Do Netflix’s var­ied play­back speeds pose a threat to filmmakers?

Bare­ly a week goes by with­out some minor-to-mod­er­ate ker­fuf­fle sur­round­ing Net­flix and its plans for rapid expan­sion. The lat­est con­cerns their pro­pri­etary video inter­face, a seem­ing­ly insignif­i­cant yet pos­si­bly major tweak to its func­tion­al­i­ty, and the ever-present threat of stream­ing to the sanc­ti­ty of the cinema.

Net­flix announced last week that they would grad­u­al­ly inte­grate a new fea­ture that allows the view­er to con­trol play­back speed on the movie or series they’re watch­ing, either slow­ing the action to half-time and three-quar­ters-time or quick­en­ing it up to time-and-a-quar­ter and time-and-a-half. Seems like a fair­ly stan­dard addi­tion to the Net­flix UX (that’s tech-talk for user expe­ri­ence), until one starts to won­der why it’s been intro­duced and what it might be used for.

A hand­ful of film­mak­ers and oth­er cre­ative types have spo­ken out in ardent oppo­si­tion to any tin­ker­ing with play­back speed, as a roundup from The Hol­ly­wood Reporter notes today. Judd Apa­tow, Brad Bird, and Aaron Paul (Netflix’s gold­en boy du jour, as the star of the new­ly release Break­ing Bad movie El Camino) all took to Twit­ter to sound off against what they see as a per­ver­sion of a work’s right­ful shape.

https://​twit​ter​.com/​J​u​d​d​A​p​a​t​o​w​/​s​t​a​t​u​s​/​1​1​8​8​8​6​7​6​9​4​4​7​4​3​50592

https://twitter.com/aaronpaul_8/status/1188925851514966016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1188928476201439232&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdeadline.com%2F2019%2F10%2Fnetflix-variable-playback-speeds-raises-filmmaker-ire-1202771261%2F

The argu­ments both for and against the new devel­op­ment have been clear-cut enough. The anti- fac­tion right­ly posits that slim­ming down a movie’s run time destroys all sense of pac­ing and robs the work of its dra­mat­ic impact, the under­ly­ing sen­ti­ment being that sped-up view­ing casts art as a deliv­ery sys­tem for infor­ma­tion best got­ten through as quick­ly as possible.

The pro faction’s rejoin­der, artic­u­lat­ed ear­li­er today by New York­er film crit­ic Richard Brody, focus­es on the poten­tial of this new tool. He sees the abil­i­ty to tin­ker with time as a pos­si­ble boon to those curi­ous about cin­e­ma, and an impor­tant reminder that film should not be treat­ed as an immutable thing. Remix­ing, cut­ting-and-past­ing, tem­po­ral warps – these dis­tor­tions keep the art form vital by pos­ing chal­lenges to its own integrity.

He’s essen­tial­ly artic­u­lat­ing the phi­los­o­phy of the Sit­u­a­tion­ist Inter­na­tion­al move­ment, a school of the avant-garde that rearranged and redubbed exist­ing films to con­vert them into sub­ver­sions of their own main­stream ide­ol­o­gy. A much larg­er fac­tion of the pro- crowd, how­ev­er, has not tak­en such a high-mind­ed defense.

Some have fal­la­cious­ly assert­ed that the feature’s no big deal because fast-for­ward­ing exist­ed on VHS tapes decades ago. (This notion ignores the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between the two fea­tures; fast-for­ward­ing was invent­ed to quick­ly get from one part of a tape to anoth­er, not to watch what hap­pens in between them more quick­ly.) Oth­ers have not­ed that third-par­ty video play­er pro­grams like VLC and YouTube have offered this func­tion for years. (This notion ignores the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between an emp­ty ves­sel like VLC and a self-styled stu­dio like Net­flix, which must license video from bona fide sources with con­tracts over which the artists have some say.)

Both of these points sug­gest, to this writer, a more dis­cour­ag­ing ratio­nale that’s gone unspo­ken. Con­fus­ing and frus­trat­ing as it may be, it would appear some view­ers sim­ply wish to con­sume a greater vol­ume of con­tent in a small­er amount of time. This is undoubt­ed­ly what Net­flix wants; both for con­densed time to pump up total view num­bers, but more insid­i­ous­ly, for view­ers to start think­ing about mov­ing pic­tures – you know, art – as mate­r­i­al to be digest­ed in the most expe­di­ent fash­ion possible.

Reori­ent­ing the way the aver­age view­er process­es film and TV, both so aggres­sive­ly rebrand­ed as con­tent in our post-mean­ing media era, ends at the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of art’s util­i­ty being com­plete­ly rede­fined. Will it be some­thing intend­ed for appre­ci­a­tion, analy­sis, and reflec­tion? Or will it be a pure mode of occu­py­ing spare time, shrink­ing atten­tion spans in order to pump up a corporation’s prof­it mar­gin? Will this be revealed as a false dichoto­my, with the out­come falling some­where between the two? I can’t claim to know, but I’m cer­tain­ly unset­tled by the wide­spread lack of con­cern over the medium’s cloudy future.