I recently stumbled upon LetterBoxd, a website where cinephiles rate films they have seen and write reviews for fellow movie-viewers to read. There is a section of the site called your “Watchlist,” where, as the name suggests, you list all of the films you would like to see.
During Thanksgiving dinner, I asked my grandparents, who have extensive knowledge of vintage movies, which films I should add to my Watchlist. They were overjoyed that a teenager was interested in watching films. They complained that the modern teenager does not have the attention span to appreciate the movies they loved during their youth. They nostalgically recounted watching 6-hour long movies they watched in two three-hour installments at New York University. “I watched about 180 movies that year,” my grandmother said, “And I remember every single one of them.”
A study conducted in 2000 showed that the average attention span of a teenager was 12 seconds. In 2016, this was tested again, and the number was lowered to 8 seconds, less than the attention span of a goldfish. The internet and social media keep us tied to our phones and the continuous stimulation lowers our ability to pay attention to movies that are 90 to 110 minutes long.
Social media entertains teenagers who scroll through an endless stream of mindless, 30-second-long TikTok videos. Instead of consuming infinite amounts of brain rot, we could redirect our attention to art we can view inside the comfort of our homes.
For many, watching movies is an escape from the real world. Movies use our visual and auditory senses to bring us to a cinematic universe. Beautiful cinematography and convincing performances with well-written scripts blend with musical scores and sound effects to create both realistic and surreal environments of upbeat comedies and heart-wrenching tragedies.
Watching movies also brings people together. Whether going on an outing to the theater or sitting on your couch, movies are entertainment meant to be enjoyed with friends and family. My grandparents play an endless game of collecting movie quotes and saying them to each other at appropriate moments. My main mode of communication with my Vermont-residing friend is reading the others’ movie reviews on LetterBoxd.
We should revive the dying art of watching movies and venture into the countless stunning worlds that film imagined for us.
