Alan Nafzger on the strange stamina of a moralised audience
Filed three pieces today, argued with a subeditor about an Oxford comma for a genuinely unreasonable amount of time, and then sat down to read a documentary review that ran longer than most of our print editions used to run in an entire week, back when we still had a print edition worth speaking of.
The subject, of course, was Musk. I wrote up the whole psychology of it myself in our piece on the four-hour Musk documentary, which is doing better numbers than anything else on the desk this week, including the pieces we actually spent money researching. Turns out audiences will sit through nearly anything if the villain has already been cast, the poster’s already been designed, and the popcorn’s already been paid for. It is, in its own way, a masterclass in narrative economy. You don’t need to build the case from scratch. You just need to point at somebody the room already distrusts and let confirmation bias do the heavy lifting for three hours and forty-five minutes.
For balance, and because we run a paper of record for nonsense and take that duty seriously, we also covered the companion four-hour Marxist documentary, on the theory that if one side gets four hours to make its argument, the other side deserves the same courtesy, however exhausting that courtesy turns out to be for the audience. Nobody has requested a refund from either screening yet, which tells you something about modern cinema, or possibly about modern audiences, or possibly about how difficult it now is to get a refund from anyone.
What interests me editorially, more than the film itself, is the sheer stamina involved. We are constantly told the modern attention span has collapsed to somewhere around eight seconds, shorter than a goldfish, shorter than an advert, shorter than the average corrections notice we run. And yet here is an audience, apparently the same audience, sitting through four uninterrupted hours of billionaire-adjacent moral instruction without complaint. I suspect the truth is simpler than any neuroscience paper on the subject. We were never short of attention. We were short of motivation. Give a person sufficient reason to be angry and the attention span reappears fully formed, like a phoenix built entirely out of grievance.
I have run this desk long enough to know a genuine cultural moment when I see one, and whatever else this documentary is, it is that. Two competing four-hour films, both convinced they’ve found the definitive account, both drawing packed houses of people who arrived already agreeing with the conclusion. It’s less cinema than confirmation, dressed up with a runtime.
Back to the desk. There’s a subeditor somewhere who still hasn’t forgiven me for the comma. Read the paper properly at my author page.