In a pandemic, Friends can take the place of our actual friends. Gossip Girl can take the place of actual gossip with your actual girlfriends. The Office can take the place of your office. Community can take the place of your college.
As an introvert, I don’t mind spending time alone, but for this duration of time to be completely alone has been a challenge. The background laughter of my favorite classic sitcoms have played loudly in my home while I cook and clean and do menial things. They offer me the reassuring illusion that I am safely around other people and in familiar territory. It’s the closest thing to a time machine I have been able to find.
But why?
I had to find out, and what I discovered is the psychological phenomenon of the “mere exposure effect.” It explains that not only are we more likely to re-expose ourselves to something that we like, over and over again, but that by re-exposing ourselves to it, we are more likely to like it even more, as a result of the repeated exposure.
But, what came before re-watching? Binge-watching. We’re still doing that, too, what with new content being fed to us practically daily by Netflix and the like. But research has found that binge watching (and re-watching what we have binge-watched) are correlated with viewers experiencing anxiety and depression. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, and the research was inconclusive as to whether anxiety and depression cause people to binge-watch and re-watch, or whether binge-watching and re-watching cause or exacerbate depression and anxiety.
Although the mere exposure effect serves to explain why we don’t bore of something we’ve seen a million times, and although there is clearly a strong relationship between anxiety, depression, and the screen, it does seem that our collective at-home viewing preference in general, and in particular during a pandemic, as well as how it pertains to the habit of re-watching leans heavily toward TV shows as opposed to film. I got to thinking about this, during the unusual off-time I have had not looking at a screen.
In a time when even the most neurotypical person is experiencing (maybe even for the first time) some degree of anxiety and depression as a result of our changed world, it seems our well-being or lack thereof is driving a collective social practice of TV consumption. Netflix has has added 25 million new subscribers (and counting) over the course of the pandemic; HBO Max launched May 27th, and hosts classics such as Friends, Sex and the City, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, all of which I have found myself re-watching.
The reason we tend to offer for not wanting to watch a film is that it is “so long” – this is, of course, ironic, because in actuality it’s much easier to spend hours upon hours binge-watching a show, rather than a couple on a film. But there is something about a film that does feel longer; that couple of hours feels like such a time commitment, when it’s really the equivalent of six episodes of The Office, or three of Gossip Girl. Therefore, it seems that our collective attitude toward preferring to watch a handful of episodes of a show over a film is not really about the time commitment, it’s about the experience of time within the narrative.
Therefore, it seems that our collective attitude toward preferring to watch a handful of episodes of a show over a film is not really about the time commitment, it’s about the experience of time within the narrative.
When I re-watch TV shows, it’s not just that I’ve seen the shows before, or that they belong to a different world than the one we experience today that is soothing. It’s not just the content and represented reality of these shows — a world with comparatively less sociopolitical stress and a world in which a mask is not as necessary as food and water — it’s not just that it’s familiar, it’s that it keeps going. I can wake up the next day of my life alone in my apartment, and there will be a next day on Friends, The Office, for nine or ten seasons. Films end.
Instead of getting lost in a world that will welcome us back to it tomorrow, a world that feels real, a world we can get lost in for hours upon hours — the Central Perk coffeehouse or the offices of Dunder Mifflin, Scranton — a film is not so friendly to us. The experience of the world we are invited to within a film begins, continues, and just as suddenly ends. If we were to sit down to watch a film, knowing that in the total time we spend with it we will come upon its ending relatively soon, knowing that the narrative that the film contains – unless of course, it’s a part of a series – will ultimately be over in a couple hours, this experience may have in fact the opposite effect of re-watching a TV series. We say that the “uncertainty” of these times is what gives us anxiety, but it’s not that — it’s the anticipation of some finality that we can’t predict, and anxiety around a final outcome is what makes someone watch and finish a film.
Think Hitchcock — the medium of film relies upon eliciting at least some anxiety in the form of suspense in its audience to keep it engaged for the entire (give or take) two hours. Certainly, TV shows create suspense as well, but the difference is that there is a less limited amount of time to tell the entire story. There is time in a TV show, in particular in a comedy, to give to ultimately unimportant character’s lines and moments — a film and its time constraints are not so generous to its writers. Every second counts.
Therefore, if we are re-watching TV series to calm our anxiety, especially in 2020, a year that inundates us in each of its days with new things to be anxious about, why on earth would we put ourselves through the intentionally-created emotional rollercoaster that is a film?
We say we don’t have time for a film, but it’s not the hours we’re talking about. We don’t have the emotional capacity to fall in love with and care for characters that won’t be around for the foreseeable future. I’ve seen more people in my age group get married in the last year than any year prior, including my older brother. Some of these distant friends from college I’ve seen tying the knot are the same people I saw hanging out at frat parties and casually dating just a few years ago. Perhaps some of them didn’t foresee themselves getting married at 24, 25, 26, but then again, we didn’t exactly foresee a global pandemic (well, maybe some of us did).
My age group is growing up fast, because we’re realizing that stability, having someone we can depend on to be there when we wake up is something we’ve underrated, and it’s what really counts when the rubber meets the road. A film doesn’t give us someone to wake up to in the morning, nor does Tinder. A TV show, a marriage, does.
A film has the potential to leave us high and dry. Its duration forces us to stick around to the end, but as opposed to a multi-season TV show, there is an end in immediate sight, and the end is going to leave us with a feeling, a strong one — one that we can’t predict. We will lose what we come to love in a matter of hours, rather than seasons.
The relationships we build with characters in a film are more challenging, more high-risk, because they’re not the friends or family or coworkers you can wake up to and interact with every day. They’re the ones that got away, that ended as they began. Those loves of your life who touch your soul, who you wanted to be with for longer, maybe forever, but couldn’t. You may never forget them, and you may not even be quite sure why.
Film is a self-contained, fully-articulated, fully independent form. Certainly, an individual’s, or a society’s perception of a film can change over time as our own narratives in real life progress, but the narrative of the world that the film exists in does not change.
We watch a film to be hit by a jolt of electricity that will leave us buzzing, telling our friends about this intense, immersive experience we had. We are often left pensive, introspective, changed in some way. We take a look at our lives and ask ourselves questions we may not have before.
We watch TV to dissociate, to melt time away, or to melt away into time, the couch, the void of “uncertainty.” Dissociation happens when we are too traumatized to cope. It’s our brain’s way of protecting us from our sadness, our anger, our depression (although often dissociation leads to depression). It’s a subconscious choice. It’s a survival mechanism.
If we are anxious, depressed, lonely, even the sound of Ross Geller shrieking “we were on a break” for the umpteenth time can be soothing.