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It’s All Too Much – An Epiphany

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I had an epiphany as I gasped my way up the mountain behind my house this morning, maybe due to hypoxia or the 33 degree heat. I was listening to an audiobook, as I usually do to try and mask the horror of exercise, and for the hundredth time I thought “Great book, but it’s a third too long”. It seems every book I read is a third too long. Every movie I watch is a third too long. Every Netflix series is a third too long. It’s like the writers feel compelled to add in yet another plot kink that needs to be resolved, right when I’ve had my fill and would be quite happy to wrap things up.

Extended to music it still holds up: the vast majority of albums would be better if they were sub 30 minutes, many of the songs more potent without that extra chorus. I loved the Flaming Lips gig the other week because it was the first time in years where I wasn’t looking at my watch two thirds of the way through, the exception that proves the rule.

What they all share is a certain arbitrariness about their form. LPs were that length for reasons of physical form and classical movements, the typical 80-100,000 novel probably reached its form due to limitations in early binding and printing. For movies it’s probably to do with the length of typical theatre performances, or maybe the manageable number of film reels. But now we are normalised to these lengths and as an audience we have expectations of ‘value’.

Not sure if my new hypothesis extends further: would paintings be better if they were a third smaller? Maybe. People in Western countries would certainly be healthier if meals were a third smaller. Perhaps we’re living a third longer than would be optimal.

So there it is: due to a stack of arbitrary factors we are habituated to our entertainment being a third longer than would be ideal. Or has my attention span and tolerance for fluff just fallen off a cliff as I’ve got older? Answers on the back of a shrunken postcard.

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  1. I broadly agree. We wanted to see The Brutalist at the cinema but at three and a half hours long I’ll wait for it to be on Netflix as I can’t face sitting for that long. We did see Oppenheimer but that was at a newer cinema with better seats and we barely made it to the end. CDs were a curse for bands not culling inferior material and most 10 part series could easily be 6 episodes.

      • Even with the intermission the Brutalist is at least an hour too long. We found the second half endless. If it had ended an hour before we’d have liked it a lot, as it is we were both pretty irritated when we left the cinema and it’s that final hour of fidgeting and yawning that has stayed with me.

        A Real Pain on the other hand is a wonderfully concise 90 mins and we loved it.

  2. Yes your attention span has probably diminished. We are all serged ip truncated, abbreviated, bite sized grabs of everything.
    Just recently quite a few on here said they don’t listen to albums anymore preferring playlists or the frisson of what the algorithm comes up with.

  3. Something on Q.I. recently suggested attention spans are not shrinking, but there are so many more pulls in modern life that we barely go 30 seconds without an advert/distraction.

  4. For many years I used to argue that the vast majority of novels were too long and could have benefited from some judicious editing. The position was a consequence of falling in love with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a student; so densely packed with ideas and just a shade over 100 pages – such efficiency. Why couldn’t others learn from that example?

    Shortly before Covid I decided it was only fair to put my stupid ideas to the test, so I spent a year reading only long novels. Inevitably, I discovered that I’d been talking absolute nonsense; there was not a page of The Count Of Monte Cristo, War & Peace, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina et al that I’d have done without.

    Something in the length of those books adds to their splendour – not everything needs to be a brisk and efficient shower, sometimes it’s nice to lie and soak in the tub for a while. Particularly when the tub is as warm and inviting as those particular novels. Even Infinite Jest, a book of which I cannot hand on heart say that not a single page could be spared, works partly because of its length and not in spite of it.

    Life increasingly encourages us to parcel out our attentions in bite sized chunks, to always see efficiency and to minimise. Doing the opposite isn’t inherently virtuous by any means, but it’s certainly nice to retain both options.

    All of that said, I do think a lot of movies these days have third act problems, and the tendency of TV series to fall apart in the final third is a big part of why I’ve largely stopped watching them. Too much high concept stuff without a proper payoff at the end, and the risk of spending ten hours plus of your life on something only to discover it was never actually going anywhere feels too great at this stage.

    • Point taken, although I think we apply different mental rules to a lot of old classics and judge them by criteria more to do with passing a test, or completing a cultural quest.

      I have long championed the short story or novella as an ideal length to introduce and resolve a plot. When I read modern novels they very much seem to be short stories with a bunch of extra bloat and a ‘clever’ plot twist too many. The juice is rarely worth the squeeze. It’s a rare plot that can support 100,000 words.

      • You’ve just articulated, more or less word for word, my views before I went through the exercise described above. So I fully get it.

        I’m trying to think of how to better explain what changed for me. I think you’ve put your finger on it with the comment about plot – previously I’ve always been more of a plot person; first and foremost I wanted to be told a story. And you’re right, most stories can be comfortably told in 150 pages.

        But reading those longer books kind of flipped that for me. When you’re getting up to 800 pages plus you have to accept it won’t all be twists and turns, and that the author isn’t just being inefficient, that this was a deliberate choice. Sure, I can tell you what happens to Anna Karenina in about four paragraphs. But to get a sense of her life, and particularly her inner life, you have to read the whole thing. And it’s so beautifully written that doing so is just total pleasure anyway – I didn’t want it to end.

        I also don’t agree that reading these books is about passing a test, or at least it shouldn’t be. Sometimes you might start out reading a classic novel because you want to say you’ve done so – you want to stuff it and mount it on the library wall with all your other trophies. But invariably you discover along the way that there’s a reason people have kept going back to these books over time, that they really are masterpieces (many of them, anyway).

        I can comfortably say that War and Peace is the best novel I’ve ever read. I cannot understand how Tolstoy was not only able to put you so completely in the shoes of characters from whom you are so temporally and geographically displaced, but also able to jump at will from one human heart to the next, and then weave all of it into the grand sweep of history. If anything that book is too short.

        • The duration of any novel is clearly no measure of its merits, but there’s a unique pleasure to be say, 100 pages into a tome that you’re enjoying immensely & knowing you have at least another 700 to go.
          I love a ‘meaty’ read partly for the sheer pleasure of being immersed in the author’s world for a good week or two – or sometimes even longer.
          Neal Stephenson is a modern great deliverer of epic yarns, having clocked up several around the 900 page mark & his aptly titled Baroque Trilogy totals over 3000 IIRC. I can honestly say it’s a contender for my most enjoyable ever read, without being anywhere near the ‘best’. That type of fun just can’t be produced in a tight 200 pages. Sometimes more really is more.

          • Yeah, I agree. Neal Stephenson is an excellent shout – several of his books contain huge amounts of detail that might considered extraneous to the functioning of the plot, but which add to the world-building and sense of place. It’s the difference between a day trip to a foreign country and spending some time actually living there.

        • If I want plot, I’ll watch TV. I go to novels for character, language, the slow cook. (Incidentally this is often true of really good TV too: The Wire doesn’t have a plot, and the season which does is comfortably the worst.) This is also why – to hop genres – people who say of Shakespeare “but he stole or adapted all his plots so he can’t be THAT good” are missing the point: yes he did, and it doesn’t matter at all.

          • The Wire is the TV equivalent of some of these novels. You could probably tell those stories in a fraction of the allotted time, and the show would be about a tenth as good as it is if you actually attempted to do so.

            • The Wire has been likened by some to Dickens – it initially focuses on the lives of a very select group of folk, doing what they do & then ‘pulls back’ its scope thus illuminating how they are tiny parts of a much bigger system.
              The Sopranos on the other hand, is Shakespearean in that we follow the travails of one man, who despite being a ‘warlord’ of sorts is plagued by doubts, can’t keep his kids in line & has ‘mother issues’ & a whole lot more besides.
              I think there’s something in those takes on both programmes.

    • I recently re-watched the third/final series of ‘Detectorists’ – I’d say the quality was there in every series but they probably stopped at the right moment (with one special 3-4 years after the third series).

  6. Many a short album can be too long. I can think of certain Beatles albums where they didn’t seem to have enough top class material. Then there’s the case of The White Album, the argument for culling. But now you can get the album size that’s right for you with streaming. It’s a fair judgement regarding CDs though. Those that came after the LP era, where 80 minutes are possible. I found with certain albums that I never quite got to know the later tracks properly. It was just too much of one artist in one go.

    • Double vinyl albums are perfect for dipping in, play just one of the LPs or even just a side. Playing an 80 minute CD from start to finish is different.

      And the White Album is fine as it is for me. It’s the diversity that makes it

      • That’s the one advantage playing vinyl has over playing from the CD.
        The record is split into two sections on vinyl.
        You don’t have to play side two after side one (or vice-versa) if you don’t want to or don’t feel like it.
        With the CD version, the whole thing is continuous and it’s all too easy to play more of it than you would if you had to get up and flip a vinyl copy over.

        • That becomes a disadvantage when listening to classical recordings and live albums when uninterrupted playback is preferable. For all other recordings one can just press STOP if it all becomes too overwhelming.

          • Agreed the CD is just great for those big classical works.
            Not for ALL live albums, I’d say. I can think of a few gigs I’ve been at where an intermission would have been appreciated.

  7. Besides the invention of the CD leading to longer albums, with some dubious results, it also gave us the curse of the “bonus track”. These tend either to be crap or to include songs that are already on the album, but just in a slightly different take. It is one of the crassest marketing tricks in the music industry: “Look how much you get for your money!”

    Technology gives us new possibilities, but, as I like to say: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

    • I 100% agree with this. I hate it when albums come to their ‘proper’ end… and then carry on with alternative versions or bonus tracks. Here’s two examples that spring to mind. My CD version of Love’s Forever Changes reaches a climax with the magnificent You Set the Scene and then it goes straight into a different version of Alone Again Or. The same thing happens with my CD of Caravan’s In the Land of Grey and Pink, this time with some non-essential bonus track kicking off.

      I am not decrying the inclusion of bonus tracks, but for nerds like me, please just put them on another CD. Even for new releases, I will always buy the shorter version if available. Just imagine a re-released version of Sgt Pepper finishing with the long fade out of A Day in the Life and then there’s a country hoe-down instrumental or something.

      • The blu-ray in the Pepper box tacked Strawberry Fields Forever & Penny Lane on the end. I’m not sure it improved things.

        The first round of Costello expanded CDs had a 20 or 30 second gap between the end of the album and the start of the bonus tracks.

      • I have moaned before about the lovely vinyl reissue of Carole King’s “Tapestry” which ends with the magnificent “You make me feel (like a natural woman)” with its sublime ending. Except that some prat thought it would be a good idea for the vinyl reissue to tack an unremarkable live version of “Smackwater Jack” on after it. Unbelievable vandelism on an album otherwise perfect, and being vinyl you can’t even stop it without sprinting across the room or grabbing the remote, either of which rather spoils the mood.

      • Or put a minute of silence in-between. My extended CD copy of FC goes straight into some studio chatter before (the magnificent) Your Mind And We Belong Together which I suppose someone thought would be interesting after You Set The Scene

        • Bonus tracks on ‘new’ albums… yep… I’ve no doubt, a waste of space.

          Meanwhile, The Byrds’ ‘reissues’ (see also: The Monkees, and as cited above, Love) are enhanced considerably by bonus tracks.
          ‘The Day Walk’, ‘Triad’, ‘Lady Friend’, ‘She Don’t Care About Time’, ‘I Know My Rider’, ‘Psychodrama City’, ‘It Happens Each Day’ etc.

          It’s their best material.

          Frankly, when I dig out The Kinks’ ‘Something Else’ CD (my fave Kinks’ LP) I still tend to go straight for the As and Bs at the end of it.

          • Yep, the Byrds bonus tracks make you wonder why the original albums picked the tracks they did. That whole reissue series nailed it, and everyone tried to copy it – except they didn’t have the same level of good stuff in the can.

            • One of the reasons was they were jealous of Gene Clark’s writing skills and didn’t want him getting more royalties than everybody else

  8. I’d have to ponder the ‘third less’ notion – I suspect you’re right in many cases but I suspect you’re going too far in others.

    Freeman Wills Crofts (a terrific if semi-forgotten ‘golden age’ British crime novelist) wrote his first book, ‘The Cask’, while convalescing from a long medical inconvenience. It was a hit and he soon became a full-time writer. In a later reprint of ‘The Cask’ he wrote an introduction stating that he wrote a chunk of it because he had an incorrect idea of how long a novel ‘should be’ – had he known he’d have cut out episodes X, Y, Z. Later books were more concise – though as he became known as ‘the master of the humdrum mystery’, some would suggest they were no less tedious! Personally, I love his plodding, mesmerising style as alibis are chipped away over dogged investigations.

    I’ve been working on two vinyl projects recently – one a new album by my pal Paul Archer (his first vinyl album in a 30 year recording career), the other a first-time release on vinyl of a ‘lost’ Duffy Power with Argent LP that had been planned for release on CBS in 1971. Both projects are with the splendid US label Think Like A Key.

    With the Archer album, the vinyl length really focused minds. For a start, the songs when being recorded had no flab or lengthy play-outs. Paul had recorded maybe 18 tracks and sought my help to select and sequence from that. I treated the LP sides as reflecting two sides to his music – one was rock / declamatory, the other was mellower / reflective. So in a way it was two sequences/selections. I came up with 6 on Side A and 6 on Side B and happily, Paul was delighted with the flow of each. There will be a CD/download version of the album and Paul selected 2 bonus tracks from the remaining pool – and he chose well in my view. No one told him it had to be 2 rather than 6 or more, but self-limiting it to 2 was a good call. It’ll be out in September.

    For the Duffy/Argent set, the producers (Chris White & Rod Argent) always wanted to see their original LP sequence out on vinyl – whatever happened with the rest of the sessions (spanning 1970-71, with lots of different songs and alternative versions will full-band accompaniment plus some solo demos). The original LP-as-conceived was quite short – about 35 minutes – so with Chris/Rod’s approval a new mix in ‘single edit’ form of a track that had been left off it (indeed, that was never mixed at the time) has been added as a clearly marked ‘bonus track’. In the 2CD version, that vinyl offering is replicated on CD1 with around 78 minutes of amazing outtakes, alts and new mixes on CD2.

  9. I agree about the length of films although, along the lines of music playlists, a long movie on the streaming services can be broken into smaller segments (i.e. interrupted at any point and then resumed later). I watched Babylon on Netflix the other day and it was a brilliant movie dragged down by its length – just over three hours. A third of the film could have been cut quite easily without any of the highpoints being lost.

    • My son suggested we watch a South Korean film at the cinema a few years ago, we thought the film had concluded at one point it went on for another half hour and added nothing.
      There’s a few films I’ve seen where they must have filmed scenes and then decided well we’ve filmed them let’s not waste them, more’s the pity.

  10. As well as the bonus track issue on CDs, there was also the curse of the ‘hidden’ track which was all the rage at one point. The excellent Jarvis Coocker album had a hidden track which appeared after nearly half an hour of silence.

  12. Yes, I saw the duration of ‘The Brutalist’ and thought ‘Nah’.
    ‘A Real Pain’ is 90 minutes, ‘September 5’ is 95, now we’re talking, and although ‘A Compete Unknown’ is terrific, 140 minutes could have been trimmed down to 110, even 100, quite painlessly.

    My favourite author is Muriel Spark for this very reason. 120 pages? Cheers Muriel, you’re a pal.
    I rarely listen to an album that exceeds 40 minutes. ‘Smile’ (48 minutes) is one exception.
    Even individual songs. If Paul can wrap up the saga of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in two minutes, eight seconds… folks we have a template.

  13. The length of an album only really becomes an issue if the material on it isn’t good enough, and I guess the same is true of anything really, be it a film or whatever. On single artist albums, 70 mins can be great for, say, a ‘Best of’, and multi artist comps are great, but the number of single artist albums outside of compilations that work over that length are very few and far between.

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