Time Is a Bitch: On Cinematic Snore Core
Some recent films that try to bore us for the greater good
Immediately after we had gobbled our Thanksgiving dinner a couple of weeks ago, my spouse, sister, and I piled onto the couch to watch a movie and wait for pie room to open up. After some light haggling, we settled on Janet Planet, a 2023 film written and directed by playwright Annie Baker. From the moment the movie opened on a painfully long shot of a young girl running across a dark field toward a dimly lit cabin in the distance—any viewer over the age of 35 will instantly recognize a scene from summer camp—the three of us were frantic to place the exact year of the film. The campers exchange Troll dolls—it must be the 1970s!1 A song playing on a car radio was Sound-Hounded and identified—it’s 1984! One of us noticed that the young protagonist is sporting a T-shirt with 1986 written on it! Finally, the camera lingers on a New Yorker cover Scotch-taped to a bedroom wall: it’s definitively 1991, and we can all relax.
Why we were all so anxious to determine the exact year the movie takes place? And why would the filmmaker choose such a nothingburger of a summer? It’s no longer the 80s, which have a certain nostalgic cachet thanks to Stranger Things; it’s the butt-end of the boring-ass presidency of George Bush Père; the Soviet Union has not yet officially collapsed; Nirvana’s Nevermind won’t be released until September. It turns out the answer to both questions is the same: nothing happens. The film attempts to capture the experience of being an 11-year-old daughter of a single mom in rural Massachusetts with no friends and nothing to do. Time hangs heavy. Scott and Lori and I were nervously chattering and looking up dates on our phones during the long, long scenes of silent nothingness because they felt nearly intolerable. (One memorable moment that made me laugh out loud: a real-time close-up of a dinner being microwaved. Apparently it takes a full 30 seconds, utilizing 1991 microwave technology, to defrost two small cheese blintzes.2) The dappled light streaming through upheld fingers, the deafening bullfrogs and crickets in the long grass outside an open window, the sheer lying around—it’s all exquisite and evocative and dreamy. But as viewers—even as Gen X viewers who lived through it all the first time around—we could no longer handle all that nothing.
That said, as soon as it became obvious what the film was trying to do—forcibly slow us down and rivet our attention on minutiae, compelling us to remember a vanished way of being in the world—I insisted that we stop talking.3 I wanted to hear the long silences. (At one point I shushed my sister, she protested “But there’s no dialogue right now,” and I rolled my eyes at her.) The story, if one can call it that, is slight, but it builds slowly and inexorably through all those scenes of boredom. Lacy’s mother (the eponmyous Janet Planet, played by Julianne Nicholson) is a luminously freckled, oddly charismatic single mom who mesmerizes everyone with whom she comes into contact. The film is divided into three episodes dedicated to three different people who are pulled into Janet’s orbit and then unceremoniously spun off again. In a key scene Janet sadly intones, “I’ve always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.” It’s a poignant and affecting moment—until one is struck by the inappropriateness of a mother making such a confession to the pre-pubescent daughter lying next to her in bed in the middle of the night. (Perhaps the reason Lacy lies around so much is that she’s simply exhausted from listening to her mother’s late-night disclosures.)
We witness all of these ephemeral adult relationships through the eyes of the lonely Lacy, to whom friendship—let alone intense interpersonal connection—remains mysterious and elusive. She has all that time on her hands because she has no one to spend it with but her mother, and each new person who enters Janet’s life thus turns the loneliness screws a little tighter. The expansive, stretchy time of the film underscores Lacy’s slow torture at the hands of the well-meaning Janet and whichever new friend is hanging around the house. There are simply no distractions—unless you count a homemade shoebox theater with cobbled-together miniature puppets that Lacy plays with in her room for hours. (Watching her pull the little velvet curtains closed as she lies on her stomach in front of the “stage” constitutes the narrative high point of the film.)
As I watched the movie unfurl, I was reminded of a couple of other recent films that similarly attempt to capture the experience of sweet summery boredom: Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), starring a gorgeously twinky Timothée Chalamet, and this year’s unfairly, terribly titled My Old Ass, ostensibly featuring Aubrey Plaza but really dominated by the luminous young Canadian actress Maisy Stella.
Call it cinematic “snore core”: these films (and I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting or haven’t seen) all revel in a nostalgic and borderline sentimental depiction of teenage ennui. (They are the counterweight to the ubiquitous, actually boring Marvel universe fare of glitzy violence, two-dimensional relationships, and hackneyed plot lines.) Snore core films don’t have to be literally set in the past—Call Me By Your Name takes place in 1983, temperamentally and technologically in the same decade as Janet Planet, but My Old Ass is set firmly in the present and its plot relies heavily on the use of smartphones. That said, the latter achieves a retro feel through its time travel device (the film’s, and our, present is the quaintly sleepy past in relation to Aubrey Plaza’s future perspective) and by setting its action in rural Ontario on a cranberry farm. I mean, come on. Ontario.
It struck me, as it so often does of late, that the particular experience of time these films depict is simply gone. None of us—not even children—lies around bored any more, staring out the window or at the pattern in the carpet or at the light seeping through our fingers. And we all know why. We certainly spend plenty of time bored (at least I do), scrolling and clicking and sighing. But that sticky, lugubrious sensation of sun-dappled lassitude is no longer the standard experience of a middle-class North American childhood summer.
I want to tentatively suggest that the cinematic mini-trend I have noticed here is the expression of a genuine sense of loss. Earlier commentators on boredom tended to interpret its depredations in very different ways. The Victorian adventure writer Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, saw it is a side effect of a too-comfortable bourgeois existence that was in danger of leading to social degeneration. In the 1887 essay ‘‘The Day After To-morrow,’’ he writes:
Our race has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitudes but one of health; and there he yawns.
For psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, writing over 100 years later in an essay entitled “On Being Bored,” boredom—particularly for children and teenagers—is experienced as a state of waiting for desire: “the bored child quickly becomes preoccupied by his lack of preoccupation”; “the bored child is absorbed by his lack of absorption”; in boredom there are “two impossible options: there is something I desire, and there is nothing I desire.” The century separating Stevenson and Phillips domesticates boredom, turns it into a normalizing rite of passage rather than a sign of societal breakdown. And the couple of decades that separate Phillips’s essay from the present further burnish the reputation of boredom—because we can no longer experience it the same way, it is fully ripe for romanticization and longing.
And yet as the three of us watched Janet Planet last month, and I enforced the no-talking rule, and the tryptophan molecules unspooled themselves in our brains, and we sank deeper and deeper into the couch, we started to recapture that feeling just a little bit. The movie was sort of boring4 and we were sort of bored, and yet we stopped reaching for our phones or talking or squirming away from the sensation of lazy inertia. The long-forgotten feeling of ennui was paradoxically riveting. It clearly lay dormant within us and yet we were still able to access it, like the remnants of our childhood chicken pox cases sleeping in our nerves and waiting to rage forth as shingles in old age.
What do you do if there is no memory of this feeling inside of you? A few months ago a student stopped by my office hours “just to chat.” (This almost never happens any more.) She was an English major eager to talk about ways we could help students get to know one another through in-person group activities, and mentioned in passing that she doesn’t use social media. I nodded approvingly, and that seemed to embolden her to go on.
“Actually, I don’t really like texting or interacting with my friends on screens at all,” she sighed wistfully. “I really wish people would just pick up the phone and call each other.” She paused and looked me up and down. “Like it must have been when you were young.”
Since I clearly had a captive audience, I indulged in a short round of “What Things Were Like When I Was Your Age,” complete with a brief excursus on “Running Around In the Woods After School and No One Knew Where We Were.” She stared openly at me as if I was an anchorite mystic returned from the grave.
“Wow,” she breathed. “I am really jealous. I so, so wish I could have grown up like that.”
About half an hour from the end of the movie, when it became clear that we were all falling asleep, we decided to stop and finish watching it later. We wanted to savor it. Scott went upstairs for more pie, and my sister and I pulled our afghans up under our chins and started reminiscing about our experience of time when we were growing up. The conversation hit all the usual beats: playing kickball with the neighborhood kids after school; the shared household phone, incredible to contemplate (remember having to politely chat with your friends’ parents when they picked up?); three channels of TV to choose from. But then Lori, who lives in Asheville, started talking about her experience after Hurricane Helene had torn through Western North Carolina. The third day without electricity, cell service, or internet, she was sitting in her apartment reading a book in the waning afternoon light. Her Kindle had died, and it was too hard to read by candlelight, so she knew she had only a little while longer to read—and hours before bedtime. She felt the boredom waiting for her like a watchful cat about to spring. It took three days for it to arrive, but when it finally did, it was relentless and familiar and all-consuming and salvific.
I am so glad that we grew up like that.
I was the one who insisted on this Troll dating methodology, and I was completely wrong.
I assume that it actually takes longer. The fact that 30 seconds felt so long, and that the filmmaker couldn’t bring herself to push it past this point, further confirms my thesis.
This is actually my usual rule during movies and TV shows, but we had watched a Lindsay Lohan Christmas vehicle earlier in the day and it had forced us to slip into bad habits.
I loved it.
Great piece!
I haven't seen any of the films, but I love the essay.