“Listen, it might not be an Oscar winner, but it’s one of those movies that you can enjoy if you just turn your brain off!” This refrain is one I have heard more and more in recent years, and as innocuous as it may seem on the surface, it haunts me. I mean, it’s in the term itself! Turn your brain off? What sort of way is that to engage with art? Now, obviously, supporters of these kinds of movies will say that it’s not that deep, and it’s just a tongue-in-cheek phrase. However, I’m here to say that it is that deep, and we should want more out of our art. In fact, this insistence that things are just surface-level with no deeper meaning behind them is part of the problem, but we will get to that.
Before going deeper into this topic, I want to preface by saying that Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is in my top five favorite movies of all time, and although the movie Twisters was not exactly spectacular, I was having a blast the entire time I watched it in theaters last summer. I’m no stranger to popcorn flicks, and I’m very open to goofy schlock. That being said, I worry that the “turn your brain off” ideology is not just a sign of our culture’s increasingly shrinking desire to engage deeply with art, but an enabler of it.
Many young people seem to value ironic detachment from the art they consume over any potential benefits they could gain from critically engaging with said art. One-sentence joke reviews abound on the movie review site Letterboxd. It’s “pretentious” to watch movies from before the 1980s or that are more than two and a half hours long. Actors don’t want to sit through them, and even presenters at the Oscars think they’re too good for one of the best movies of the 21st century. If these are the feelings of people actively involved in the arts industry, why would anyone outside of the industry want to put effort into trying to engage with movies and other forms of art? Art that is meticulously constructed with depth and important messaging is increasingly being pushed to the side in favor of mediocre art that we don’t need to “use our brains” in order to get everything out of on the first viewing.
Maybe the reason people seem so willing to accept mediocre art is because they aren’t even looking at it in the first place. A report from TV metrics company Nielsen found that 88 percent of adults "use a second digital device while watching TV." Pretty darn easy to prefer “turn your brain off” movies and shows if you aren’t using your full brain power while watching them. Netflix is fully aware of this, and has apparently told showrunners that the shows they are working on “aren’t second screen enough.” They’re basically telling artists to stop making interesting or compelling art because people won’t be able to keep up if they aren’t paying attention. It was bad enough when people were choosing on their own to “turn their brains off” while watching movies, but with the drive for second-screenability, movie studios are preventing anyone who still wants to use their brain from being able to experience art with intention and care behind it.
Related to the artistically bankrupt nature of movies designed for a second-screen environment, author Will Tavlin wrote an excellent article for N+1 Magazine about the painful mediocrity of most Netflix movies released today. He mentions how Netflix executives commonly tell creatives to have characters announce out loud what they are doing so that audiences who aren’t watching can still keep up. These movies are also almost all shot in very standard, boring ways with flat lighting, desaturated gray color palettes, and music that can only be described as existent. Obviously, this problem is not just limited to Netflix (Amazon MGM's Red One had a budget of $250 million, and boy can you not tell), but being one of the most prominent streaming platforms and movie studios, it’s hard to ignore their influence on the movie landscape.
The extent to which this drive for second-screenability compromises art and artistic vision cannot be overstated enough. If art is made purely with the goal of making for good background distraction, and in fact actively prevented from rising above such a level, art with anything interesting to say will become an increasingly rare commodity. I don’t want to watch movies that were designed not to be watched. I want to view art made by people who had something to say and who cared deeply about the product they were making, not art that is only good if you “turn your brain off” and refuse to engage critically with it.
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