Movies are boring, say film students

Thelma and Louise do not live happily ever after.

Isn't it great when Thelma and Louise pass the bar exam and start a new life? And didn't you love it when Dorothy decides to ditch Kansas, marry the Tin Man and settle in Oz?

Film students don't have the attention span to sit through a feature-length movie, reports Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. They can't focus for that long, film professors say.

More than half the students in a University of Wisconsin-Madison film class flunked a multiple-choice question asking what happens at the end of the Truffaut classic Jules and Jim, Professor Jeff Smith told Horowitch. They guessed that the characters hid from the Nazis (in Paris in the early 1930's) or perhaps got drunk with Ernest Hemingway. Those who saw the movie would know that Catherine kills herself and Jim by driving into the Seine. (FYI, there is no happing ending toThelma and Louise either.)

If students watch screenings in a campus theater, they look at their phones, say professors. If they're allowed to stream movies on their own time, they don't.

Craig Erpelding, now a UW Madison professor, worked until 2024 at Indiana University, where professors could track the campus’s internal streaming platform. Fewer than half would start the movie, and only about 20 percent would make it to the end, he told Horowitch.

It's become impossible to find a movie to discuss that everyone in class has seen, says Erpelding. Even would-be filmmakers aren't movie watchers. “Nowadays, they’re people that consume the same thing everyone else consumes, which is social media.”

A Cornell professor says the only movies her students have in common are Disney films.

As teenagers, today's college students "spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next," Horowitch writes. An analysis found people working on computers now "switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004."

Netflix tells filmmakers to put action sequences in the first five minutes of a film, Matt Damon said on The Joe Rogan Experience. Characters repeat the plot several times to help viewers who aren't paying attention because they're on their phones.

Some professors are fighting back, writes Horowitch. At Johns Hopkins, Kyle Stine is trying to get students watch “slow cinema” — "minimalist films with almost no narrative thrust"— to lengthen their attention spans.

Others are selecting shorter movies. In his filmmaking courses, Erpelding "now asks students to make three- or four-minute films, similar to the social-media edits they see online." That's what young people are watching.

Years ago, in my newspaper days, our film critic told me he was teaching a film class at a local university. Students were indignant when he assigned reading and quizzed them on it. They thought they should be able to pass by watching movies. But, at least, they were willing to watch the movies.