It got me thinking that Michael Douglas was right when recently he said that the long form TV series like Games of Thrones, the Borgias, Wired and so on were the future of film.
Their publishers said the same to Dickens and Trollope …”look Charlie just write an 800 page cliff hanger with lots of characters and weave a really complex plot. Just remember big is beautiful”
.
After a week in which they held the smallest penis competition in Scotland – I’m serious – and EF Schumacher the economist who wrote “Small is Beautiful” was on my mind, this may seem a bit of a surprise.
After all our attention spans are reducing…aren’t they?
We’ve got 20:20 in cricket, speed dating, speed interviewing, snacking and in Pecha Kucha the 7 minute presentation (20 slides, 20 seconds each) which is designed to be twice as good as TED speeches which last twice as long.
So short is good. We’re all obsessed it would seem by the “quickie”. When I got sent a 25 minute YouTube piece I found myself feeling my time was being stolen. ..”where do I find a spare 25 minutes?”
When I read anything now I think “get to the point PD James, stop prevaricating.” Given this logic the greatest crime novel title would be “The Butler Did It”.
But the return to the Aga-slow-cooked plot where the complexities and weakness of human behaviour get played out and twists and turns happen with tantalising unexpectedness, is not a sign of a fashion change. The appetite for good stories just never went away. Ask JK Rowling, ask Ken Follett, just as we asked Dostoevsky or Wagner….well… imagine the abbreviated Ring Cycle. No actually now I think about it, speed Wagner should be mandatory.
The reason the Reduced Shakespeare Company is so funny, apart from brilliant performance and scripting, is that it’s mad. Hamlet in 30 seconds is a hoot. Whilst performed over three hours it’s harrowing. Probably even the Petra Kucha (or 20:20 version) of World War II would be pretty funny too.
Only comedy works in the short form - hence PG Wodehouse. In our noir world you need time to eat, digest and discover.
Me? I’m now off to create “Mad Men Noir”. It’s long. It’s brutal. It’s going to be terribly depressing. It’ll involve heavy drinking, the serial killing of competitors and the most complicated marketing plan ever.
As to whether these blogs are too short read next week’s effort which will be 800 pages of unremitting misery all in black and white.
www.colourfulthinkers.com
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3 comments:
you seem to miss a simple truism 'quality not quantity'.
i would take a three line poem about leaves by basho over the rambled, rhyming tedium that is the wasteland, then i would take crime and punsihment over all of the short 'crime' stories in the world. yes dostoyevsky wrote long books as he had to pay off gambling debts (which he generally had to flee) but every page of his books are wonderful and deserve to be there.
proust could ramble on for three pages about how one holds one's nose at 45 degrees monday-sat and then 46 on sunday and how the outlook of life is changed thusly, then he can say one line, one paragraph and one is on the floor in a pesudo-orgasmic spasm.
quality is all that matters. 'classics' mean 'chosen' maybe euripides wrote 10,000 plays but only the best became 'classics' (were chosen). quality always comes through. maybe 10 billion people have written plays since euripides but how many are left?
'i love those who yearn for the impossible' goethe
amen
ben
Slowly I Married her - Leonard Cohen
Slowly I married her
slowly and bitterly married her love
Married her body,
in boredom and joy
Slowly I came to her
slow and resentfully came to her bed
Came to her table in hunger and habit
came to be fed
Slowly I married her
sanctioned by none
with nobody’s blessings, in nobody’s name
amid general warnings, amid general scorn
Came to her fragrance, my nostrils wide
Came to her greed with seed for a child
Years in the coming and years in retreat
Slowly I married her
slowly I kneeled
And now we are wounded so deep and so well
that no one can hurt us except Death itself
And all through Death’s dream I move with her lips
The dream is a night but eternal the kiss
And slowly I come to her
slowly we shed the clothes of our doubting
and slowly we wed
leonard cohen
slowly...
You've fallen into your own trap! ;)
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