If you blink while watching the first movie ever made, you miss it.
It’s that short.
136 years ago, Louis Le Prince directed the first motion-picture film. It’s called “Roundhay Garden Scene” and it’s 2.11 seconds long. For the next five years after the production of “Roundhay Garden Scene” society had only 2.11 seconds to marvel at the new technology.
I can’t imagine travelling distances to view 2.11 seconds of anything, and that’s a privilege I don’t take lightly.
This giant of its time is now basically a gif. But what a wonder it must have been. What a privilege to gaze upon a new frontier in human civilisation.
Watching it today captures a fraction of a fraction of that wonder.
Sadly, that lost wonder is still a common occurrence despite advanced travel and viewership technology.
Here’s how you can lose out on the wonder in movies/TV shows.
I consider myself objective when it comes to movies. But lately, I have been taking personally so much about the movies I watch, and it’s ruining the fun.
The good news is that this has only happened with popular 2000s and 2010s TV Shows that have had their time in the sun.
So I wondered what it is that makes a terrible watching experience? Before we get into that, allow me to rage a bit.
I Should Have Watched Succession That Week
I first saw Succession playing on a friend’s TV during a party. Despite the rowdy crowd in the house, three people were sitting watching the show.
I stood long enough to watch that scene with Kendall Roy and Logan Roy walking through an orchard. “It’s so good, you should watch it,” my friend said the next day as they watched a new episode.
That’s what they all say. “It’s so good, you should watch it.”
Fast forward this year, I start watching Succession.
All I could focus on was, “GET SOME MONEY OR ALL YOUR SHARES AND START YOUR OWN BUSINESS YOU LOSERS!” Even as my rational mind told me that’s just the script.
All I saw was a bunch of rich and powerful people struggling for riches and power on a hamster wheel. It got on my last nerve so much that I was so happy whenever terrible things happened to any of the characters. I was so happy when Logan died, when Kendall lost the CEO position, and I wished something terrible had happened to Roman. Shiv is stuck in a loveless marriage with a kid on the way and a new villain, CEO husband, on the horizon.
Would I have watched it for a what a good show it was a few years ago? Yes, I think so.
I Shouldn’t Have Watched Game of Thrones
Some shows require a communal watching experience like the kind that swept across the world with GOT. I don’t know why I didn’t watch it at the time, but my plan was to watch it in my 50s. I was tricked into watching it this year. This one didn’t make me rage any different than it did for many people. It was simply lonely.
I watched it with my siblings, but they were young back then and hadn’t buried their heads in the sand and ignored the conversation when it was alive. I didn’t have the communal discussion with peers.
It would have been the same fate in my 50s, but I would have been too old to care.
On that note, I will never watch Money Heist, Fleabag, The Boys, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, You, Peaky Blinders, and many more.
I will stick to old sitcoms and be more involved when popular shows arrive.
So what is it about these shows that makes a terrible watching experience?
1. Life
These days I’m angry and too irritable for some reason. I used to watch unfairness or betrayal in a movie and just cry or feel bad or patiently wait for the revenge. Now I get angry outside of the script and no revenge or any other balance of the scales is enough. “Oh fight back, you weakling! You’re hiding your cowardice in some virtue bullcrap!” “Don’t even look at them, you sappy idiot!” “She’s manipulating you, you ughh!”
2. Timing
This is the biggest contributor to a shitty watching experience, especially those with elevated levels of drama.
Much like the old wisdom in Ecclesiastes, where “to everything there is a season,” the same principle applies to your viewing habits.
The emphasis here is on cultural timing. Movies and series often reflect and respond to the zeitgeist. Watching a movie like “The Social Network” during the rise of social media had a different impact than it might today, with our advanced understanding of technology’s role in society.
There is also a time of clustered movies of a certain genre like what happened between 2012 and 2015. That period was characterised by a bubble of dystopian movie series like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, The Host, The Giver, Divergent, etc.
Cultural timing is important because most of these shows are not comfort shows in the way sitcoms can be. They have a Kinetoscope hype which adds to their context (memes, TikTok POVs, reaction videos, mimics, social media discussions etc) and makes watching them years later a lonely and, frankly, useless endeavour. You just look like the last to arrive at a dying party.
Oh, and Greg Hirsch SUCKS.