“I firmly believe the biggest unnoticed problem in our culture right now is loneliness,” writes Felix Biederman in the best thing I read last week, his review of Joker. That movie, of course, has dominated the media conversation. In his review of it, Biederman correctly points out that the only reason anyone is talking about it at all is because of "a whirlwind of reaction and counter-reaction."Because no single movie could hold much of our attention at all right now. Standalone movies are in the middle, neither an infinite series of quick videos nor an infinitely expanding universe in which to get lost, which is the worst place to be. Each one of us is under the unfathomable pressure of a zero-sum game for our attention. Sleep makes up the only minutes that are not bitterly fought over by armies of engineers relentlessly figuring out ways to suck up our "engagement." And what those engineers have discovered is that there are two ways to suck up all our attention. One is through a lot of really short pieces of content. The other is through a lot of really long pieces of content.
Last week, I was quoted in Campaign saying "TikTok is the next Netflix," because I believe those two companies have cracked the two most ingenious ways of holding our attention while approaching the challenge from opposite ends of the spectrum. One does it through a never-ending feed of 15-second pieces of video, the other through a never-ending feed of eight-hour pieces of video (give or take a few hours). Instagram Stories has taken out an enviable slice of our attention pie through the former strategy, too, and Quibi hopes to do it again. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and HBO and Amazon Prime Video and others have achieved certain degrees of the same through the latter strategy, where Disney+ also hopes to succeed. But they both share the guiding principle that they can either get all of your attention or none of it.
In Music Business Worldwide last month, Cherie Hu tracked this polarization away from the middle in music, where standard-length songs are increasingly seen as merely stepping stones for more lucrative shorter things like viral hooks or more lucrative longer things like biopics and documentaries and "visual albums."There's a huge zone in the middle that gets none of our attention. And that's exactly where Joker would have been had it not attached itself to a larger story (the imagined frustrated provocation of right-wing incels) and a larger universe of tired comic book heroes. Chu writes: "In this environment, 'middle-form' content does not become useless per se, so much as it becomes bait for more and more urgent questions about what’s next: 'Cool, but how is this going to go viral?' or 'Cool — but what’s the bigger story?' Today, those kinds of extremes hold most of our curiosity — and our money."Just provoking thought is not as much of a justification for the existence of entreatment as it once was. Which is why Todd Phillips famously shoved a Taxi Driver and King of Comedy homage through the studio system in the guise of a superhero movie.
It wouldn't have gotten made otherwise. Or at least it wouldn't have gotten noticed. The two extremes, binge-watching and binge-Storying, are one and the same, the zone in which each one of us now lives.
The shorter stuff
The fan base for Zack Snyder's unreleased cut of terrible superhero movie Justice League is very specific and surprisingly rabid: they pitched in for a Times Square billboard. (Twitter)
Tantalizing detail from the Times' coverage of the party following the premiere of new Timothee Chalamet Netflix movie The King: "The media covering the after-party at the Box nightclub on the Lower East Side received bizarre instructions: 'Netflix are requesting that you refrain from commenting on the cast’s activities.'" (NYT)
This video of a Chinese solo diner swiping through TikTok without touching his screen so he can eat crabs is wild. (Twitter)
I caught this episode of Beats 1 internet radio show Time Crisis with Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig and Justin Vernon from Bon Iver live while driving from Boston to New York over the weekend. It was a fucking blast just to tune into a radio show while it was being broadcasted. Then they dropped Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff" and Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" and you just really never treat yourself to those songs, do you? Never mind that the show was pre-recorded! (Pitchfork)
If you don't subscribe to the Financial Times you are missing out on ridiculously posh content like this insane interview with the editor of the Daily Mail who shrugs off his personal connections to Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell and the use of racial slurs by one of his columnists between bites of grey mullet. Also, the author semi-complains about "a man with an offensively orange fleece." (FT)
Jordan Peele secured a 9-figure deal from Universal. Extremely smart move by Universal. (IndieWire)
This art museum board scandal piece is filled with the good stuff like this: "Leonard Lauder, the cosmetics scion and the museum’s powerful chairman emeritus, phoned Mr. Griffin from a boat to coax him back." (NYT)
Peter Thiel has dinner parties where he requires that guests use “steel-man arguments versus straw-man arguments.” (Vanity Fair)
Instagram is getting rid of my favorite feature. (The Verge)
Because we just cannot get enough Trevor Noah. (THR)
Is this the first? Pitchfork kicked off something I've been dreading all year: the inevitable decade lists. I can't even remember what I listened to yesterday. (Pitchfork)
TNT and TBS have hilariously swapped one show twice before it's even gone on air. Woops! (Variety)
Someone known as "the Points Guy" has a built 100-person company behind him. (Digiday)
China's military parade was mesmerizing. (YouTube)
Will Smith announced his arrival on TikTok in cringe-worthy fashion. (TikTok)
Todd Rundgren dropped into NTS. (NTS)
Which is more embarrassingly on-the-nose, the Banksy painting or the sale price? (NYT)