Except for a brief period in the late ’90s when I worked at People magazine’s West L.A office, I’ve been working alone in front of a screen for the better part of 30 years. It’s not the screens, of course, but the writing that matters — the devotional discipline that keeps me sane and opens “the doors” from time to time.
And yet the idea of doing little else but staring at screens for the rest of my time on this planet is haunting, to put it mildly. For the better part of 25 years I did a lot of travelling (i.e., mostly film festivals), but that constant sense of renewal and adventure came to a screeching halt when the pandemic hit 17 months ago. Throughout most of ’20 and the first half of ’21 I’ve been feeling the ennui, you bet.
Before Millennial-Zoomer publicists and marketers decided to destroy HE’s column revenue I could work from anywhere in the world — all I needed were my two laptops, iPhone, charging cords and decent wifi access. Nice gig while it lasted. Nowadays I feel like the Count of Monte Cristo, thinking of little else but escape.
Most people are professionally tied down to one thing or another as a rule, and of course they became double tied down when the pandemic killed human life as we all knew it. So it’s not surprising that with things starting to ease up (despite the unfortunate decision by millions of idiot sociopaths to ignore the vaccine and give the Delta variant a leg up), people are looking to live their lives with a little less in the way of screens, streaming, Zooming, home theatres, etc.
Deadline‘s Michael Cieply, posted earlier today: “Maybe, as a group, we are suffering as a culture from ‘screen fatigue’ — we’re tired of Zoom calls, event television, etc. We are really tired of looking at ourselves on media screens, large and small.
“This was happening before Covid. The secular decline in viewers for the Academy Awards program is my own favorite yardstick for the growing ennui. Even before the lockdowns, the Oscar audience was off 57 percent from its peak. It had fallen in stages, from 55.25 million viewers in 1998 (when Titanic was Best Picture) to less than half that number (when Parasite won) last year.”
HE interjection: Last April’s Steven Soderbergh Oscar show was easily the most calamitous Oscar telecast since ceremonies began to be broadcast in the early ’50s. It sucked the life out of everything and everybody, and all but smothered the 90-year-old lore of this annual industry ritual.
Cieply: “Sure, the virus hurt. But it only hastened what was happening anyway — a very human reaction to the confinement of life on screens. People were getting itchy. They wanted to eat. Breathe. Climb rocks. Fall in love. Have babies. Walk the dog.”
