Latest / The Imperfect Impulse w/Bree O'Connor / S 3 Ep 13: Two Hours of My Life I’ll Never Get Back

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S 3 Ep 13: Two Hours of My Life I’ll Never Get Back · The Imperfect Impulse w/Bree O'Connor

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Imperfect Impulse with Bree O'Connor.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, I'm your host, Bree O'Connor.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: This week,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm eager to dig into something I've been thinking about for a long time,
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: and that is how do we change our attitude and Toward Consuming Art.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't just mean that we feel entitled to it or
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: that it should be fully accessible or should be inaccessible
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: or whatever those attitudes are.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: What I really want to tackle is how we consume art.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to point to the ubiquitousness of a single-phrase review that was kind
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: of clever the first time I heard it,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: but the subsequent five billion times I've heard it have been less so.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that one-sentence review is, Well, there's two hours of my life I'm never gonna get back.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's fairly cynical.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: While it rather succinctly expresses frustration
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: with whatever it was you just consumed,
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: and it's pretty clear that you didn't like it,
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: what bothers me about it is the assumption that that two hours was a waste
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: of your time.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm here to argue that there is no use of time that is a waste of time.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Would you have preferred to have done something that maybe felt good?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Would I like to spend my time in an MRI machine or at the dentist's office?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: No, but those weren't wastes of time.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Those were times of necessary discovery and mental upkeep, physical upkeep, all of that.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to argue that any encounter with art is not a waste of time.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And here are a few tips designed to help you find meaning and worth in things
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: that you didn't particularly enjoy.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: First off is to remember the artist or artists behind any piece
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: of work Are human beings trying to communicate something?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whether they are skillful or clever or funny is secondary to the fact
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: that this piece of work was made by somebody who wanted to communicate a message.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if we look at it from that perspective and perhaps try to be friendly
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: with said artist or artist's And what they may have seen in the endeavor,
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: well, that softens your perspective a little bit.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's much easier to tell some faceless nobody who's not even a real person
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: that their expression is not worth your time.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they're rich or privileged or what have you, so therefore they are a waste of my time.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you start to think about them as a real living person who has thoughts,
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: experiences,
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: and feelings of their own,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: it becomes a little harder to tell that person that they were a waste of your time.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the first question that I like to ask myself when I encounter a piece of work
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: that I didn't particularly care for Is it the execution of the communication or
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: the communication itself that I object to?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Let's drill down on this a little deeper.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to name the particular playwrights that tend to get my back up,
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: but there are a few and they hold a worldview that I find personally objectionable.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what tends to happen in the work of these particular playwrights
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: That I don't know personally, but I'm familiar with their work.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is that they present this snarky world view that people are inherently shit
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: and they will do shitty things and they are garbage and let's watch garbage talk
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: for two hours and do terrible things to each other for two hours.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: While I don't enjoy that worldview or mindset,
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: I can separate the fact that I don't like that general worldview from whether
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: or not they were absolutely skillful at representing that worldview.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: I can have a very visceral reaction to something and not like it,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: but admit that the artist themselves has
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: If that core message or ideology
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: that I object to is skillfully rendered,
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: then I need to ask, okay,
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: what is it in my experience that gives me such a violent pushback to this worldview?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: In this particular instance or instances,
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: I find that I have very little that I can take away from such narratives where
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: the people are terrible and they will do terrible things and we just have to sit
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: and wallow in that terribleness without any other insight.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that makes me feel absolutely helpless.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: It makes me feel indicted in some way.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: If the people that I'm watching Now,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: that is slightly different from the point of view available
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: in something like Succession, which I did enjoy.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: What I found engaging and interesting and skillful in the telling of that story is
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: that each character,
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: as horrible as they were,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: and they were comically horrible because,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: my lord,
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: you just can't imagine that they'd go any lower,
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: was that every once in a while you'd get a glimpse of humanity,
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: you'd get a glimpse of this hurt,
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Afraid, vulnerable human being behind the nasty behavior and you'd feel for them.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean there are whole episodes where you absolutely feel for people you despise and
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: as soon as you start to root for them they pull the rug out from underneath you
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: and go like oh look at them doing terrible things again and That's
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: an emotional rollercoaster that I can get behind because it also provides me with
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: a little bit of hope,
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: even though it systematically dashes all that hope within the next 20 minutes.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: But there's at least some sense
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: that there could be some redeemable person underneath all of that.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's just they're not likely to be redeemed.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very different message.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And also they do it for comedic effect.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Dark comedic effect.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think you're going to get a ton of guffaws.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to get a lot of uncomfortable laughter.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that's a worthwhile journey.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's an example of what happens if I ask myself that initial question
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: whether or not it is the message or the execution of
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: the message that's bothering me.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, sometimes it is the execution.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can step back and say, wow, that was incomprehensible.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: The narrative was a complete mess.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: There were too many monologues.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like I already knew where the narrative was going long before it ever arrived there.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many technical things that you can easily figure out for yourself where
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: the message got destroyed by the execution.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: In which case,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: you can learn something about the artist themselves,
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: where they might be in their development as an artist,
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: and Maybe if you are inclined yourself,
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: you can spend some time figuring out, well, where would I make cuts or improvements?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: What would have improved my experience with that?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: I recognize that not everybody takes joy in that particular process,
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: but as a process geek,
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: I could do that for hours and hours and hours and be perfectly happy.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're not
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: What you can do is think about where your execution and message,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: what are times where you were not as skillful as you would have liked to be.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Were there any of those habits that you saw in that particular piece of art
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: that you can identify with as a human being?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are all communicators,
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: whether we are self-identified as artists or not, we all have to communicate.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's a lot to be learned in messages that were not skillfully communicated.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's also a lot to learn in messages that are completely cockeyed.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about it in an earlier episode, but we did talk about The Room.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what makes that movie charming in its inexpertness is its absolute earnestness
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: and almost alien misunderstanding of human behavior.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: The whole film misses how human beings actually behave.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's useful to recognize.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now we get into the more complex problem of where there is a mix of the two.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I think that if you loved the message but didn't like the execution,
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: that's probably a way more positive
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: experience than if you hated both the
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: The execution and the message.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you loved the execution but hated the message, there's going to be another experience.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that a lot of art kind of sits in those two realms where you have
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: to really pull apart what it is that you objected to.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what is the point of this exercise?
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like a lot of work, right?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I hear my 15-year-old Sighing in my head.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds like a lot of work.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: But the truth is that's what we go to art for.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: We go to art for work.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you are being passively spoon-fed art,
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: the chances of that art being forgettable are pretty high.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to have a better experience when we are invited into the art and find
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: the work of understanding it challenging, joyful, or growth-oriented in some way.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of times when we find work that is really challenging,
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: really chewy,
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: and we really have to put forth a lot of effort to Understanding it or
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: to understanding the artist behind it.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: It may put us through our paces and sometimes we'll turn away from that kind of work.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm going to challenge you to really lean into it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And here is where I think we come to the fundamental problem with assuming
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: that this kind of work is a waste of time.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: To me,
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: that cynical expression of an experience of art is indicative of a time period
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: where we cannot manage our own discomfort or navigate messages that conflict
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: with our own worldview,
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: in which case we will shut it down or refuse to engage with it
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: because it asks too much of us.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: This lack of intrepidness I think is supported by social media and supported
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: by pop psychology which often if you dig deeper than the kind of psychology
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: that you get on TikTok you will find that that's not really the message
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: that psychology is trying to bring to us and yet we use it as a wall to shut us off
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: from The wider world or from other human beings.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is the source of our loneliness.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the source of our sense of insecurity,
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: our sense of lack of mastery, our sense of fear for the advancing world around us.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore,
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think that our inability to engage with art or to look at it as a waste of time is
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: the canary in the coal mine.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: It may not on its own be the worst thing in the world,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: but I think coupled with our inability to navigate personal relationships
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: or difficult conversations or even basic civility is all signified by our inability
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: to engage with art, to think deeply about how other people experience the world.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now that sounds to a lot of people like zero fun whatsoever,
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: but I promise you that if you jump into something that is complicated
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: and emotionally,
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: for lack of a better word, chewy,
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: something that really makes you work at it before you can digest it,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Our brains really like that.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're built to figure that out,
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: to find joy in connection or in figuring it out,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: in learning something about ourselves or someone else that we didn't know before.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: But if we cynically push back at the intrusion of someone else's experience,
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: then I think we are already lost.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: So this is where I would like us to ban.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, maybe not ban,
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: because like I said before,
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: there's two hours of my life I'm never going to get back.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was originally pretty clever and kind of funny,
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: but its overuse is indicative of a larger problem that I think is prevalent
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: in American society, and we should do better.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: We should do better.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do I think art will solve all the problems?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not that.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: I am a true believer, but I'm not a fool.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think if it's a place where we can work on that skill set,
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a place where we can challenge ourselves.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: But we have to develop a community that encourages it, that aspires to it.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And right now, we aspire to shutting down.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: We aspire to smaller, more cynical enclaves that don't let in any outsiders.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a problem.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I invite you to spread the gospel and go see something without being convinced.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Go see something without knowing more than your friend wants to go.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Just go experience it, I promise you.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're not going to die.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: And those two hours or 90 minutes or 15 minutes are not going to be wasted as long
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: as you choose to truly engage.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing that's a waste is saying no.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: There you have it.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Those are my thoughts this week.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Get out there.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Engage a little bit.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Give yourself some questions.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Talk with people afterwards and enjoy getting to know somebody else.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for me this week.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: I will talk to you next week on The Imperfect Impulse.
• 17:57
  [music]