Patience in the Era of Prestige Media

Major spoilers for the 2003 film Elephant and very minor spoilers for the most recent episode of Severance.

In 2005, I sat in a friend’s dorm room at a local college in Florida and watched Gus Van Sant’s Elephant on DVD. The film, a masterful real-time look at an otherwise normal day in high school interrupted at the end of the second act by a school shooting, is less “straightforward narrative” than Altman-esque glances into the lives of characters and how they intertwine before and during the violent act.

The film stuck with me for all twenty years after I watched it, having not seen it again on purpose despite it being one of the more powerful films I’ve seen. While the whole of its 80 minutes are memorable, one scene from the film still replays in my memory frequently: a budding photographer, Elias, silently developing rolls of film in a darkroom. Van Sant never peels the camera away from Elias’s actions, and the result is witnessing the entire meticulous process of manually developing film.

When I watched this at the time, I was furious with mundanity of the scene. (I was also, I should state, 19 years old.) Yet when the credits rolled, I realized we were let into something otherwise trivial, but now made special: this was Elias’s last time developing film before he was murdered twenty or so minutes later, not thinking of anything but what brought him joy. In retrospect, I still feel this is a significant inclusion in the film because it is colored much differently by the time the credits roll.

For the twenty years since, I’ve treasured the slow, seemingly unimportant aspects of movies for well more than they show. A character processing or avoiding things. Someone trying to return to normalcy. Someone enjoying normalcy before it ceases to exist. The attempts in finding normalcy in a setting where none exists. (In terms of recent works, I feel The Brutalist did a decent job of this.)

Yet In today’s media climate, where an entire season of a show appears instantly and dialogue is rewritten so those making pasta with their backs turned to the screen can easily follow along, it appears that the average viewer couldn’t be arsed to stop and smell the roses.

First, this is exemplified by the lack of slower-paced tentpole content in movie theaters and on streaming platforms. Whereas in the past, characters would quietly work through things, now things are talked (or yelled) through more often than not. See every Marvel production (save for Iron Fist, which, though terrible, spent a lot of time with characters in contemplation). See The White Lotus, despite its prestige. Mare of Eastown’s protagonist going up to her attic to reflect on her son’s loss at the very end of the series might be the quietest part of that show, which ends seconds later.

A great recent example of this is the frosty reception of last week’s episode of Severance. Yes, much of the episode was dialogue-free, with characters driving, sleeping, or walking. Yet these mundane actions, when not taken at face value for even just a second, advance the plot, lore, and characters more than dialogue can do. We see how they live and think, rather than being told.

For the viewing audience, who gets these episodes in a weekly drip and has memed and theorized the show half to death, this silence and these motions are not enough. Because the rest of the show is fairly fast paced and revelatory by way of dialogue and explicit action, asking the audience for a week to read between the lines is apparently a daunting task based purely on online reception of the episode and subsequent review bombing of the show on relevant platforms.

I am who I am by having my dreaded tenth grade English teacher ask me to dig over and over again into the significance of the yellow wallpaper in The Yellow Wallpaper. The skills I developed by actually reading between the lines allow me to do what I’ve done professionally for sixteen years. Yes, I read Batman comics, but I read Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, too, and I’m better off in the end.

My worry is that by catering to an audience who cannot put down their phone while watching TV for a second to chew on the scenery, we lose this quiet time and thus the ability for others — future generations who watch this media especially — to separate text from subtext. Most of my favorite media relies heavy on subtext, rewarding repeat sits with it to peel back layers I may have missed before. Not references (referrals to other works or happenings), but feelings and implied actions that may or may not have happened on screen.

Think the ending to Twin Peaks: The Return. Or all of David Lynch’s work.

Or Elizabeth Olsen saying “he only has boys” in Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Or most of Lou Reed's early songs (and all of Berlin.)

These are the rewards of attentive viewing, listening, or reading. The keyword here, mind you, is "attentive," and if anything, the backlash against slow motions or "nothing happening" on the screen is often less indicative of the media itself than the complaining viewer.