9 Reasons To Watch My Film

1. It’s already playing, so you can pause it and read this and return to it, and by the end of reading this, it will have loaded enough so that you won’t have to pause it while you’re watching it to let it load more.

2. You have no plans to do anything else or are clicking around listlessly and want a reprieve from that.

3. You want something to listen to and come back to from time to time in the background of your other web browsing for the next 36 minutes.

4. You have thought seriously about how the internet has or should affect literature, art, and culture. You have wondered what your favorite authors from other times would have used internet — for instance, would Jane Austen would have been concerned about her follower count? What would have Knut Hamsun reblogged on Tumblr? Would DFW have Instagrammed pictures of his dogs?

5. You agree that social media has replaced cinema as the primary location of engagement with art and culture but still think older forms (books, films) are important and can be enjoyable.

6. You think most movies are too long.

7. From “Post-Internet” by Gene McHugh:

What is the point of making anything and casting it out to this ocean of media if it’s just going to be at best buzzed through or at worst completely ignored? It’s great that the Web allows anyone to put their own production into the sphere of public consumption, but at what cost? For the contemporary artist especially, whose motivation is ostensibly to create culture with a greater depth and preciousness than a “Fat Kid on Roller Coaster” video, it would seem absurd to even participate in this dog-eat-dog system.

Still, though…would anyone earnestly desire for everything to return to the pre-Internet model in which only a handful of individuals are able to put their ideas out there into the world? No, probably not. Fifteen minutes of fame are better than none.

What to do then?

How can an artist participate in this system which is in many ways preferable to the prior model without feeling as though their individual works of art are on some level meaningless?

8. You like non-rhetorical, present tense documentaries. You feel you have read and learned enough so that you have principles and values and don’t need to be told with whom to side on social issues. You had a cynical opinion of Kony.

9. You dream, or have dreamed, of a world without cops and insurance companies.