Ep. 393: Can Movies Save Us From Our Phones?

Late last month, The Atlantic ran an article titled, The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films. I want to read you an excerpt from early in the article. This excerpt starts with a quote from a film professor. I used to think if homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever, Craig Epperling, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me, but students will not do it. I heard similar observations from 20 film studies professors around the country.

They told me that over the past decade and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Alright, so yeah, that's not great. But here's the thing. I think there is both bad news And good news here.

The bad news is, as I'll argue, this phenomenon reveals the impact of digital technology on our basic human ability to pay attention and think is perhaps worse than we originally imagined. But the good news is that in this problem, we can find its own solution. So as I'm going to go on to argue, getting better at watching movies might just be the right first step. toward reclaiming your brain. So here's the plan.

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