Calm down dear, it's only a model
Just before he became the foursquare mayor of the Second World War (let’s face it, he’s revisited it that often), Stephen Spielberg admitted: ‘Jaws couldn’t be made now. The audience wouldn’t wait that long to see the shark.”
He’s right.
Within ten minutes, focus groups would be demanding a CGI Great White (probably in 3D) skullpunching the teeth out of a hapless cheerleader on waterskis.
Goodbye narrative arc and charater-driven ennui, and hello gratuitous shark porn.
Actually, before even that, you’d have the merch. The Wii Surf board – “Ride the rip tide, or rip your guts up – Great for training those stubborn-to-reach-core muscles.”
And can you imagine quite how shit Jaws would have been as a result?
Now don’t get me wrong, I think the Sky + box is a nifty piece of in-home entertainment kit. But it’s not, as far as I’m aware, a time machine.
It’s certainly slimmed down, but it still has mass. And, if my Sunday evening sessions with that bloke out of D:Ream have taught me anything, it’s that things which have mass (such as Professor Brian Cox’s Air Miles statement, the East Riding of Yorkshire, or a Sky+ Box) can’t travel faster than time.
My Mum had to make do with living in the now. Still, at least she had the option to wind the clock back at will and, if she did a series link for Lark Rise to Candleford, possibly freeze it altogether.
Her metaphysical point, of course, was far deeper, and far more zeitgiest-savvy than she possibly could have realised.
What she was asking, really, was ‘why should I be a passive consumer of culture? Why can’t I challenge the prevailing Bayesian models of adjusting strengths of association only in reaction to stimuli delivered by the environment and, instead, actively probe the environment to consume optimally?’.
Really. That’s what she was dualling with, while Dad tried to finger the triple A’s home into the remote.
It’s the same phenomenon I noticed when an otherwise intelligent friend of mine suggested recently that he wanted to learn to speed read.
‘Why?’ I asked.
(apparently, he said, it’s all to do with the larynx. Read a Hilary Mantel without using your larynx and you’ll fly through those wasteful pages of literature in no time. I considered offering to punch his out for him, but didn’t want to be saddled with a steam cleaning bill from Waterstones Espressamente.)
What about the simple joy of trudging through an entire book, I asked him? Like authors have to do when they, you know, write it? The triumph of reaching the pinnacle with nothing more than a slab of Kendal Mint Cake, as opposed to a Kindle and a >> button.
He was having none of it. He wanted to cut to the chase. He’s got a hungry Google Reader to attend to.
Our brains are going through the toughest evolutionary change since that PR-savvy Ethiopian, Lucy, thought she’d have a go just on her back legs.
These days, instead of concentration and contemplation, we all want to be curators. Blame Google if you want, but, in our greed for ever-increasing input, we’re all accountable.
Passive consumption (or, as my dad would call it, putting the hours in) suddenly seems incredibly archaic and leaden: we’ll curate our own fun, map out our own route. Go viral, scan the juicy bits, and spit out the pips.
But sometimes – and I know this because I read it in Readers Digest – the the fun is in the journey. It’s somewhere in between. It’s rarely the tourist honeypots.
It’s not often I see eye to eye with crusty old Etonians, but maybe Pink Floyd had a point. In their recent victory, ruling that, to ‘preserve artistic integrity’ albums should be delivered, digitally, in exactly the same way they were on wax cylinders, they were freeing us from the tyranny of self curatorship.
As the old family saying goes: ‘you might know how to bleed your radiators, but that doesn’t make you Corgi registered’.
Reading without our larynx? The very thought makes me speechless.
What an interesting article!
I have noticed that peopleseem to have a limited attention span and the ability to concentrate is being diminished by the drive to be “entertained”.
Effort seems like a dirty word and although man often looks for the “easy way” he tends to realize that hard work is the only thing that produces anything in the end and that things built slowly endure.
Bryn
I can’t be bothered to read all that, can you summarise it in 140 characters or less please?
(not really, I enjoyed it – bit jealous of your mum and her Sky + box though, I want one.)