Readingground Blogazine

by Charlie Bass

A couple weekends ago, like a gazillion other people, I purchased my ticket to Watchmen. I was eager to see it (despite having not read it—I know, blasphemy!), but was dismayed that my ticket indicated the movie would be close to three hours. The length itself didn’t bother me, as I like plenty of long movies; rather, I had no faith the people behind the movie would be able to consistently and successfully pace those three hours.

Of course, it turns out I was right—despite some really great moments, there are a number of places where the movie sags, where it gets dull, feels lifeless, essentially stops moving. Despite their best efforts, the filmmakers were not able to keep the movie afloat—an admittedly difficult task with material that incorporates such wild shifts in tone, mood, and even genre. It’s an ambitious, messy movie, and like so much these days, less a coherent film than a collection of occasionally great scenes.

The single best sequence in Watchmen, wherein we learn the backstory of the Dr. Manhattan character, offers a combination of rhythm, grace and economy the rest of the film sorely lacks. It’s like a brilliant little miniature movie unto itself, a tragic love story with touches of dread and humor, history and pop culture—a microcosm of what everyone says about Watchmen. But beyond these elements, it’s the way this sequence moves, not just in how it cuts together but in the timing of the actual scenes themselves (especially in a movie so often flat-footed), that makes it stand out. It is, in short, masterfully paced.

Pacing is a central concern of every temporally-based work of art: a movie, book, song, album, concert, TV show, TV series, performance piece, installation, play, video game—all of them need to consider how to properly manage their time with us. Holding and sustaining a person’s interest is a tricky thing to manage, and has become even more so in a world oversaturated with choice. Now more than ever, pacing is key, for we are quickly bored and move on.

Obviously, length is an important thing to consider, especially in regards to the chosen medium. The longer the work of art, the more central pacing becomes to it. We understand movies can be up to roughly three and a half hours if properly paced—anything beyond this basically becomes about time and endurance. Films like Bela Tarr’s nearly 7 hour Satantango, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 (14 hours) or Warhol’s Empire are notoriously focused on film time as real time—and film people generally talk about them as experiences, not movies. In some sense, these films, in breaking away from our expectations, become an entirely different art form.

How have we arrived at these expectations of length for a movie, and the proper pacing that length requires? Before D.W. Griffith made the three-hour The Birth of a Nation in 1915, most movies up until that point had been well under two hours (generally closer to one hour). The success of that film helped permanently adjust the expectations of the medium’s length, due in no small part to the exceptional pacing that allowed audiences to make this adjustment.

Every medium has an expected length and an appropriate pacing that’s solidified, then adjusted and readjusted over time, due to a variety of factors. The above example reflects three major contributors: genre, technology, and presentation. The Birth of A Nation essentially created a new genre, the epic film, and in turn, we now expect films that fall under this genre to push the three-hour length mark. In building up to this major work, Griffith was involved in the creation of new technologies that helped make such a long film with so many scenes even possible. Finally, the presentation of films in the silent era had moved beyond the early sidewalk displays to full-fledged theaters capable of holding large audiences, all watching the movie together at one time in one place.

The Birth of A Nation is a serious-minded, if obscenely racist, epic movie. For movies, books, TV, and plays, you generally have to be dramatic (or at least serious) to be long. There’s a good reason there are no hour long sitcoms. Brevity is the soul of wit so epic comedies are doomed to failure. Beyond comedy, we don’t expect a Western to move super fast from scene to scene; the genre asks for a bit of a mosey and filmmakers oblige; but apply this same pacing to an episode of Law & Order and people change the channel. Genre indicates certain preconceptions, the rules at play we come to expect, and those very preconceptions in turn determine the laws of pacing.

This applies to music as well—to even imagine a three minute symphony or a two and a half hour Beatles song just seems completely bizarre. Rock and roll, in particular, is a music genre with expectations that continue to be shaped and reshaped by technology and modes of presentation. For example, I will listen to a song up to ten minutes long on my iPod, but am most likely to skip over it, even if I love it—maybe it’s the size of the device and my knowledge of the compression involved, but I’m always expecting a song on my iPod to be three minutes long. But at home on my stereo, or especially at a concert, I’m willing to let things play longer.

Concerts are a good example of how genre and presentation affect pacing in a live performance situation. Jam bands like Phish and The Grateful Dead were technically rock bands, but in their improvisational approach to playing live are, as has been endlessly noted, much closer to jazz. Pacing in jazz or a jam band is vastly different from pacing in a three minute pop song—they are the epic movies of music, also hearkening back to the various movements of symphonies. Not that I have the patience for them…

Television is, like music, undergoing changes very influenced by technology and shifts in presentation. Traditionally, the pacing of television shows has been built upon the fact that commercials inherently disrupt pacing. Thus, this is built-in to the pacing structure, as with what can be termed the pre-commercial head-fake (his heart stopped! —commercial for detergent—he’s gonna live!). Nonetheless, DVR and the web are currently changing this approach—or at least how we manage the expectations associated with this tradition. Like a lot of people these days, I don’t really watch live TV (outside of occasional sporting events), so I skip through commercials with the DVR. Alternately, TV shows on DVD has made me more affectionate towards shows that are less tolerable when seen week-to-week. 24 has become famous for this—once-a-week it’s okay, but back-to-back DVD marathons of it are like crack.

Watching stuff on the web is ever-changing, but it does seem to be still mostly following the pop-song/music video 3 minute rule for the moment. Most people I know cannot sit still in front of You Tube for a video more than five minutes long; again, this is mostly due to the genre of home movies (notoriously not well-paced) that makes up such a large part of the content. Presentation is part of it, but the evolving technology of both You Tube (HD features, widescreen offerings) and computers (resolution, processor speed, increased bandwidth, etc.) is quickly changing all this.

I commented a few paragraphs ago that every medium has an expected length and an appropriate pacing, but I was being narrow-minded. What I meant to write was that every experience has an expected length and an appropriate pacing. What I’ve been discussing in regards to the arts really applies to almost every aspect of human interaction—pacing is central to all of it. Take a conversation, where someone is telling a story but they keep digressing too much, and it goes on and on. This kills the rhythm we expect from good conversation, as does an awkward pause (justly named). Ideally, most conversations would be like one in a more meaningful screwball comedy, where the wit is sure and the timing spot-on.

A great screwball comedy is fundamentally sexy—is it because, beyond the rapid-fire wit, it expresses the need for sex to also be properly paced? Because great sex is something else that requires proper pacing. I don’t know you well enough to elaborate here, but if you’re not at least trying to get the pacing right, amongst a whole host of other things, I feel sorry for you.

Finally, there’s food: I was recently at a restaurant and saw my salad being brought to my table with the entrée right behind it. I sighed in anguish, until I saw the two different waiters carrying them make eye contact. My entrees went back before hitting my table, thus avoiding a disastrous grievance against the rules of dinner pacing. Everyone agrees that a meal, like a song or a movie, should be properly paced. The best meals, the best sex, the best movies, always are.