We already know it’s true, but we really hear it when it’s coming from the mouths of our beautiful Boston Boys: Our phones have pureed our brains into such runny applesauce that we can’t even watch a dang movie anymore. Damon and Affleck are geezers now and there’s nothing wrong with that.
During a co-interview last week with his soulmate Ben Affleck on The Joe Rogan Experience, Matt Damon described conversations about storytelling with Netflix executives in which the executives said, “it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”
Don’t trick yourself into digesting this quote like it’s about some other yahoo and let yourself off the hook. He is talking about you, the person reading this, probably while half-watching The Rip, the Netflix movie Damon was promoting when he said it.
After all, the percentage of people who were on their phones while watching TV was as high as 94% according to a 2019 study, and 2019 means pre-Covid. There can be little doubt the pandemic finished the job and made the dual-screen experience the universal norm.
Netflix certainly knows this, and it’s front-of-mind for them when they manufacture their streaming entertainment products. Last year in an essay for N+1, Will Tavlin claimed that screenwriters who worked with Netflix told him basically the same thing—specifically that Netflix has a pattern of saying things like, “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” So Tavlin documented what it actually sounds like when a Netflix movie fulfills this corporate requirement. You end up with hilariously expository lines like this, from Irish Wish starring Lindsay Lohan: “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” Her love interest says later in that conversation: “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”
It feels like I could just jump into the movie right there, presumably at the start of the third act, and understand pretty much everything that’s at stake.
It’s edifying, then, to contrast this truth bomb about today’s smartphone decadence with Affleck’s vision of how much more attentive yokels like you and me were in the good old days of The Movies—viewed exclusively through his sepia-toned nostalgia goggles. In the Rogan interview Affleck claims that “Every American went to the movies every week, basically. But it was because it was that or watch the cows walk by.”
Affleck, whose fast-talking and wild gesticulations dominate much of the interview, is a bit introspective about his tendency toward nostalgia: “I always feel like complaining about it makes me feel like one of these guys that was like [slips into Jimmy Stewart voice] ‘when I was a boy, we didn’t used to have these phones. The fuck are all these phones? And everybody’s looking…”
To Damon, movies are “more like going to church.”
“You show up at an appointed time. It doesn’t wait for you. It’s versus the experience of watching at home, I think. You’re watching in a room, the lights are on, other shit’s going on, the kids are running around, the dogs are running around, whatever it is. It’s just a very different level of attention that you’re willing to or that you’re able to give to it.”
Speaking for myself, I hear Damon loud and clear. This weekend I’m crating my dog, hiring a sitter, and going to church. This will be the liturgy. Amen.
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