I finished watching Gilmore Girls for the first time a few months ago. I dragged out finishing A Year in the Life because Rory’s plotline was so awful (I could write a whole separate post about how Amy Sherman-Palladino holds some central belief about women not being able to both be happy in romantic love and their careers). Last week, I decided to start it again from the beginning. I am also currently rewatching Community with my husband, because I don’t have AC and I’m nostalgic for the week before classes started my senior year of college when our AC was broken and my roommates and I huddled around the TV and a fan and binged the show. With all the shows and movies out there, I sometimes feel guilty when I rewatch something because it means that I am missing out on something else, i.e. I’m paying the opportunity cost of watching something I’ve already seen.
Six years ago I spent a week visiting a convent in the Bronx. I wasn’t considering joining or anything; it was a service opportunity/“mission trip” with other women my age. I remember one of the women on the trip was explaining Spotify to the sisters. However you feel about Catholicism, if you have ever spent time around people in religious life, you know that they are some of the most at peace, joyful, well-adjusted people you will meet. One of the sisters considered the idea of Spotify for a moment, and then thoughtfully said “It just seems so overwhelming. How do you spend time listening to an album and really get to know it?” I could really just end the essay here. She’s right. It is overwhelming.
Amusing Ourselves to Death came out in 1985, and many have hailed it as a prophetic vision of our Huxleyan modern life, beholden to the boob tube (or, an atrocity Neil Postman couldn’t have predicted — Instagram Reels). I tend to think that everyone believes they live in the worst time in history and always has, regardless of medical advances and iPhones automatically filling in one-time codes and then deleting the text message afterwards, so I find the book on the whole to be a tad pearl-clutchy. This is my general feeling about pining for a “simpler time”: we are already here so it seems pointless to wish we had somehow been born at another time. Nonetheless, I think Postman gets a lot of things spot-on. Namely, the observation that the nascent Internet age has made it so that we are always absorbing WAY more information than previously in evolutionary history. This change has occurred so quickly that we have not had the time to adapt, and suffer for it. He points out that historically, the only information that was relevant to you was that of your locality. If it wasn’t happening within your community, it could not directly affect you and therefore it would not take up much of your brain-space. And as Kate Berlant says frequently on the Poog podcast, “we all become more and more disembodied each day,” we are now in a position of taking in news and information from all over the world. To reiterate, this does not automatically mean the world is worse, just different.
There was recently some Twitter chatter over a person who said that they had muted all mentions of “Israel”, “Palestine”, “Gaza”, and “genocide” to protect their peace and they were immediately eviscerated over it. I have complicated feelings about that. On the one hand, I don’t think we can bury our heads in the sand and avoid thinking about uncomfortable topics and horrors happening across the world, committing the bystander effect en masse. We should care about other people, and the Internet gives us the democratic power to connect with victims of genocide and natural disasters to do so. However, I think compassion fatigue is very real. And to Postman’s point, for most of human history we would not have even known about these conflicts in the intimate, visceral way we do now. We should still care, but also have compassion with ourselves that our brains have limitations on how much new information we can intake. The same is true of content we consume for fun. I could go on a behavioral psychology sidebar about the intermittent reinforcement of a “good Twitter day” and “bottomless bowl”1 scrolling that keeps us coming back, but the point is not that we should desist from social media and news completely. We are, irrevocably, a part of the Internet Age. So when you’re home sick from work, it’s probably fine to have a 12hr screen time report for the day. What is important is to know how to regulate when we are feeling overwhelmed by discourse.
If you’re Gen Z or a Zillennial, your VHS and DVD collection growing up was probably extensive — I can’t speak to Millennials, sorry. The movie my siblings rewatched the most was National Treasure (we are still pretty big dorks) and had no qualms about doing so. But obviously the multiple streaming platforms we have for movies, music, and TV shows has changed how we consume media because there is always something we haven’t seen before. I love watching the same show everyone else is watching (I will be sat on June 9th for HOTD) because I enjoy talking about it with people in real life, but there is literally always a new show people are watching, 365 days a year. I waited 6 weeks for Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire to come in the mail from Netflix, and I watched it twice in the few days I was allowed to keep it. People had box sets of The Office and The Sopranos, a significant investment that would require multiple rewatches to be worth it. I don’t have the storage for a DVD collection now and I love my fancy frame TV to death — but I think with the glut of well-produced movies and shows accessible to us now there is that pressure to watch as much as possible.
I’m sure there are those out there who, conservatively estimating, have seen their favorite shows 5 times and their favorite movies upwards of 20 times, and are naive to the social pressure I’m describing. Therapy language of the day dictates that rewatching shows is a “trauma response” or a behavior unique to the anxiety-ridden among us. This was a popular narrative during the pandemic, and one could argue that it makes sense as a counterbalance for the Amusing Ourselves to Death position — since we are anxious about global events over which we have no control, we watch New Girl for the umpteenth time like it’s some kind of binky. I don’t even think we need to go that far for an explanation here, because I think the connotation verges on “these damn snowflake kids and their comfort shows”. It’s just not a new phenomenon! We have souls, and it is good for our souls to interact with and grow more intimate with art. Usually, this requires multiple passes to know something well. We buy prints of the painting we liked at the museum so every time we pass it in our house, we can notice something new about it. When I read The Hunger Games as a tween, what I cared most about was the love triangle. As an adult, the social injustices of Panem, the societal parallels, and the acute difficulty a 16 year old has navigating the optics of a PR relationship stand out to me the most. I learn something new every time I read Jane Eyre. I have never really listened to Lana before but I think Norman Fucking Rockwell has a solid chance of a top spot in my Spotify Wrapped this year! Even Substack can create pressure to constantly reading new pieces and interact with them to boost our own pages, at the price of information overload. Generally, I think creating and reading more long-form content is better for our brains, and I like that it takes me as long to read someone’s essay as it does to watch a 5 minute TikTok.
So… I don’t know… go watch something again and make your soul happy! I’d be interested to know how you feel about how much bad news & fun stuff we can/should be taking in.
Great argument! Bojack is my binky show to watch though ☺️