Camden Rose on late nights, deadlines, and London’s new favourite billionaire film
Flew a kite in the park at dawn because that’s apparently what I do now, some new personal ritual that started as a joke and has become weirdly essential to my mornings, then went straight to a club until far too late, then straight to a library, in that order, which is not a schedule I’d recommend to anyone. Somewhere in between, half of London messaged me about a documentary I still haven’t watched.
Caught up on it properly this morning with the breakdown of the four-hour Musk documentary, which is a lot to process on three hours of sleep and a history essay deadline looming over my head like a personal thundercloud. Turns out a billionaire can hold an audience’s attention longer than most DJs I know, and considerably longer than most of my essay drafts, which rarely survive past the second paragraph before I abandon them for something more interesting.
What actually got me thinking, once the caffeine kicked in, was the comparison between the documentary’s structure and the way a good club night builds. You don’t peak in the first twenty minutes, you build, you circle back to the same energy over and over until the crowd’s fully committed, and apparently this film does something similar, just with moral outrage instead of a bassline. Four hours of the same emotional beat, repeated and reinforced, until the audience is fully in it. That’s not filmmaking, that’s just a very long, very political set.
There’s also a whole visual war happening around the release. The satirical look at the Musk movie posters had better production values than half the flyers at the club last night, which, to be fair, is a low bar, because most of those flyers were photocopied at 2am by someone who’d clearly given up caring about typography hours earlier.
My essay, for the record, is still not finished, and I’ve now spent more time reading about a billionaire’s documentary than I have on the actual assigned reading, which says something uncomfortable about modern attention spans, mine specifically. Kite’s still up there somewhere, probably, unless someone’s cut it down for scrap by now.
Whatever’s left of my sleep schedule will probably not recover before the essay deadline, but at least I’ve got a strong opening line about attention spans now, courtesy of a documentary I still haven’t actually watched myself, only read extensively about, which feels like its own kind of modern research method.
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