MONOLOGUE 005: to indulge in art is to waste time.
Who gets to experience time as an infinite resource?
I recently watched a YouTube video titled “Beautifully Boring: A Look At Films Where ‘Nothing Really Happens’.” by one of my favourite YouTubers, Pompous Unhelpful Nit (a charming name, really.) The video is twenty-eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds long and throughout the video, me and my sister stop four times to discuss our thoughts about the video topic at hand. Need I remind you that as humans, we can only ever regurgitate already expressed ideas through our understanding, so discuss might be a hefty word to use.
Anyways, in the video, there are two main subsections:
Exploring social class in ‘Nothing Really Happens’ Films
Wonderfully Mundane: Routine and Repetition
Within these subsections, more and more unruly layers of human psychology are broken down into bite-sized accessible bits, and I leave the whole experience feeling reformed. And by reformed I mean, I simply just proved their point.
The video essay focuses mainly on how these ideas are presented through film (hence, the title) but it had my fast little brain clawing for further similarities. There had to be something, right? Under the vessel of media is a layer of societal truth so where exactly would that truth take me?
Now, if you haven’t caught on to the irony of this yet, I’m expressing a sense of wonder that the video essay explored;
Who the fuck has the time to think about this shit?
I watched this video after setting an alarm for work the next day. My sleeping schedule is fucked, and therefore I didn’t have thirty minutes to ponder on the ins and outs of finite time when my own was glaring at me in a bright, white, 82pt bold typeface.
But I watched it. I paid attention throughout the entire video essay, and when it was done, I spent more time thinking about it. When I woke up the next morning, it was the first thing I saw when opening my laptop screen.
The video essay states that art makes us feel better about ourselves, and I can’t help but relate it to my manipulation of time again. When I was freelancing in 2020 I wasn’t really freelancing. I spent copious amounts of hours reading articles and stalking design studios and websites that I liked. It filled me with this indescribable sense of inspiration that continued pushing me to ‘freelance’ until the reality of not having money struck. The balance between spending hours researching and spending hours working for money is a fine line that the creative industry has yet to truly tackle. In the video essay, they say that Capitalism had formed a guilty pleasure out of inspiring yourself. Spending time and money on leisure is only allowed in bite-sized pieces, and relaxing too much results in time wasted.
Time has taught us to be impatient. We’re all creatures of habit, and human nature draws us back to the quickest way of indulging in our fantasies.
I love Nothing Really Happens films. A sequence of events that happen to people. There’s barely a plot or a narrative purpose, it is simply people existing. Some would consider it time wasted watching a film like that. Others would call it ‘catharsis for the routinely redundant.‘
There’s a certain joy in watching people do nothing. By nothing, I’m referring to the mundane. watching a film, reading a book, sharing a meal with someone, going on a walk. If you look closely these are all moments in which time ceases to exist. It’s because leisure does not require a time stamp. We have become so preconceived to the notion that everything must be timed, and everything must fit, but in all its irony, a routine ruins time.
As I begin to pick apart this ideal, I - like the rest of the world - am starting to find ways to place myself at the centre of time. Where I can stop everything else in my life to think about something as inconsequential as a film.
There are two ways to understand the concept of time: as a luxury, and as happenstance. Time is a happenstance because it acts as a mediator in our lives. It helps us track the minutiae of everyday life so that we can continue to live without total and utter insanity (although I’d say we’re very close to that point.) but in this routine, comes repression. Time is a luxury because to say that you “have time” for something is to say that it is on your side. Time favours you. So the question is then: who does time favour?
Enter: Capitalism
To break up the day, life must occur. Work, hobbies, relationships, getting your fill of other lives to influence your own. In doing this we’ve naturally become creatures of doing. Whether you believe that we’re not built to work or we’re all lazy, somewhere in those belief systems is Adam Smith’s very own Capitalism.
In pursuit of profit, the amount of time we have to enjoy the arts is considered futile by most. What joy is there in reading if you can’t eat? Cracked walls present problems that can’t be taped over. It needs to be gutted and replaced.
There’s too much nuance in dismantling and rebuilding so I’ll leave it at this; the joy of art is subjective. But if you believe that art presents nothing to the enhancement of human nature, you’d be mistaken. We are artistic creatures by nature. Science is art. Faith is art. Despite your belief, time will find you in a place of understanding, both in art and in yourself.