Movies are too damn long now.
In the “old man yells at clouds” category of complaints, I recently told my partner (who loves movies enough to go to the movies for the sake of going to the movies) that I’m never sitting through a movie longer than two hours again. I’ve had it with big bloated exercises in directorial self-indulgence. Everyone seems afflicted with an an “auteur” mentality now, and sprawling epics or multi-part franchises have become the rule rather than the exception — never mind viewers’ exhaustion with both of those things. Killers of the Flower Moon may be every bit as great as people like to tell me, but I will never see it because there will simply never be a day I have a whole-ass three and a half hours to spend waiting for Scorsese to get to the fucking point.
A similar, meandering pointlessness came for TV a long time ago; successful shows run forever, never reaching any sort of narrative conclusion, trapped in a cycle of repetition and escalation as they try to outdo themselves with increasingly ridiculous plot devices. (Witness, for instance, Stranger Things, which has tipped so far over into spectacle and absurdity that people have largely lost interest ahead of the big final season.) TV halfway solved its own problem by making the arcs shorter and the budgets bigger, so we’re left with a lot of the “miniseries” format stranded halfway between television and film.
I am the first to admit that I’m nobody’s target audience for movies. I have a low tolerance for screen media; I didn’t grow up watching a lot of TV and don’t gravitate towards it. “Watching” as a primary activity is passive enough to make me antsy and I shut off a lot of movies and TV for sheer lack of momentum. Maybe this is a personal failing; I’m equally impatient with the raft of similarly auteur-ish literary fiction with only the vaguest gestures towards narrative (hence my recent Atlantic list to the contrary). But maybe I’m also not totally wrong, and somewhere along the way we collectively lost the plot.
