Last night I watched Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith on DVD. (I was eight years old when the first Star Wars movie appeared in theaters, and for years thereafter a flashlight was never just a flashlight. So when I saw that mask go on Darth Vader last night, it was a kind of closure, albeit temporally inverted. It had to be seen.)
I though the first half was about as bad as any movie I’ve seen in a long time (which, granted, is a fairly small sample), and the second half was surprisingly decent. Rather than write yet another movie review, I’d like to consider why I thought this.
What struck me as most horrifically bad about the first half was the pacing. There was no set-up, no accumulating tension, no dramatic build towards set-piece conflicts. Words scrolling into space at the beginning — a Star Wars tradition — summarized the situation and conflict, dispensing with the need to actually build the story. Instead, we are dropped right into action that would be climactic for most movies. In essence, we join the story halfway through. (I’m not talking about what happened during Episodes I and II; significantly new stuff happened in those scrolling words.)
And once the movie began, it rushed on in a rather breathless fashion, a near-continuous assault of exotic sets, ferocious combat, and narrow escapes. For me, at least, life-and-death struggle isn’t very gripping when it’s the norm, the baseline, the standard. It needs to hover around as a possibility, gradually growing in menace and import, until it bursts forth.
(The second half of the movie spent a little more time doing this right, dwelling on Anakin’s psyche and turn to evil. We know something really bad is going to happen, but not how or when. Or what new action-figure merchandizing opportunities might be revealed.)
Did you catch those key words two paragraphs ago? “For me, at least…” That’s what kicked me into Think Twice mode. Was it a bad movie, or a good movie made for someone else?
For several years now I’ve been noticing that television programming for children and teens has been evolving. Segments are shorter, cuts between camera shots occur more rapidly, and the whole has a much more “in your face” effect: a frenetic flurry to grab and hold attention. I noticed it first in MTV music videos, and later in advertisements and regular television programming. It’s elsewhere, too: billboards, print media, commercial establishments, videogames.
And I’ve been wondering what the effects are on young people’s cognitive habits and attention spans. The obvious hypothesis is that kids raised in an environment of sensory blitz will be (a) better at filtering out unwanted stimulus, and (b) easily bored in stimulus-lean situations.
I think it’s safe to say that most physics classes are stimulus-lean situations, at least when compared to music videos and first-person shooter videogames. Is anyone surprised we have trouble holding students’ attention? Maybe Revenge of the Sith isn’t so bad after all, if you’re in the right demographic. But it’s probably bad news for teachers.
And that raises some very interesting questions that I don’t have answers to. How can we adapt instruction to optimize it for students who are very very good at scanning and filtering massive sensory assault, but very very bad at pondering and cogitating? Should we even try, or should we stand our ground and try like heck to help them develop the mental muscles for pondering and cogitating?
