by Derek Neal
The narrator of Alberto Moravia’s 1960 novel Boredom is constantly defining what it means to be bored. At one point, he says “Boredom is the lack of a relationship with external things” (16). He gives an example of this by explaining how boredom led to him surviving the Italian Civil War at the end of World War II. When he is called to return to his army position after the Armistice of Cassibile, he does not report to duty, as he is bored: “It was boredom, and boredom alone—that is, the impossibility of establishing contact of any kind between myself and the proclamation, between myself and my uniform, between myself and the Fascists…which saved me” (16).
He spends the years of war attempting to escape boredom through painting, but his efforts are unsuccessful: “I felt that my pictures did not permit me to express myself, in other words to deceive myself into imagining that I had some contact with external things—in a word, they did not prevent me from being bored (23). The boredom that the narrator describes is not simply a lack of interest in an activity, but something deeper, more akin to meaningless, existential despair, or Camus’ idea of the absurd. His boredom is what we might call ennui in English (the French word for boredom), which seems to indicate a more profound weariness and listlessness than ordinary boredom.
Time moves slowly when one is bored, and one would like to find a way to speed it up. The narrator, Dino, says that painting is “as good a way of passing the time as any other” (16). His mother, talking about a book she’s reading but whose author she can’t remember, says “What matters to me is to pass the time, more than anything else. One author or another, it’s all the same to me” (55). Reading, for Dino’s mother, provides a cure for boredom because she does not feel that her life is meaningless, whereas Dino’s painting is unable to provide the meaning his life lacks. Time passes for her but not for him.
Boredom is often seen as an enemy or an affliction, but what if, instead of trying to fight boredom or cure it, one embraced and actively cultivated boredom? This is what Paul Schrader suggests in a section of his book on transcendental cinema entitled “Boredom as an Aesthetic Tool.” Transcendental style, or in its later iteration, “slow cinema,” is film that focuses on time instead of narrative. Most films, Schrader writes, are about “getting there”—finding out what happens next, who lives and who dies, who falls in love, who saves the day. This is entertainment, or amusement; it makes time pass quickly, so that we might say we are “swept away” by a movie, or “on a rollercoaster.” Slow cinema, epitomized by the long take, is about “being there.” In these films, events take longer than necessary to make us aware of time.
Schrader, referencing Deleuze, cites the example of a maid striking a match four times before it lights in Umberto D (1952). In a movie based on the logic of “movement-image,” or narrative, rather than “time image,” this would not happen. If a match needs to be lit to move the story forward, the three failed attempts would be cut, but in a movie where time itself may be the subject, the three failures are preserved. Watching someone attempt to light a match may in fact be boring and meaningless. But it may also be a necessary part of artistic creation and aesthetic experience.
To insist on the difference between art and entertainment is most likely a fool’s errand. What comes to be classed as “art,” people will tell you, is simply the result of gatekeeping, or market forces, or prejudice. The distinction is arbitrary. There is some truth in these claims (many things are considered art which are not art), but there is also truth in the fact that many people making these claims have never been taught an appreciation of aesthetics, or have been taught to have contempt for art. It is easy to say something doesn’t exist when you have destroyed and buried it.
One key distinction between art and entertainment, if I am to go down this path, is boredom. Entertainment shuns boredom; art embraces it. Schrader notes that a key component of transcendental style, or slow cinema, is that it activates the viewer. We might also say that boredom engages the viewer. He uses the example of a static shot of a countryside that a man slowly crosses. It takes a few minutes for the man to cross the screen. As we watch the shot, we look around and begin to notice things. The sun, the clouds in the sky, the grass swaying in the breeze. We bring our own associations to the scene that we are watching. We enter a state of introspection, but only if we are bored first. Our attention becomes intensely focused; time slows down and may even seem to stop entirely. We are mesmerized or captivated. This is the opposite of entertainment, or amusement, which is meant to distract our attention from something else, rather than focus it on something in particular. One of the oldest definitions of amusement is the “diversion of attention.” The object of entertainment is unimportant—as long as it distracts us from the slow passage of time, it has done its job. The object of art, on the other hand, is incredibly important, and it focuses our attention by making us aware of the passing of time, by boring us.
Schrader’s insistence on time as a component of boredom allows for Moravia’s understanding of boredom as a lack of connection with the surrounding world. Schrader notes that “Duration can peel back the social veneer of an activity” (6) and that the distancing techniques of transcendental style, of which elongated time is one, create “an actual or potential disunity between man and his environment” and “a growing crack in the dull surface of everyday reality” (3). Another artist working to cultivate boredom is Karl Ove Knausgaard. In a recent interview, the interviewer comments on how Knausgaard is able to write about “nothing” but somehow make it compelling: “How do you do that? Because lots of us could try to do something like this and the writing would be a disaster, it would be boring, so—”
At this point, Knausgaard interrupts the interviewer, saying “Yeah, well that’s what I think…well I do think it’s boring, and I do struggle with that thought every day.” The interviewer characterizes being boring as a negative characteristic, and even Knausgaard himself, while recognizing that boredom is a key component of his work, seems to suggest that he does not want his writing to be boring. Boredom, however, is what gives Knausgaard’s writing its power. His novels do exactly what Schrader articulated transcendental cinema as doing—peeling back the social veneer of an activity, or creating a crack in our everyday reality. Much of Knausgaard’s work focuses on the way people bring meaning to their lives, and he is fascinated by people—his father, his ex-wife—whose worlds break down and lose meaning because they refuse to play by society’s rules. To use Moravia’s definition of boredom, these people become bored, but like the narrator in Moravia’s novel, they are unable to accept this. In this case, boredom does not lead to introspection, awareness, or creativity, but to despair. One senses that Knausgaard struggles with this himself and that writing is his way of embracing boredom.
Embracing or cultivating boredom may seem like a strange objective when our world is one in which we have come increasingly close to eliminating boredom. This is the function of the smartphone and social media. Constant activity, constant stimuli, constant entertainment. But these are all ways of fighting boredom, and while they may pass the time, one may also end up like Dino in Moravia’s novel:
“My life was dominated by a feeling of extraordinary impatience…I was constantly going in and out of my studio on any sort of futile pretext…to buy cigarettes I didn’t need, to have a cup of coffee I didn’t want, to acquire a newspaper that didn’t interest me, to visit an exhibition of pictures about which I hadn’t the slightest curiosity, and so on…sometimes I did not complete the errands I undertook. Instead of buying a newspaper or drinking coffee or visiting an exhibition, after taking a few steps I would return to the studio which I had left in such a hurry only a few minutes before. Back in the studio boredom, of course, awaited me and the whole process would begin over again” (24).
The next time I am bored, which will be very soon, I won’t try to stave it off. I will accept it, and sit with my boredom, and see what happens next. It might be exciting.