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When should we consume culture in small, sequential bits?
I almost always read novels in bits. That is, I put the book down for a few times before finishing it.
I rarely watch movies in bits. That just seems wrong. But, assuming we are watching on DVD, why? Why do pauses ruin a movie but not a book? I can think of a few hypotheses:
1. Movies manipulate our neurophysiology over a two-hour time horizon. If we restart in the middle after a two-day pause, we are not worked up in the right manner.
2. Most books are longer than most movies, but there is otherwise no good reason for the difference in our consumption pattern.
3. We like the idea that we are "reading Camus," and thus we wish to stretch it out. Few people get comparable status or feel-good values from watching movies and thus there is no need to prolong that experience.
4. We don't actually like reading enough to keep on paying attention for so many hours in a row.
The ever-wise Natasha notes that we are mostly likely to read action novels -- such as The da Vinci Code -- straight through without pause. But action movies are the easiest to watch in bits. Ever try just a half hour of Jackie Chan? Wonderful. But breaking up a good drama is criminal.
Your thoughts?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 15, 2006 at 07:18 AM in Books, Film, The Arts | Permalink
Comments
I thought it might be something about the way in which the narratives are experienced, phenomenologically. Movies are experienced audio-visually but novels are experienced imaginatively. But I don't think I could break up a play, and that's audio-visual.
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Sep 15, 2006 8:26:10 AM
I think number 2 is all you need for this one.
Posted by: josh at Sep 15, 2006 8:43:00 AM
I disagree with number three. I think there's a cannon of films that are (at least seen to be) a notch above the rest and therefore come with some positive feeling associated with viewing them. Schindlers List, for instance.
I also agree with Jason's comment. On top of his points I think that authors design natural stopping points, but every aspect of a movie is designed to provide "flow". Documentaries might be an exception.
Does this have anything to do with the way books and movies are supplied? Books are purchased or borrowed for extended periods while movies have typically been consumed in the theater, on TV (pre TIVO), or rented for a very short period of time.
Posted by: Daniel Lurker at Sep 15, 2006 9:27:19 AM
Josh is right. Books are simply too long for a single sitting. I think the only time I read a book in one sitting was the can't-put-it-down book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
Also, I tend to read technical things more than anything else, so I naturally read at a slow pace.
But Tyler's super-reading abilities probably explains the lengthy "blogs we like" list.
Posted by: Macneil at Sep 15, 2006 9:33:02 AM
Yes, it may be length, because rarely does one read short stories in chunks. Or comic books, or articles in the newspaper.
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Sep 15, 2006 9:53:47 AM
It's a bit chicken-and-egg. Books are written with the expectation that the reader may put them down at resume at any given point, and so authors have learned to write in a way that accommodates this.
In the course of volunteering with Distributed Proofreader's, I've often been in the situation of reading every other page of a book. Whatever I missed, it was not enough to impair my grasp of the plot or characters.
Posted by: Cyrus at Sep 15, 2006 9:58:32 AM
I think (1) explains why it seems "wrong", and I completely agree with it, in that movies often take (or try to, at least) the viewer on an emotional ride.
I think (2) is probably the driving force for why it usually ends up happening, but it is a practical consideration, whereas (1) is a "moral" (artistic?) consideration.
I don't think (4) is the reason why we usually take breaks in reading a book, but when the conditions in (4) are not met (when we are reading a truly capitivating book), we will finish it all in one sitting (I've done this with only one book I can remember, Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, but I also happened to have a good enough block of time in which to read it, so, under different circumstances, (2) could have been a consideration.)
I think another possibility (that applies to me, anyway) is that we read books on the Metro, on airplanes, waiting in airports, waiting at the dentist, etc. whereas when we sit down to watch a movie, we block off our time to do so. So perhaps its a cultural convention to view books (but not movies) as gap-fillers. There are exceptions, but you see many more people reading a book on the bus than watching a movie.
Posted by: Phil at Sep 15, 2006 10:00:21 AM
Movies manipulate your temporal sense at a more noticeable level than books, I think. So the cumulative effect is more drastically diminished by an interruption.
This applies more the more a medium is concerned with rhythm and the grid of experienced time. Prose suffers less from interruption than poetry (even long poems); Movies (probably because they're still at least purporting to show events happening in some form of "real time") suffers less from interruption than music.
And here's a completely off-the-wall thought: maybe we read in smaller bits because so much writing involves compressing the time frame. I was reading some history last night, and I fell asleep after about a year-and-a-half of historical time had passed. I wonder if a part of my brain started to think it had actually been awake for that long.
Posted by: Matthew at Sep 15, 2006 10:16:20 AM
Phil has an interesting point about portability. Now with Video iPods and PSPs, perhaps people *will* see movies in chunks more often. (At least the early adapters with disposable income might.)
Posted by: Macneil at Sep 15, 2006 10:20:45 AM
Breaking up a movie is very difficult. The narrative is structured and performed in a way that depends critically on the continuity of the scenes. I find it very hard to even go to the bathroom during a movie. Not because I might miss something, but when I exit the experience even temporarily, the cumulative experience suffers.
That also happens with novels. The first ten pages are the hardest part of a novel for me. There's no build-up for the scene, and it takes time for me to fall into the world. When I put it down and start back up the next day, it's not so bad, but when I put it down for a week, it's very bad - almost impossible. It may be simply the memory lapses, but it also seems like the fabric of experiencing the narrative cannot be broken, otherwise the experience is stillborn. WIth a movie, that fabric is broken more easily (not sure why yet - it may have to do with the phenomenology of that medium), and so we cannot take it in chunks. With a novel, the fabric is stronger by degrees, and so we can handle chunk-sized readings.
But the chunks have to connect us to the narrative, otherwise we cannot handle it. Try reading a sentence every hour, or a page a day.
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Sep 15, 2006 10:27:07 AM
Hmm. What with the advent of DVDs, I now often am watching movies in bits and pieces. Chapters ... Nonlinearity ... Extras ... One of the things I adore about DVDs as a delivery medium is that they kind of merge merge certain qualities of books and movies. So I wonder: Do you watch movies all the way through not just because of qualities inherent in the medium (and god knows that drama and movies do tend to shove you through their material more urgently than book authors tend to), but also partly just because you're in the habit of it? I think kids, for instance, having grown up on nonlinear electronic entertainment, might be much more likely to take nearly all their entertainment (movies at home included) in chunks.
Hey, if you'll forgive an auto-link, I wrote about the way magazines are chunking things up these days here. Seems to be something in the air ...
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Sep 15, 2006 11:28:46 AM
"Ever try just a half hour of Jackie Chan? Wonderful."
Yes but a good action movie is structured. The experience of watching "Alien" in pieces will be different than consuming it in one complete viewing. "Police Story" or most of the best Jackie Chan movies build to the biggest and best fight.
But I do this too. I often have movies on as wallpaper. "Lawrence of Arabia", "Girl with Pearl Earring" Movies are a series of stills. The necessary information should be high percentage visual, including faces and body language. Very good ones still require little dialogue, and I often watch with sound off and captioned. Sound tracks are nice, but this ain't opera.
Posted by: bob mcmanus at Sep 15, 2006 11:54:30 AM
I wonder if our memory for primarily handling verbal discussions and descriptions is just different from our memory for handling scenes we see on TV. I am routinely reading several books at once, in pieces, and I find that it's very easy to slip back into the worldview and understanding of the flow of the books. But I agree that doing that with movies doesn't seem workable....
Posted by: albatross at Sep 15, 2006 12:13:28 PM
If we broaden our definition of Movies then I think the paradox disappears. If I can include TV Series (both mini-series and long running series (ex: West Wing)) then I would say that we do read and watch movies in the same way. If I’m handed a short-story that can be completed in 90 minutes, then I’ll read that straight through. If I get the first season of Battlestar Galactica on DVD, I’ll watch it in order over a period of several sittings.
I suppose this is a long way of saying that #2 is correct. I watch a movie in one sitting because I can. I read a novel over multiple sittings because I am unable to complete it in one.
Posted by: Rob at Sep 15, 2006 12:22:29 PM
Hmmm, on the book department I can not agree, because I read f.e. Nietzsche as fast as Jack Vance (meaning that I couldn't stop reading). When it comes to movies or at least TV-Series, I don't know if depth or action is really making a difference. F.e. watching Rome or Deadwood on HBO is as interesting as watching a good documentary, as long as one likes the subject.
I think a reason why action movies can be seen in half-hour breaks, is due to the nature having an action sequence and then a slower part with more dialogue. Since we are still in the momentum of the action, we don't really long for the (mostly boring) slowness of the dialogue. To do a break here, makes perfect sense imo.
Posted by: Max at Sep 15, 2006 12:50:42 PM
We really haven't had the chance to watch movies piecemeal until the last few years. (It was too inconvenient to go back and forth with VHS.) Maybe this question should be tabled for a decade or so to give people a chance to adjust their habits to the technology.
Posted by: Aaron Haspel at Sep 15, 2006 12:53:45 PM
I don't think this has been mentioned, perhaps because the readers of this blog are generally smarter
than me =), but one reason I read books in chunks because they are generally more dense and full of
information, while movies are less dense. Thus when watching a movie it is quite easy to absorb most
of it in one sitting, without any gaps, but the breaks in reading a book help me absorb what I have
just read. If I read a book all the way through without stopping, my reading comprehension suffers.
(Unless, as already mentioned, the book is a simple boiler-plate thriller, Da Vinci Code, Tom
Clancy, etc. In that case I often read all the way through without stopping, and I suspect I don't
suffer for it.)
Posted by: Sameer Parekh at Sep 15, 2006 1:00:08 PM
Interesting topic. I think the reason for this phenomenon is simple: reading is more work than watching. Watching a movie is a nearly completely passive activity, in which you view fully-actualized scenes and listen to sounds and music.
Reading is an active endeavor, in which you must work to convert squiggles on a page or screen into mental images, thoughts, and concepts. If you are not focusing, you are not reading. But if you drift off for a bit while watching a movie, the movie keeps rolling and you are still "watching a movie."
Since reading is a kind of work, it stands to reason that you need breaks from it. Since movie watching is not work, you don't need those breaks.
Posted by: Ak Mike at Sep 15, 2006 1:27:18 PM
I guess my brain doesn't differentiate between the two -- once I start consuming a story I want to finish it. I almost always read novels cover-to-cover in one sitting unless I am interrupted by something external.
Atlas Shrugged screwed up my sleep schedule for days afterwards...
Posted by: Jacqueline at Sep 15, 2006 2:55:01 PM
On a related note, I tend to watch entire discs at a time of TV-on-DVD instead of an episode or two at a time.
My theory is that the effort required to parse text counteracts the "too good to put it down" effect.
Posted by: Matt Bruce at Sep 15, 2006 3:12:28 PM
You can consume lots more detail per minute with a DVD. It's simply a much more efficient process for obtaining the information contained in the book.
Also, I would bet that the chunks of time you spend reading a book are comparable to the chunk of time you are willing to devote to a movie. People probably have a finite attention span that does not relate to the volume of information consumed.
Books encourage you to linger on the words so that you are paying attention not just to the images that are evoked but your own awareness of how you are obtaining and generating those images.
Posted by: RSaunders at Sep 15, 2006 3:17:25 PM
I like to read comedies straight through, also. If you don't remember an earlier bit, it may spoil a good joke.
Posted by: ~o at Sep 15, 2006 3:56:04 PM
In case you haven't seen this post about DailyLit.com (http://tinyurl.com/kqg9x)...
Posted by: Scott McLeod at Sep 15, 2006 4:05:54 PM
on the reading as work point, i think it's also that, depending on what you do, reading is like what you do at work, so it's less of a release. for me, largely dependent on type of reading -- nonfiction, i take my time, but for fiction, almost the definition of a good book is one i don't want to put down. depressing to have books you've been "reading" for years, a piece at a time (i now try to resolve that, if i put something down, it's done).
Posted by: dj superflat at Sep 15, 2006 4:32:38 PM
Here's a fifth hypothesis that I like the best: We read books at our own pace, but we have to watch movies at the movie makers' pace. You can't say, "I'm going to watch this movie slowly, to savor it," because you simply don't have that level of control over the experience. This basic difference gives rise to a lot of what the commenters above observe.
Posted by: RSA at Sep 15, 2006 4:36:01 PM
