If we're truly living in a snack culture, how come so many forms of entertainment - TV shows, games, movies - are getting longer? Most of us, I suspect, have had this experience lately: You tell a friend that they simply have to start watching one of the new long-format dramas, like Heroes or The Wire. There's no question of picking it up midseason. They've got to go back and start at the very beginning - using iTunes or BitTorrent or Netflix to catch up - or theyll be utterly confused. Invariably, your sales pitch also comes with the disclaimer that theyll have to watch four or five episodes before they really get hooked. Some of the most complex shows - like Deadwood or Lost - take multiple episodes just to introduce all the main characters.
Think about that: At roughly 45 minutes an episode, that means viewers will readily invest two to three hours in a show just to get oriented. The story itself can stretch on for dozens of hours. (The Sopranos, for instance, should top out at nearly 75 hours when it ends this spring.) Television has always had serial narratives, but aside from soap operas, each episode was traditionally designed to stand on its own. A midseason hour of Kojak made perfect sense in isolation. But youd need CliffsNotes to follow a midseason installment of 24 cold. (Shows as dense as Heroes or The Wire require CliffsNotes anyway.)
By comparison, film has started to feel like the short-attention-span medium. Compare your average Hollywood thriller to a season of 24, or JJ Abrams' Mission: Impossible III to his Alias. The cinematic versions seem lighter and more superficial than TV, precisely because they have less time to develop all their plot threads. As if to make up for this, movies are now getting longer as well. A few decades ago, the average film clocked in at about 90 minutes. Today, the typical feature is half an hour longer, and DVD director's cuts are longer yet. When Warren Beatty released Reds in 1981 with a running time of more than three hours, he included an intermission. Today, younger, larger crowds sit through King Kong and The Return of the King (both more than three hours) without a break.
The game industry, too, has advanced mightily from its 25-cents-a-pop roots in the arcades of the 1970s. Gears of War, this seasons hot title, was chided for its relatively short playing time of around 10 hours - though in multiplayer mode, of course, it can be played forever. (The success of the much shorter Wii Sports games is the exception that proves the rule - snacking on Wii tennis is refreshing precisely because the rest of gaming culture is so gluttonous.)
Even songs seem to be stretching out, now that the iPod playlist has replaced the three-minute mandate of Top 40 radio. The last few years have offered the most hospitable climate for pop epics since the prog-rock heyday of The Dark Side of the Moon: Critics darlings like Sufjan Stevens, the Decemberists, and Sigur Rós all regularly push the seven-minute mark.
Snack culture is an illusion. We have more of everything now, both shorter and longer: one-minute movies and 12-hour epics; instant-gratification Web games and Sid Meiers Civilization IV. Freed from the time restrictions of traditional media, we're developing a more nuanced awareness of the right length for different kinds of cultural experiences. You don't need an hour and a half of Saturday Night Live when you can get two minutes of "Lazy Sunday" or "Dick in a Box." For that kind of humor, the older, extended format turns out to be excessive. On the other hand, if you're craving a really satisfying, complex crime narrative, two hours is too short. Yes, it sometimes seems as if we're living off a cultural diet of blog posts and instant messages - until we find ourselves losing an entire weekend watching season three of The Wire. The truth is, we have more snacks now only because the menu itself has gotten longer.
Contributing editor Steven Johnson
(Sbj6668@Earthlink.Net) is the author most recently of The Ghost Map.Snack Attack!
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An Epic History of Snack Culture
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