To Finish, or Not to Finish

I have experienced something new—turning off a Pixar movie halfway through.  My wife and I tried watching Turning Red recently, but only made it to the halfway point before looking at each other and deciding we were wasting our time.  This is a first for me.  Pixar has been a stalwart ally for many years, with not a flop to their name.  Granted, the critic reviews (which I had to check after to see if they validated my opinion) were glowing overall (dang it), but it didn’t work for me.  That gives me two trains of thought: why didn’t this one land, and what drives us to finish a piece of media or not?

First, take what I say with a huge grain of salt.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I forgo the right to critique the movie as the director intended it to be since I did not watch the whole thing.  Maybe it turns around in the second half and makes up for the nail on a chalkboard level of obnoxiousness in the first half.  I doubt it, but maybe.  What I can say, however, is that artists must tread a fine line on giving their characters flaws.  Too little and the audience doesn’t see satisfying character development, too much and the audience dislikes them so much that any development doesn’t matter. 

That latter issue is where the main character suffered.  Every time she opened her mouth, I hated her just a little bit more.  I could see the story’s destination and her arc, but by that point it didn’t matter—even if she became a non-obnoxious person by the end (doubtful), I was never going to forgive her for making my teeth grind earlier on.  Her friends further exasperated that—two-dimensional caricatures who with their every action created some dark alchemical formula to drive me into a completely unjustified rage.  Again, maybe they developed into something more by the end of the movie.  Also again, I hated them enough halfway through that it no longer mattered.  As my wife noted to me later, my face throughout the part we watched said, “Please, take me out back and kill me now.”

Now that I, a grown adult, have spent far too much time wailing and gnashing my teeth over a children’s movie, I want to explore why electing to leave media unfinished interests me.  This is leaving aside turning something off for inappropriate content.  I view that as a separate issue compared to continuing off an assessment of quality; morality based instead of off taste preferences. 

I am relatively new to the maturity levels it takes to give up on a story partway through.  For the bulk of my life, I have been of the opinion that if I started a book/movie/game/etc, I was honor bound to finish it.  Many an abysmal story passed through my eyes and ears because of this, and I shudder to think of the hours wasted hate-reading/viewing something I did not want to continue.  That, I think, is where the interesting bit lies.

All of life is an equation that filters down to a simple number—24.  We each of us have exactly 24 hours in a day to do what we will, no more, no less.  As Arnold Bennett wrote over a century ago, those 24 hours are what we have to “spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of [our] immortal souls.”  One should always view the consumption of media through this lens.  Our purse of time trickles out second by second regardless of what we desire.  Does spending it on media we are not enjoying and have no expectation of enjoying should we continue make sense?  Of course not.  That is merely an application of the sunk cost fallacy, sating our pride at the expense of time irrevocably lost to us. 

Have enough respect for yourself and your time to say no, and your life will be all the better.  I hope that you learned that lesson long before I did.

If you haven’t read “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day” by Arnold Bennett, I cannot recommend it enough.  You can find a copy of it here.

Also, you may have noticed some new artwork gracing the site.  That comes courtesy of my incredibly talented cousin Chelsea Ward and her shop Sketchy Notions!  If you want to check out more of her work, visit her page at sketchynotions.com.