Are you one of those people who can’t stand the sound of silence? If you’re by yourself, do you play a radio or stream audio/video all the time? Or do you love the sound of absolute silence?
I’m somewhere in between. I love the sound of absolute silence, but when surrounded by it (can an absence surround you?), I tend to pay attention only to it.
Let’s take baseball. Best background white noise mankind ever created. These days, I watch about 500 hours of baseball during the spring and summer. Baseball is great background activity when you’re working, although I am much more efficient when I just stream music or play it off my Zune.
When I’m writing, music, again, is the best medicine, but there’s something about the background movie that makes it perfect for felling silence while you’re working on mundane tasks like email, cooking, or non-creative documents.
The beauty of the background movie is that I can write a post like this while watching one. There is no competition between that part of my brain that needs to focus on forming or typing thoughts and that part that can listen to unimportant dialog, looking up only every minute or so to see what some dramatic swell in the music means. I’m watching some dumb movie called June 9. It has teenagers running around in the woods acting like assholes and any minute, some of them are going to start dying horrible deaths. The perfect movie for getting productive things done.
So, what makes a great background movie? First, it has to be inconsequential, one of those movies many people wasted parts of their lives producing. It has to be of interest to me, meaning it has some subject-matter appeal. Often that means people get killed or are in some regular state of terror or are being eaten, blown up, or stepped on by monstrous giants. It also has to have no cerebral, artistic, or innovative aspirations. Although that last sentence describes 97% of all movies made, I can’t just background-watch any old piece of trash. If a trashy, cheap, shabbily made movie has any brains, any originality, it instantly becomes a foreground movie and I just pay attention to it.
[Hold on, someone’s getting killed.]OK, that took a few seconds, but I’m back to finish my post. See how easy it is?