Psycho. #8

Caspar finds a way out of decision paralysis.

How do you decide what film to watch?

Typing that out feels a little silly but it’s something that occupies too much of my headspace. I tend to prioritise things that have been recommended to me by trusted sources (Animus, for example) but often feel anxiety from the dizziness of freedom when essentially faced with the entire history of cinema at the click of a button.

Hey there pal — you have my sympathy. We’ve all known what it’s like to sit in front of the great entertainment unit, wanting to watch something, hoping to feel SOMETHING light us up from within, and to then scroll aimlessly, past: a classic movie you’re not in the mood for, a bad movie, a bad movie, a bad movie, a possibly good movie what’s its score on Rotten Tomatoes again, a TV series, a terrible movie, I don’t fancy something with Dakota Johnson in it tonight, maybe try MUBI instead? 

Thus can a whole hour pass; by now you’re eliminating films that are over the two-hour mark; maybe it’s just two episodes of a TV show in fact?; there’s that Agnès Varda film you wanted to watch, but not on a Friday!!? 

Bruce Springsteen wrote about this phenomenon, very directly, in his song “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)”, on his disappointing album Human Touch (1992), which was a regular on long car journeys in my childhood. “I bought a bourgeois house in the Hollywood Hills,” sings the Boss, “With a truckload of hundred thousand dollar bills/Man came by to hook up my cable TV/We settled in for the night, my baby and me/We switched round and round till half-past dawn/There was fifty-seven channels and nothin' on.”