Bored Not Boring ⎮ Blue Soup Blog

There’s a certain kind of boredom that can be torturous. The kind which nothing you do seems to relieve. As someone who has been struggling with a tasty mixture of anxiety and depression for many years, this kind of boredom is annoyingly familiar to me. Lately, as I’ve been work on finding activities that can temper that lurking boredom, I’ve started to think about boredom in a new light. Now, being the nerd that I am, my thought process about boredom has quickly incorporated film into the mix.  

We can be bored in so many different situations: at school, at work, in a dentist’s office, while watching The Big Bang Theory… the list goes on and on. But it’s interesting that when we’re bored, we don’t much think about boredom itself. Why am I bored? What exactly does the feeling of boredom entail? All these questions led me to what is, in my opinion, an even more interesting and hard to pin down question: how do we portray the feeling of boredom on screen?

The Everydayness of Everyday

Boredom and film are not new friends. Boredom has been a part of film since the beginning and many a screenwriter and director have attempted to the portray the mundane. Sometimes, it can be quite nice to simply sit in a film and not expect any big thrills or dramatic moments. Paterson (2016), directed by Jim Jarmusch, is one of my absolute favorite films that tackles what I like to call the everydayness of everyday. For those unfamiliar with the film, Paterson follows Paterson, a bus driver and sometimes poet living in Paterson, New Jersey (I know, a lot of Patersons). The film spans the time of a week in Paterson’s life with his eccentric wife, his job, and his friends. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that Paterson is a film that portrays the feeling of boredom. You don’t really get the feeling that Paterson is bored or unsatisfied with his life— quite the opposite actually. However, I do think Paterson is a great example of film’s relationship with boredom in that doesn’t try to be entertaining in any kind of elaborate way. There is no expectation that Paterson will not nor needs to break out of his mundane life for an exciting new adventure. He— and the audience— is allowed to just sit. Sit in the bus, in the park, in Paterson’s home. Sit with the everydayness of everyday in a way that necessitates a certain suspension of time. In the wrong setting or frame of mind, Paterson very well may be a boring film. However, it is never trying to be anything it isn’t

 Boring but Never Bored 

Not all films can be like Paterson. I think boredom in film is most often associated with films such as Warhol’s Empire or Sleep which push boundaries of “entertainment” or films that are not meant to be boring but through bad writing or acting or any combination of things are just agonizing to sit through. Though more experimental films such as Sleep are interesting and unintentionally boring films can be fun to complain about, those kinds of films are not what I want to talk about in this essay. Before the topic of  boredom was even a glimmer in my Blue Soup Blog eye, I came up with a question: How do you show boredom on film without boring people? This question came to me while I was working on a short screenplay about anxiety and depression. Though I’m not quite convinced that I was able to portray boredom in an interesting way in that screenplay, that question still remained. I watched or rewatched a couple of films in researching this essay and there are two films in particular that I really want to talk about: Office Space (1999) and Mustang (2015). I’m sure there are dozens of other films I could have chosen but I just kept coming back to these two and this is my blog so I’m going to talk about them.

For those who haven’t seen the film, Office Space follows Peter, a discontented desk worker who, after a probably traumatic hypnotist session, decides he just isn’t going to go to work. Though the whole movie has a really interesting take on what I’d call “life boredom” (you know, when you kind of get passed the momentary feeling of boredom and just kind of sink into a constant combination of numbness and frustration), I mainly want to zero in on the first scene. The scene is extremely simple, just showing a few of the main characters stuck in traffic trying to get to work. Now, I’m going to go a bit more in depth into a shot-by-shot analysis of this scene in the video portion of this post so I’m not going to summarize the scene too much; however, I will say that this scene is the perfect way to set up this film and put us into Peter’s mindset going into the coming events. As Peter sits in the car, his eyes are so full of just pure dissatisfaction. As the scene goes on and Peter continues to find himself in blocked up traffic, you can feel his frustration building and, even though the scene depicts a character bored out of his mind with practically no escape, it manages to present itself in an incredibly funny way without a word being spoken (of course, the upbeat sounds of “Mambo #8” in the background don’t hurt). Though Office Space ends up being more about the pleasures of nothing, this first scene of seemingly endless boredom shows how much filmmaking aspects such as editing, music choice, acting, and framing can really make or break what makes a scene entertaining. The fact that I can just sit and watch Peter go from lane to lane for almost two minutes (sounds short but try sitting through two minutes of any Woody Allen movie made in the last 5-10 years and get back to me) and not only understand that exact feeling of boredom and frustration but also kind of be intrigued proves that you can tell a story about boredom which is far from boring.

Missed Moments of Boredom

Office Space and Mustang are probably the two most starkly different films I could have chosen for this topic. Basically doing a complete 180-shift, Mustang follows five Turkish sisters who, after being caught playing in the ocean with boys after school, are locked in their home by their overbearing and often tyrannical father. Mustang is one of my top 3 films. I am not a movie crier but I sob every time I watch it and genuinely think it’s one of the best portrayals of girlhood I’ve ever seen even though I am no where near in proximity to the lives of the girls on the screen. But that’s a topic for later. For now, I’m going to talk about the little moments of boredom scattered throughout the film. These moments are often quick and it would be easy to miss them when immersed in watching; however, I think they are part of what makes Mustang so convincing and genuine. Can you tell I’m really obsessed with this movie? I’m sorry, it’s probably going to continue like this… ANYWAY, because these girls are trapped in their home, they have to find their own ways to entertain themselves. Sometimes this takes the form of “swimming” in which the girls put on bathing suits and pretend to swim around their beds. Other times, this simply means throwing a ball at a wall. The most interesting moments of boredom in this film come from Lale, the youngest sister of the bunch. Lale is a rebellious spirit, often making trouble or getting her nose into things she shouldn’t. The scenes in which Lale are bored are some of the most interesting if you pay close-enough attention (or have watched the film 100 times). As with Office Space, I’ll save any in depth summary or analysis for the video, but these scenes are often moments of exploration and discovery. In one instance, Lale plays with a ball by herself when her sisters refuse to play with her only to notice that a family is coming to vie for the opportunity to marry Lale’s oldest sister to their son. In another, Lale sits bored on a counter while a two Turkish men on the radio speak about the downfall of women in their country. Lale’s boredom is always accompanied by something that may be uninteresting and everyday to her, but is the very opposite to the viewer. These are quiet moments without any internal plot development within them. They are also relatively short moments (usually shorter than Peter’s traffic saga in Office Space), so they never drag or even get to the point where you ask, “why is this scene here?” But even if these scenes were each ten minutes long, I would probably like them anyways because of how well they create an atmosphere for the home and later for the more dramatic scenes in the film.

…

In an article for Scientific America about boredom, Maggie Koerth-Baker mentions that video has often been used as a tool for boredom research. One of the first examples of video in this kind of research was used by Colleen Merrifield in an experiment where she would show participants a video of men hanging up laundry and then see if their boredom would affect how they performed a given set of tasks. Though, in the end video may not have been the best scientific method to measure boredom, what this tells me is that video definitely has the potential to be boring. The ways that Office Space and Mustang use boredom within the context of each film’s themes, cinematic techniques, and character profiles shows that not only does boredom not have to be boring, but it is actually a great way to explore more precise details about a character, a world, or any other aspect of the film. So I guess next time I’m agonizing over how bored I am I should just sit back, maybe play Mambo #8 and take in the details of my surroundings.

… nah that’s dumb I’ll just watch a movie.

For a more detailed exploration of the films I talked about in this blogpost, watch the Youtube video below and subscribe to my channel for more @bluesoupblog

as always, I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this (and any) topic so feel free to reach out to me on twitter @bluesoupblog!

See you soon,

Sofia