Comment by bccdee
9 hours ago
Suffering is painful and uncomfortable. The pain and discomfort are what make it suffering.
It's not a question of moral virtue. There's no moral virtue in cooking with spices, either. Watching a movie at 2x may make it worse, but it's not immoral.
> That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
Unhelpful to what? What's the goal here? Simply getting to the end of the movie? They put middles in movies for a reason—they're a load-bearing part of the experience. Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good? Of course, if you're fast-forwarding through pieces of everything, this doesn't work, but that's a red flag in and of itself, and it should prompt you to ask yourself why you can't sit through a whole movie. Do they all have unacceptably slow pacing? Or is there a problem with your expectations?
I should point out, also, that I don't mean this in a black-and-white sense. I'm not saying that fast-forwarding through one scene one time is some sort of mark against you. But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end? The point of holding yourself to standards isn't finger-wagging; it's to provide an objective lens to view yourself through. How would you know if you did have a problem with your attention span, if not by monitoring yourself for the coping strategies which a person with a low attention span would use?
Why are you even trying to argue this? You're repeatedly saying things like:
> Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good?
That's nonsense. You don't know if a movie is mediocre or consistently good until you watch it. Or it might be mostly very good with some not-so-good parts, in which it's better to watch it but watch the obviously not-so-good parts at 2x speed.
> But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end?
The fact that I've written screenplays, learned acting, done script analysis on literally hundreds of scenes from movies and television shows in educational contexts, lit scenes, shot scenes with actors, and edited them together?
I'm fast forwarding because I have a halfway decent knowledge of some of the craft and I don't feel like wasting my time with segments that exist purely for emotional heightening but little else. Empty calories, if you will.
There's no problem with my expectations, I assure you. I suggest you look in the mirror and ask why you feel so compelled to insist, judgmentally, that your way of watching movies is the right way, and speculate that a different way is somehow a sign of a problematic attention span. You're trying to insist you know some superior way of watching movies. Consider that, just maybe, you don't know as much as you think you do.
You're getting just as judgemental as them about what works better. And trying to pull rank isn't going to make you right.