‘Interrupting’ is an unpardonable sin. No amount of revolutionizing technology can undo a bad viewing experience.
When people make movies they hope that it will be watched in its entirety- scene by scene, logically, sequentially. But what the poor filmmaker doesn’t realise is that the movie will be watched, or rather consumed in all sorts of ways by all sorts of “viewers”. Informed or uninformed, woke or ignorant. WHATEVER sort there is.
1980s-90s. TV era.
A pubescent young boy/girl is watching the Sunday afternoon movie. The father orders him/her do an unimportant task that could easily have been done by THE man himself. But to his shallow ego it would be too much to ask for. So the poor kid must disengage from a stupidly “frivolous” task of watching a movie and get his damn hammer (which he’d rather bang on his/her own head. LOL) for him. Whenever he/she returns to the movies the Hero is suddenly the Loser even after beating the hell out of the Bad guy. Confused, he/she loses interest.
Therefore, the next time when the Grand Mother appears with her newspaper demanding the youngster read out loud her daily dose of horoscope he/she obliges. When he/she returns (gosh! I am tired of being so gender sensitive. Are you?) to the movies there is no way this (casual) viewer can catch up or make any sense of the story at this point. The story moved on long ago leaving him/her confused and bitter. In many ways stories on screen are like time, it waits for none. 😛 Wooah! This write up’s got some depth maan. 😉
The 2000s-10s. The digital era.
The viewer is likely to be lonely, glued to screens for most part of her(yup, I am dropping ‘his’) day. She finally gets some time off and decides to, lets say, commemorate the end of WW 2 on May 8th with a certain war type movie. Of course on a streaming platform. Duh. Half way into the first act she is soo into the story, and feeling so intelligent about her movie choice since its filled with history and shit. A bomb is dropped on a certain European city and few dialogues are uttered and that’s when the phone rings. Late into the night! Its a family call. The pause button comes to the rescue, naturally. The family then calls on regular call after being indignantly shut out from the video call. She goes back a few minutes and re-watches the bombings. The family now calls on the landline. Again she re-winds and re-watches the bombings. But the calls don’t stop. The family refuses to give up. This ordeal ends with the harassed viewer witnessing the European city being bombed at least 10 to 12 times. Imagine what that does to the overall viewing experience? Many (families) consider movie watching as the most useless way to spend time. A person is not “doing” anything if she is watching a movie. They consider the person to be free. Thank god for technology that allows us to pause and rewind.
On a typical TV channel, the logical sequence of scenes and story-line is interrupted by unavoidable ad breaks.
We must hold on to the story/narrative till the break’s over. On individual devices, there is the pause button to halt the story in mid-air or mid-frame, mid-dialogue or mid-expression. Or mid-bombings. 😬 This is the ad break of the current times or rather the ad breaks were the pause button of those earlier TV only days, but we had no control over this pause button at that time, that being the major difference. The viewer reaches for the pause button when she is faced with the unfortunate event of interruption.
There is no limit to the number of times one can summon this button. That’s the real beauty of this feature. It empowers the viewer and not the interrupter. The problem with traditional pause button (read ad breaks) is that the breaks and the interrupter, especially the one in the form of family or friends are seldom in sync. The family needs something from the viewer right when the break gets over and the movie resumes. Most often the viewer has very little choice but to oblige since she is inundated by the burden of everything that the family has done or is still doing for her. #gratitude? So the viewer has no qualms about voluntarily disrupting her viewing and attend to the family.
The story in the movie proceeds innocuously without knowing that the beloved viewer has disappeared. On returning she tries to make sense of the narrative but fails. She forever than remains in the greyish zone, the zone of not knowing. Do you know how big a tragedy that is?
It is because of such pesky interruptions the so called viewer never completely gets the story and is left confused and therefore unsatisfied.
As a result of this she goes about telling all her friends and family that, that particular movie sucks and bad-mouths the director and makes it a point to avoid watching his movies in future. Oh! No. That was not a slip. I intentionally skipped ‘her’ as back then it was more likely that a Director was a man considering how male-dominated our film industry has always been.
In fact she goes one step ahead and suggests all her family and friends to not watch any movies by that particular director. Ever. Don’t you think how grave an injustice this is?
This casual viewer is now sure to remain a casual viewer only, at least for a really long time. We are talking about pre streaming platform days, when it wasn’t as easy as streaming 3 random movies a day (mostly on weekends) and you could easily qualify as a “movie buff”.
Being a ‘movie buff’ was quite a hard work back then.
Since a casual viewer was (often) subjected to such brutal, incorrigible interruptions, the movie director of that Sunday Afternoon movie might have paid a big price. It may have tarnished his movie career. Because there exists numerous such interrupted viewers and the bad mouthing among friends multiplies and so the misconception spreads like a virus. Unfortunately its the movie critics who often face the wrath of directors for reviewing their films so badly. Isn’t it unfair?
Sighhhh. This is the ill-impact of interruption. But you may be tempted to think that now we have the revolutionary ‘pause’ button at our beck and call to mitigate such undesirable interruptions. Having said this, ‘interrupting’ is still an unpardonable sin. No amount of revolutionizing technology can undo a bad viewing experience.
Interruption is the hidden sickness that we need to address. If someone is seen with a book, chances of getting interrupted are slightly lesser. It seems, books or reading simply enjoy that kind of reputation. Ironically, nowadays people are more likely to watch something as opposed to read when they have some time to spare. Ah! Maybe that explains why many don’t think twice before interrupting a movie watcher. Well, in that case, Family cannot be blamed. :-l