Rewind, Kind Be

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Twenty years ago, my grad-school friend L. and I had a brief debate about a topic that I’m sure she’s forgotten but that has stuck with me ever since—because I was completely wrong. We were talking about the difference between writing and movies, and the ways they each get quoted, clipped, and truncated. Writing, I argued, was better designed for this kind of disassembly: You can pluck a sentence from an author’s work, whether it’s short and epigrammatic or a winding, looping word-tendril from Proust or James Baldwin, and it can still feel whole. It can make sense on its own, but it can also summon up its missing surroundings—it tells you, if not in so many words, where it came from. Writing seems linear, I said, but it doesn’t have to be.

L. argued that this applied to movies and TV as well, that the shortest clip could carry the meaning of the whole. What’s more, she said she knew people—”kids,” I want to say she said, because she may have been teaching a class?—who consumed video this way, in minuscule chunks, and still they were able to derive meaning and enjoyment from them. The chunks’ relationship to the whole mattered, sure, but it didn’t necessarily depend on their position in the sequence of events. However the work had been edited, whatever its highs and lows and pacing, viewers could undo that by watching what they wanted, for as long as they wanted, and in whatever order they wanted.

At the time, this struck me as crazy. How could you watch a blip of something and still feel it without having experienced everything that led up to it? Or maybe: Who would choose to watch things that way? Why skip the essentials of suspense for the ephemeral pleasure of the quip, the gunshot, the unearned catharsis? Me, I would never!

This was, of course, before memes and GIFs were everywhere, endlessly excavating our visual culture for moments whose emotional and informational contents allow them to stand on their own.

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I don’t have a grand theory about why we do this now. Maybe we don’t need a grand theory. Maybe the GIFs just work. Great visuals stick in your mind, and we now have the technology to create and recall them at will, so we do: We deploy them as shorthand and as commentary because we know they either evoke in others the same emotions they do in us, or because we assume other people at least know what they’re supposed to feel. Homer Simpson vanishes into the hedge. Michael Jackson eats popcorn. Leonardo DiCaprio points at the screen.

It would be easy to extend this idea outward. We could say, for instance, that GIFs have primed us for the quickie video experience of Vine, TikTok, and Reels. We no longer need the opening title, the setup, the rising action, the dénouement, the credits—just give us the good bits!

That feels pretty lazy, though. For one thing, the popularity of GIFs was established at the same time as the dominance of short social videos. Pretty hard to tease out cause and effect there.

For another, we’ve always wanted to just get to the good bits. You hear tales of playhouses in olden times where an actor, having just delivered a memorable performance of, to pick the absolute most clichéd example, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue, is cajoled and hectored by the audience to deliver it again, immediately—the Elizabethan version of instant replay. Old Hollywood musicals, meanwhile, were sometimes conceived by producers as a way to squeeze a bunch of popular songs into a single show: Yeah, you needed a plot to connect them, and a few big stars, but that was secondary—the audience was there for “Singin’ in the Rain,” not necessarily for Singin’ in the Rain.

Fast-forward a little more, and you get early hip-hop producers isolating beats and breaks from popular songs to offer us an infinite loop of the bars we adore. MTV’s videos and quick-cut interstitials allowed for further atomization of our experience, and then—oh, well, then we’re at today.

Tell Matt What to Do Next With Trying!

I’m not the greatest consumer of short-form video or movie-and-TV-derived GIFs, but I can see how my own viewing habits have evolved in the past two decades. There are certain series I’ve watched enough—The Americans, The Expanse, Game of Thrones—that I can dip in at any point, at any point in any episode, and watch until I simply decide to stop, and still derive something genuine, something greater than those seven minutes of drama might suggest. Lately, I prefer my first-run movies to be long, partly to justify the expense of the cinema but also so that I can fall asleep in the middle of them, wake up, and enjoy the remaining half-hour as if nothing was missing from my experience. Then there are the TV shows I watch at the end of the night, just as the THC gummies start to take hold: 10 minutes in, and I don’t know what’s happening, but I know I’ll continue the story tomorrow. It’s linear, but so disjointed it might as well not be. I’ve consumed whole series this way, not that I remember what happened in them.

We watch nonlinearly because the classic approach to narrative structure, as reliably effective as it is, is only the beginning of our engagement. But as a long-form creator—which these days means anything over 3 minutes or 300 words—I wonder how I’m supposed to use this information. I do like the flexibility that length offers: The introductions and reintroductions, the dramatic accelerations and red herrings, the way you can pile revelation atop revelation and—with a well-placed aside—draw out the suspense, the delicious suspense, that leads to a devastating conclusion. But if a reader, a viewer, is going to return again and again to a mere blip of that, or not even return but experience that blip and only ever that blip, then should I alter my approach? Should I write in epigrams and lose the connective tissue? Is the medley the height of culture? Should I write solely for the remix?

Nah. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good (?) and I Like It (?): Prime Target

You know how I love prime numbers, so I gotta watch this new show on Apple TV+, starring White Lotus’s famous not-actually-a-nephew as a mathematician who’s figured out something cool about primes—which, of course, attracts the attention of people who want to kill him. This, my friends, is why I did not become a mathematician.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt