I rarely talk about my students in public, because that’s hard to do without personal issues and biases arising, almost instantly. I don’t like to call anyone out.
Here’s a case where I will break my rule, even though what follows is far more description than judgment.
A couple of weeks ago, I showed Martin McDonagh’s award-winning “The Banshees of Inisherin” to two literature classes, each with 35 students.
Whatever you think of this 2022 movie, you can’t help but see that some people like it. Such as the Western cognoscenti. For example, critics on Rotten Tomatoes are at a 96% for the film. It’s also pulling a solid 4.1/5 on letterboxd, with somewhere around 700,000 people watching and rating it.
But my students, smart 18-22 year-olds, disagreed.
Here are some of the terms they used, and they were not supposed to spend much space judging the film, in an assignment asking them to analyze it and connect it to real-world topics.
“slow and tedious”
“extraordinarily boring”
“offensive”
“many scenes need to be cut”
“mundane”
I was actually surprised at how many of them held back their negative opinions. In class discussion, those flowed as aggressively as a flooding river. One class virtually agreed that Martin McDonagh did not know how to write efficiently. The movie needed editing badly, they claimed. It’s too slow, they repeated over and over.
I had to stop and tell them that analysis can be separate from judgment, and judgment is not a feature of the assignment.
Now, in what follows, I know that my sample-size here is so small that I risk falsely generalizing about “today’s youth.” And even generalizing from the number of students I’ve taught — now surely in the thousands — is completely unscientific.
Caveat given, and onward we go into speculation.
If these American students are representative of anything broadly, cinema is mostly screwed, at least for a decade or two.
You might reply, “What a dramatic comment! Spoken by a drama lover!”
Yep, I repeat: cinema is mostly screwed, and I hope I’m wrong, too. And maybe viewers in other countries can pick up where American audiences have long left cinema off.
First, I suspect that my students’ haste to judge an award-winning work is culturally symptomatic of the widespread practice of rating everything. And the practice of rating everything instantly.
I know I’m besieged by this practice every time I go to the doctor, to Walmart, every time I interact with my bank — they pressure me to rate them from 1-5 stars on their service. And, obviously, that’s true of any online business and piece of merchandise, including movies.
My colleagues have noted the quickness-to-judge phenomenon in young people, too. Which seems to us as if cropped its ugly head up recently, perhaps within the last five years, although maybe it’s been around far longer than I noticed.
Actually, it’s not really rating and judging things that bothers me, which in a way is a mere announcement of taste.
Instead, it’s the brazenness of the judgments that gets me.
I must admit that I have always loathed Brahms, nearly any piece of music he wrote. But I am also happy to acknowledge that this is a matter of personal taste, and that listeners and musicologists will tell me that I am wrong with a thousand solid reasons. Those reasons so far have not helped me with encounters with Brahms. Still, I’ll respect his work and acknowledge that my Brahms-hate is and should be a minority view.
Yet I was taken aback by the students’ hasty willingness to tell award-winning playwright and director Martin McDonagh — an acknowledged master of his craft in not one but two art scenes! — that he didn’t know how to write an efficient script. I mean, I’m not going to tell people that Brahms couldn’t write music!
As they might say, that’s ballsy.
And I might suggest that its brazenness, even pride, to the point of Icarus flying to the sun. But I’m not going to be the guy to tell them to write a script and then have it subjected to mass evaluation. I’m not sure they realize that it is a trillion times harder than it looks, and that’s an understatement.
Anyway, it appears to me that, cinematically, these students have been raised on the musical equivalent of Speed Metal.
And, to continue the analogy, they believe that Speed Metal is the standard by which you should evaluate all music.
That would mean, then, that any other music by comparison is too boring, too slow, too dull, too mundane, too long, and definitely not exciting enough.
The cinematic equivalent of Speed Metal might be — and here I completely speculate, so let others investigate my hypothesis more critically — the uber-manic style of video presentation in both smartphone use and in the kids’ fare they have seen in the last 10 years.
Culprit #1: Tiktok, which I know is the old-guy scapegoat for all social problems these days.
Culprit #2: The Lego movies, Kung Fu Panda, and anything else that introduces something new every 30 seconds.
As an example, I was with two of my own kids the other night, and we turned on a cartoon show called “Adventure Time.” We hadn’t seen it, and yet when I looked it up, it had amazing reviews.
My quick-to-judge review of “Adventure Time” is that you can only appreciate it if you listen and watch everything on 2x speed, as I know some of my students do. In the show, something random and new happened approximately every 15 seconds. After about five minutes, I really could not keep up, certainly not while casually viewing it.
I know that when I first saw the first Lego Movie in the theater in 2014, my wife and I looked at each other and wondered what the hell we were paying for. It was a true old-man and old-lady moment for a couple of 30-somethings. We both gave each other this look that combined a couple of thoughts: “why are we letting our kids watch this, and should they?” and “we are getting too stinking old.”
Such fare — and I do like The Lego Batman movie, “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” the last Puss N’ Boots film, “The Penguins of Madagascar,” but they are all in this category for me — such fare is so manic that I get exhausted about 45 minutes in.
I just need to stop for awhile. It’s so fast and flashy that, after a time, I don’t feel like keeping up.
Maybe, to recuperate, I need to go listen to Brahms.
Anyway, my total speculation is that these late Gen-Z’ers that I am now teaching cannot handle anything slower-paced than the 2x-speed video world they have been subjected to.
This squares with my recent battles in my film class. Do you know what movies they think are slow and boring? (And remember: “they” here is a majority but not everybody. I remain a probabilistic thinker almost always.)
Vertigo — slow and boring
Come and See — weird and very slow
Bicycle Thieves — oh my goodness so dull!
Brazil — too weird for me
The Purple Rose of Cairo — at least it was only 80 minutes long
Nebraska — when does this movie end?!
And on I could go. I am getting a reputation for showing boring movies, even though you can see that I am not very daring in challenging them with something truly weird.
Now, I know there are a couple of odd humans out there in my class, probably like me, who had their world rocked by what they watched. I wouldn’t doubt that some student had a visionary experience with “Banshees” that made them more a movie-lover than ever.
It’s just that the vocal majority — a bunch of higher-IQ types, including pre-med, pre-PT, and engineering students — are telling me that Martin McDonagh doesn’t know how to write and direct a movie!
My response to this is to, as I usually do, meet them halfway.
That is the way to teach a general-education class. They acquiesce to you by showing up 40 times a semester, but you’ve got to figure out their understanding and then pierce into their narrower vision of reality by using what they know, and challenging them at that very point of contact.
So I’m thinking of showing the manic classics next semester in Film. Possibilities:
Bringing Up Baby
Raising Arizona
Dragon Inn
Dark City (an average of 2 seconds per shot!)
Everything Everywhere All at Once
If you have any further suggestions, drop them in the comments below.
Also, I am well aware of the maniacal pace of silent movies, but from experience, these look so ancient to 18-year-olds that unless they’ve developed a taste for them already, they’ll have a hard time swallowing Keaton and Lloyd upon first viewing.
This all reminds me, by the way, of George Lucas’ intention with the first Star Wars. He was trying to make a “much faster” 2001.
The result is that these young people these days may need a 2x-speed Star Wars!
But there, as always, is hope.
I’m sure a filmmaker will use the limited social data I just provided to their advantage. One strong suggestion I have is to resurrect the screwball comedy for the 21st century, please!
Another is to get back to meaningful, amazing silent-movie chases. I know that what’s Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise have tried to an extent in the recent Mission: Impossible movies. But could there be a modern Keystone Cops with a rich-enough script, ala Buster Keaton’s short “Cops”?
No need to despair in matters of taste: just role with the times and keep trying to make great art!
Now maybe I’ll try to listen today to Brahms.
I’ll try him on 2x speed first.