Are You Entertained?
In high school, my crew of guys saw Major League 2 in the theatre. Its predecessor, Major League, or Major League 1, as I learned to call it, had been something of a personalized classic to us. But it wasn’t as though I pirouetted into Major League 2 expecting an artistic vision from Jean-Luc Godard. We were just hoping to see a funny movie. The sequel appeared to be a typical Hollywood-Hatchet-Job to me, I wasn’t finding it funny enough to justify my time, and I preferred to keep my Major League 1 quotes untarnished in my head. By the time the twenty minute mark arrived, I had walked out of ML2.
In my view, ML2 was a lost cause and Wesley Snipes and I were justified walking away in solidarity with our heads held high. The Willie Mays Hayes character lived on without Snipes, thanks to Omar Epps’ mediocre Wesley Snipes imitation, and the movie outing continued just the same without my presence thanks to my friends’ mediocre imitation of lower standards. I didn’t make a big scene or try to convince anyone else to sacrifice their hard-earned, just-spent dollars to go sit in the lobby or catch portions of other movies. I just felt that there were things I’d rather do, so I left. No big deal.
My friends would later say I was being a dick. When the film was over I was found reading a book in the lobby, and a couple of my friends felt the impulse to hype up how amazing and awesome the movie was. This is what is referred to in high-school-emotional-maturity-etiquette as trying to rub it in. Still others recalled that I had voted for (I’m sure it wasn’t a Renoir film) another movie candidate instead of Major League 2, and the walkout could be nothing other than my tantrum-protest.
In truth, it was as simple as the fact that the movie wasn’t that interesting to me. The book I had with me, Robert K. Adair’s The Physics of Baseball, had just as much baseball, and had proven itself through several chapters to be more engaging. I never understood the idea that just because you buy a ticket, then it follows that you have to finish it. To me, that’s how poop sandwiches end up eaten.
Somehow this act was seen as a challenge to the faith. After the amazing and awesome movie review antics expired, several admitted that it wasn’t a very good movie. I was never quite sure what was so disturbing about walking out, so I adopted the practice of taking a book to any movie I was unsure about.
The Blair Witch Project was so incredibly hyped as a real event that I gave in to seeing it for myself, but I was pretty sure that it was going to be a fake pile of dog doo. When I saw that it was not only fake, but boring, I left with my book and was later accused of being too scared to stay in the theatre. I wished I had felt some primal fear, at least that would be something, but I felt nothing. There were no characters, and they weren’t doing anything other than wandering around the woods with a shaky camera. The only scary thing about the movie was how frightened my friends were that I got up and left. I couldn’t figure out what this belief structure was built around that it could hold so strongly to the orbiting tenet that leaving a movie was a cardinal sin.
Has anyone ever hated the first twenty minutes of a movie, watched to the end and found out that they absolutely loved it? Didn’t think so. The closest personal experience I’ve had is the first twenty minutes of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where it’s shot almost entirely first person and intended to make the audience feel a little bit uncomfortable. I didn’t know if I liked it at first, and it ended up being my favorite of the year. However, you can tell the discomfort is intentional, and that it is done with craft so you watch on. It may have made me feel uncomfortable, but it was just an I.O.U. that ended up getting paid off. Sure, there are plenty of movies that are OK enough to get me to continue to watch the full movie, but turn out to be garbage; but I can’t think of one movie in the history of ever that totally sucked for the first twenty minutes, and then got its act together, and turned out to be a great movie. That just doesn’t happen.
It seems that once someone invests that initial twenty minutes into a film, it can be anticipated they will likely continue watching to the end. Perhaps most feel as though they have invested too much time already, like the dude miserably swimming halfway across the English Channel and deciding he could just as easily go all the way. The difference is you don’t have to rewind back through the first twenty minutes in real time in order to stop watching, and twenty minutes is really only about a sixth of the way through the movie. Maybe there is some kind of feeling of a great reward or a diploma at the end, like the freshman deciding school is garbage, but justifying that it would be worth three or four more years of capitulation in order to reap a lifetime of perceived rewards. If that were the case, the degree would be the “seen it” epaulet that one gets to wear when talking to his friends in the local Blockbuster or movie rental section at Hy-Vee. (An epaulet which, in the current economic climate, might be close to commensurate in value to an actual degree.)
Now, the pendulum has swung away from dutifully wading through swamps of poor quality entertainment, thanks to Netflix streaming. Suddenly these same bishops of blockbuster, clerics of cinema, and ecclesiastics of entertainment are able to easily turn the movie off after ten minutes. With Blockbuster, they shelled out 4 bucks and thought they had to get their money’s worth by torturing themselves through enduring the whole crappy thing. Now they feel like they are getting more for their buck by renting ten movies and watching the first ten minutes of each.
While distorted notions of value and worth may play a major factor in the phenomena, I think the real reason for the strange behavior is that most of our entertainment is feeling and fantasy oriented: part of the deal is that you’re supposed to turn off your reasoning mind entirely. I like to go with the flow as much as the next guy, but I wish there was some way I could eliminate sure stinkers from the Netflix queue before I even have to waste ten minutes, because, after all, six first twenty minutes equals one wasted movie. Is there any more value in having wasted time on more movies? Maybe some slight value in mowing down a Netflix queue, but Netflix is doing such a good job of mowing themselves down lately, that we can’t put too much long-term stock in the state of our tenuous Netflix queues.
Next Week: Part II ➜ Enter the Dragon — A Solution to the Torture of Entertainment Paradox
Tweet
Hi…. i just visited your site and after going deeply in your site i see you have very valuable contents posted. It looks great and i love your site.