I know many people who, while being fully literate and even liking to read, manage to read only a half a dozen books per year. Now, it is the quality of the reading that counts, of course. Yet, I think that there is more going on here than simply lack of time. I suspect that there is an almost physical discomfort with large blocks of reading.
Myself, I am as immersed in reading as a fish is in water; however, my media of reading has changed. Although I still check out books from the library and buy books, the bulk of my book reading is epub or pdf. This is a change that I was never expecting, never even wanted, but that crept up on me like a goodtime habit turned addiction.
This means that I read even large books, such as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, on the computer. This has changed the sheer physical process of reading for me. The physiology of it. I have transferred to the screen the feeling I sometimes got from reading of choking. Choking on a too muchness. This is not a criteria that necessarily counts against a book, but it definitely determines the course of reading the book. Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg is a case in point. It took me years to read that novel, because it was too much while at the same time I found it delightful – that is, there were things in it I would think about happily for days. It is a highly erotic book, with that peculiarly ironic eroticism special to Mann. Yet, like the snow in the mountains through which Castorp, in the most exhilarating chapter, skis, the book spread out before me and exerted a resistance, an overwhelmingness, that my mind met with its own resistance. It choked my eyes.
This psycho-somatic resistance comes up for me even more in watching movies.
When I was a single guy, I used to think that my problem with movies (and my problem with tv) was simply with popular American movies. It was the problem of plausibility. Metz, in an essay on movies from 1967, wrote a rather profound bit about this:
“We know that for Aristotle, the plausible (Vraisemblable) (to eikos) is defined as the totality of what is possible inhe eyes of public opinion, and is thus opposed to the totality of what is possible in the eyes of people who know (this last “possible” being supposed to make a unity with the truly possible, the real possible) The arts of representation… don’t represent all the possible, all the possibles, but only the plausible possibles. The post-aristotelian tradition – for instance, the notions of the plausible, of bienseance, of the agreed upon among the French writers of the classics of the 18th century – has taken this idea and enriched it with a second sort of plausibility, not so much different from the first and yet totally absent, it must be said, from Greek philosophical thought: what is plausible is what conforms to the laws of established genre.”
The plausible was always, to my mind, a bit ridiculous. The middle class – that pale aspirational image of the club house set – has produced some rather ridiculous genres, especially when unmixed with the working class, the marginalized. When those two forms of plausibility mix, you get film noir and classic American vaudeville comedy, but otherwise you get unthinking cop shows and rom coms.
There are movie viewers who accept anything; and that is their bliss. There are others who watch for the illogical moment, the break in the chain of the real; there are those who, accepting the supremacy of genre over the real, treat the question of plausibility solely in terms laid down by genre (would superman be able to do this or that? A different question than, say, the notion of a superhero fighting crime in a society founded on crime, say the Apartheid reigning in the U.S. during the golden era of the superheros).
I like watching thrillers with my brothers – on video, of course – because they are sharp-eyed for technical implausibilities in the story. How Hero Y knew about Villain X, or whether he’d have the time to escape danger in Location A and get to Location B in time to save the day – although usually this is on a finer level. They have an engineering mindset that they bring to these logistics.
Mostly the films I watch now are not, alas, with the love of my life, A., since who has time, but with Adam. It is through Adam that have bought into the marvel universe and horror films. I have accepted that there are languages here that are genuine, something to learn. It is not higher learning. But I can’t dismiss it.
However, to go back to media. My real problem with movies is that, as books were transformed by small screens, so, too, movies have been transformed by the way I watch them – not projected on a big screen, but usually on a computer. It is the tv-ization of the movie, and it means that I get squirmy when there is too large a block of watching. My unit is now the 20-25 minute tv program. Sad, that. This may sound like I am talking about being restless with intolerably slow movies, but it is just the opposite. Those movies do operate in 20-25 minute blocks, infilling. Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky – these movies are easier for me to see all the way through. But other movies that I know are good I interrupt, I view in stages. For instance, a film I am watching in bits now: The Return of Dr. Mabuse. I love the beginning of the film, the grit, the silence, the escape. And I love the actors, and what I know of the backstory, how this film was made. But I am breaking up my experience of it into segments – making it into tv units.
Film, for me, seems to tend more to what Barthes called the relay – the advancement from one point to another in a narrative, a sequence of images – with a sheer speed that both confuses me and makes me want to delay the process, impose the tv unit.
I wonder if this is a common problem. I suspect it is a common problem.
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