So bored with feature films

Over the past 4 years my viewing habits of moving-image media have changed profoundly. A whole host of factors, both external as well as internal to the types of films themselves, have reshaped not just what I watch but perhaps more importantly the satisfaction and fulfillment obtained from the watching.

Whilst neither scientific nor grounded in a broad survey, the identification of the changes in my own viewing habits may none the less serve as a microcosm of changes on a broader audience level both technologically and culturally. Others may not have changed their viewing habits for the same reasons as I but I suspect the results have a fair degree of consistency across demographics.

Whilst not the exact source of change there is a specific point in time where I can identify a major shift in my viewing habits brought about by a specific catalyst - my wife’s pregnancy. During this period of incubating an alien body inside the host of my partner she experienced, as all hosts do, a persistent narcolepsy and general exhaustion owing the alien sucking all the nutrients out of her body for its own development.

As a result our usual nighttime habit of watching a movie became a unviable proposition as a two hour feature was just too long a commitment to stay awake for an alien host body.

So we needed to change our primary entertainment viewing media and thus we shifted focus to shorter forms, namely TV drama in either the 47min commercial network form or the slightly longer 57min format for cable and non-commercial broadcasters. Where 2hours was too much for a pregnant body, 47-57mins was quite doable. Of course we had always watched TV of various flavors but it had long been mostly secondary to feature movies in our cinematic drama diet - entree rather than main course if you will.

The happy coincidence with this change in viewing habits, brought about by the catalyst of pregnancy, was that it coincided with what is arguably the height of the golden age of TV drama both out of the US and UK (and with notable efforts from Australia and other parts of Europe).

Need I count the ways….
- West Wing
- Deadwood
- Sopranos
- Six feet under
- Spooks
-Dexter
- The State Within
- Wire in the blood
- Rome
- The Wire
- Madmen
- Angels in America
- Carnivale
- The Tudors
- The new Dr Who
- East west 101
- Underbelly
- Entourage
- Joe from Cincinnati
- Queer as Folk
- Californication
- Fingersmith

And this is just what I would consider the top-shelf list, there are obviously many more that whilst not achieving the sublime status of Deadwood, the finesse of West Wing, the sophistication of The Wire or the exquisite beauty of Angles in America, are none the less very capable dramas.

It’s a mighty impressive set by anyone’s reckoning and with each of these high quality shows delivering between 8 and 150 hours of screen time there’s a lot of watching to be done from a deep supply.

But this happy collision of a desirable screen duration with a broad palette of offerings created another change driving a further dilemma. Once we established a contented and comfortable habit of watching a hour of TV drama before pregnant exhaustion set in we came to a desired expectation for there to be a show on Every night for us to watch.

The tragic truth of course is that broadcaster programming is incapable of living up to this expectation. Let alone that waiting a week between episodes and suffering commercials was both a waste of time and a seriously undesirable interruption of dramatic flow.

So a traditional viewing of a TV drama based on watching when the broadcasters said we could was simply not satisfactory or desirable. And Frankly you just haven’t watched West Wing until you’ve watched 2 episodes a night every night of the week right through all 7 seasons back to back (this we have done 3 times now and doubt not at all that we will do so again in the not too distant future)

So to circumvent the dramatic dislocation exerted by the structure of commercial broadcasting we took to simply buying the DVD box sets allowing us to watch what we wanted, when we wanted, commercial interruption free. (I could have of course gone online and downloaded the episodes from various nefarious sites but I chose to buy the DVDs not out of ‘legal morality’ but simply because I’m a collector and like to own the ‘box’. )

The truth is that whilst the shows listed above are enormously popular among my circle of friends and colleagues - the topic of ongoing discussion over meals and beers - I actually don’t know a single person who has watched these shows as broadcast. Everyone I know, without exception, has watched these shows either on bought/borrowed DVD or from ‘illegal’ downloads.

The other factor in this mix is that a great many of the shows listed above have either not aired at all here in Australia or, in the case of those such as Rome, aired 2 episodes late at night and were then canned for not rating high enough.

All these factors prompt a mode of viewership of TV drama that steers decidedly away from the intended weekly serial broadcast and into a manner much more akin to the reading a novel (an idea touched on in this Sydney Morning Herald article). For in not watching the shows as broadcast we invariably, as viewers, don’t wait a week between episodes. We watch as many chapters as we like, when we want, much like picking up and putting down a novel.

At the other end of the spectrum there is another flotilla of moving image media that takes up a considerable amount of my viewing time. I have come to love the density of online video. Short films, trailers, animations, motion graphics, the 30sec spot, the youtube video, the moving image joke, the viral video, the clever advertisement, the spoof and satire piece.

Whilst too often dismissed as disposable fluff it is actually this vast body of produced media, accessible online anytime, that I very often find the most inspiring on a daily basis. It’s in this body of work that you will find the most creatively challenging, technically adventurous and socially brazen. This mass of media, virally exchanged and embedded across the expanse of the internet, is the test bed for the cinematic language of tomorrow (take a visit to Motionographer to get a taste of just how bold cinematic language can be)

Whilst enormously divergent in variety and context what all this online media share is a density; a concerted meta-principle of maximum meaning in minimum duration. Consuming a daily diet of this stuff breeds a cinematic eye trained for efficiency and accustomed to density, nuance and complexity in brevity.

Then of course there is the third dish on my cinematic diet that profoundly influences the experience of all others - narrative based computer gaming.

Still a young and largely immature cinematic form, gaming has none the less delivered to me some of the most compelling and engaging cinematic experiences of the past 5 years. Half Life 2, Oblivion, Bioshock, Rome Total War, Stalker, Company of Heroes and the sublime Portal make up just a handful of titles that have shown how truly engaging and ‘cinematic’ gaming can be and herald a bright future of narrative and dramatic complexity.

However much like the experience of TV drama detailed above, my consumption of a game is an a-la-carte affair. With anywhere from 40 to 150+ hours of game/screen time the experience is taken in self determined chapters and sessions.

When you’ve taken the Bioshock journey through the city of Rapture for 40 odd hours your expected timescale for a good drama to play out is inevitably realigned.

There is also a technology derived experiential element to viewing itself that for me has robbed features of their lure.. Arguably the long standing appeal of the feature film (outside and irrespective of its duration and content) was its traditional delivery environment - the cinema theatre. The idea being that whilst other forms might be good - even comparable - they were not going to be delivered in the ‘prime’ environs of the dark auditorium on the big screen.

But there is a lot of legacy tradition in the perspective that big screen theatre is best and it’s a perspective I find I now reject. A 40in lcd screen in a living room with surround sound and a very comfy couch I would argue is a quality of viewing every bit comparable to the cinema theatre. The standard of home entertainment has been elevated so high in the past five years that I simply don’t feel the appeal of the cinema theatre anymore. My living room is more comfy, I can pause the movie for a piss break anytime I want, I can have a communal viewing experience with friends if i want and I don’t have to conform to the programming of anyone but me. My home theatre feels sharper and more synamic by intimacy than the theatre, the viewing experience wholly more pleasurable (this may also account for the increased number of IMAX films I have seen over the past few years - if I’m going to leave my home theatre then I may as well leave it for something that is offers More)

So, beset by the epic duration of the multi series TV drama and narrative-based computer gaming on one side and the ultra short dynamism of viral online video on the other, and with its primacy of viewing experience seriously undermined by the sheer quality of the home theatre, where does this leave the feature film?

Decidedly unsatisfying….

Permit me to tell it like it is, I am so bored with feature film. Upon reaching this conclusion I was at first surprised but the surprise was short lived when taken in the context of the evidence.

How can a feature hope to craft the kind of character depth and sophistication in just 2hours that a show like Sopranos did for Tony over 6 seasons? How can 2hours of screen time delve anywhere near the plot depths that The Wire achieves over more than 60 episodes? How can a 2hour action feature contain the scale of adventure contained in the 40+ hours of a game such as Bioshock?

Is it it any wonder I am bored and unsatisfied with feature films? By comparission to these other forms in my daily diet of cinematic form the feature film just seems shallow, simplistic, limp, an undernourished step-child of cinematic media.

And yet even when we compare it to the other end of the spectrum, to short works of brevity and efficiency, the feature film just seems wasteful, superfluous, inefficient and bloated. In possession of neither comparable depth on one side nor complex density of form on the other, I can’t help but see feature films lately as bland, middle-of-the-road, lowest common denominator cinema for those short of attention span or seeking not be challenged.

Will my love for feature film return? Gaming will undoubtedly only become more mature and sophisticated, we hope TV drama won’t go backwards in its persistent quality and its unlikely the viral dynamic short online isnt going anywhere anytime soon. In this light my cinematic desires for narrative, character, complexity, dynamism, new worlds and compelling visual and visceral engagement are more than likely to be satisfied largely without feature film. And I don’t think ill miss it…

Comments

[Kafil Din]

Thank you very much for excellent list of TV viewing. My wife and I have been looking for things to watch now we have finished Spooks and Six Feet Under so I found your information at just the right time.

Good to see we are not the only ones who can't stand the way fine shows are treated on television. I think you should check The Middleman as well for a light hearted sci-fi spoof that is just irresistible but was pulled before a second season was made. The sadness is that amongst my friends this show is hugely popular and has quite a cult following but because we never watched when it was serialised with commercials and now we have no more episodes.

Do keep in touch and keep up the interesting writing.