BORING!!!
The KPF: an objective formula for telling whether a story is slow
Whenever someone grimaces that a film or novel or insert other work of narrative art is too slow, we ought to ask: Compared to what? And: Is your evaluative judgement of it being too slow actually a wires-crossed descriptive statement about its purposeful slowness? Look at music (or listen to it). There the allegro and adagio movements are spelt out—so wouldn’t it be wrong-headed to criticise the slow movements for being slow?1
What people usually mean, then, by too slow is boring, and what they mean by boring is that they felt bored. The real question is, what does it mean to say a play, short story, novel etc. bored you?
That it’s the opposite of what Henry James in The Art of Fiction wrote was the “only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel,” which is, “that it be interesting.” I’ve come to distrust, as much as I do the comparably baggy-scoped ‘problematic’, that old vaguery ‘interesting’, which means anything from ‘the next Finnegans Wake’ to ‘a smidge different from daytime TV’. It’s ‘interesting’ in this sense that Danilo Kiš’s short story ‘The Legend of the Sleepers’ repeats with many many variations its opening paragraph; that doesn’t mean that it’s not boring.
Which takes us to: it’s not as interesting as it reckons it is. Does this novel’s eschewing of linearity, plot and character make it bracingly radical, or is it a pastiche of a modernism now a hundred years old and so completely conventional? Is this film’s message controversial and outrageous or do the messengers and targets of its outrage make it just mainstream ressentiment, what I once called a sheep in wolf’s clothing?
That it’s cliché / banal / trite. This one I’m sympathetic to but would still advise caution: almost all art content taken out of context, removed from its form is inevitably trite, like one of those exotic deep sea fish that deflates when taken out of the water. That’s why style and form are so important. Art isn’t for its ideas, you can’t slice off (or think you have) the ideas and subtext from the underside of a work then complain they’re trite when lined up against other, cleverer ideas you’ve taken from whichever sociology book you’re slogging through. Save them for your essays, your substack, let us have our art for art’s sake, for the love of form, for Sontag’s “erotics of art.”
That you were talking through the film/play/show and not because it was boring but it felt boring because you’d been talking through the film.
Or you were distracted while watching the film/play/show or while you were reading the novel because your tummy was rumbling and you got hangry. (‘Hangry’, Christ. Do you think people in famines get hangry?)
All of the above can be engrossing, affecting on a primary level while still being boring. What is hoarier than a horror film’s jump-scares? They still work. That’s why people can say of even the most conventional narrative artwork, “Well I was never bored.” And so the corollary of how engrossing a story is, how much it keeps your attention can’t be the way we define whether or not it’s slow.
As it stands, your impression of a story being too slow is too subjective to deserve being a legitimate standalone criticism of it. We’d have to control for your mood in the moment, your taste, your ideological resistance or tendency towards this or that artwork’s subject matter - it’s a drama about Hungarian peasants? - and/or its style - in black and white?? - and/or its creators - by Béla Tar???
There is a more legit intuition at work here though: that slowness, or fastness -i.e. pace - is to do with the relationship between the amount of incident in a story - both conventional and original - and the amount of story itself we get it in. If we still suspect a story is too slow, and want to prove how, we need to turn to Milan Kundera.
In the last issue of Artless, I wrote about Kundera and his interest in all the formal things novels can do. Son of a famous classical pianist and musicologist, and himself an essayist on Beethoven, Janáček, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, he would often write about prose fiction in musical terms - identifying the rondeau structure of
’s The Satanic Verses, for one - as though he subscribed to Walter Pater’s notion that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.”One small but useful example of his musical insight into the novel relates to slowness (which he named a novel after). Pace pace complaints, he came up with a way of measuring it. You work out the ratio of how much time passes within a story to how many words the author has taken to tell that period of time—or, to put it the other way around, the ratio of amount of artwork to amount of in-story time passed. This is the only objective pace-maker. To paraphrase Kundera in The Art of the Novel:
Note the amounts I’ve given are distinct enough from each other to highlight the different paces, but you could insert any text-amount and story-time-amount and get the general idea that it’s the ratio between them that determines a story’s fast- or slowness.
We can also extend the formula to other types of narrative art, such as films:
Or narrative art on the stage:
What complicates it for stories on stage is that, being live, stage-time matches story-time one for one: a scene passes at the same rate as time passes for the audience. You can’t summarise a story on stage as easily as you can in prose fiction or can manage to do in films (which also take place ‘live’, that is, in the present, but use devices like montage and fast/slow-motion to speed up or slow down time). On stage, elisions of time, summaries of the narrative usually come between scenes and acts; other plays might use devices to compress time within scenes—say a scene with a chorus that summarises an amount of time that’s passed in the story, or a scene in which actors walking on and off stage in different phases of age make-up portray time passing faster.
One thing that’ll enhance the fast- or slowness in any story is what is happening and how. A week in story-time of unrelated events among abstract, unrelated characters will drag more than a week in story-time of dramatic, emotionally fraught actions by, and their consequences to, rounded characters we’re eager to follow.
You might think our calculations would be disrupted by non-linear storytelling. But the Kundera Pace Formula (KPF) still works here. Even if a chapter of a novel jumps around time-lines and tenses, it’s still possible to tot up the fragments of time passed within the world of the story to give you a total, then work out its ratio to how many words it took to tell that particular chapter. Jazz music might have complicated time signatures and tempos but you can still count the time signature.
So to all you TL;DRers and DNFers out there, the next time you feel a story is too slow, use the KPF and work out whether it is in fact slow. If not, then maybe it’s you projecting onto it; or, in the words of the Bobby De Niro song, “It is you that is boring.”
Music is too slow when the playing doesn’t follow these tempos; and outside of classical music when it clashes with the tone of the piece (playing Hallelujah at a Happy Hardcore bpm, or playing Happy Hardcore at a funereal pace is gonna sound too fast / too slow). It bears repeating: all artistic values are relational.
This is one of those pieces where I think, “ah, I have a lot to say on this subject.” Then I finish it and realize I don’t have much to say that you didn’t already say here! This will be my standard reference for this topic from now on.
I’ll add a tiny bit, mostly riffing on what you said, or implied.
I read a lot of customer reviews on Shudder, the horror movie app.
And the “critique” that the movie is too slow is the most common one. They run everything from sordid trash to subtitled art films, so a lot of trash-dependent horror fans just don’t have the ability to appreciate a film that isn’t packed with gore and jolts and screaming music.
“Slow” for me almost always means the viewer or reader only wants one kind of storytelling. And I hear you on the danger of using “interesting” as a constant arbiter, but I also think that it can work in a variety of contexts if you allow it a variety of meanings.
In James’s work, I tend to find his prose consistently interesting, even when story incidents are few. And usually they are few, I think. And his use of time, stretched and bent by his language and flexibility of perspective, is also interesting. His “horror” tales are among the best in any language, I think, even though the typical horror film viewer might not see it that way. I’ve read some that are truly terrifying, even though they’re largely about ideas more than action. In fact, their emotional effects continue to grip me even when I recall almost nothing concrete about the story.
Lastly: here’s a great anecdote from old Hollywood, which I’ll ruin slightly because I can’t recall which mogul and director and film it involved.
After a screening, a director was told by an executive, “your film is exactly 17 minutes too long.”
“How did you arrive at that specific number?”
“Because 17 minutes ago, my ass started to itch.”