridley Scott. My main criticism is that I wasn’t bored. Let me explain. I sat through “House of Gucci” and “The Last Duel.” I rewatched “Gladiator.” I even watched season one of Scott’s new show “Raised by Wolves.”
Most of these ended up falling flat for me, but I’d like to isolate one factor in particular: length. Both of Scott’s movie offerings in 2021 clock in at around two and a half hours. “Raised by Wolves’” first season received a somewhat mixed reception with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 74%. Often critics who gave unfavorable reviews mentioned that the first two episodes, directed by Scott himself, went well but the season lost its luster as the show went on. If the show had ended with the first two episodes, critics might have been more satisfied with the results. Isn’t it then the length that’s the problem?
It’s not just Scott’s movies in 2021 that were roughly two and a half hours. The sci-fi epic “Dune” is roughly the same length, as are the two major Marvel offerings “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Eternals.” To be a movie-goer is to be a champion sitter. One could also rewatch whole franchises, there was another “Ghostbusters” movie recently released. The major blockbuster franchises have been drawn out for over a decade.
Entertainment seems to be calibrated for unbearable length. Game developers create 80-hour RPGs when 20 hours would probably suffice. A friend of mine used to mock me for reading Dostoevsky and called the books my “Russian doorstop novels.” Our society is trending towards its own digital form of the 19th century Russian novel, a brick, albeit a virtual one.
The late Mark Fischer observed about this state of affairs that “No one is bored, everything is boring.” Ultimately what I have been daydreaming of is the kind of “analog boringness” I haven’t felt in over a decade. I have too much access to too much raw content and information to be bored. However, I’d like to imagine there was a hyperborean state of affairs where content itself functioned differently: rather than keep you continuously occupied in the act of consumption, entertainment could be a resource to tide one over. Content would, in my ideal vision, be short enough and rich enough to contemplate one’s boredom. There would be some recess.
