Last year I went to see Extraña forma de vida or Strange Way of Life, a movie by Pedro Almodovar. The thing is that it’s actually a short and we don’t usually see shorts as single screenings in theaters.

So, they had to pad it with a documentary about the movie to get it into decent length to justify the ticket price, which was pretty close to the usual ticket prices (although I don’t remember what the exact price was). In the documentary Almodovar talked about how he wanted shorts to be taken more seriously and to be available to audiences in a way similar to features. Is this going to happen? No. Obviously not.

But that is a problem. Back when we started this blog, I made a rule for myself that I won’t publish anything with less than 400 words. I have broken this rule on occasion for various reasons, but those have always been something out of the norm (if there even is a norm here). In general, the word counts are much higher than that. In some cases around 10.000 words. But why the rule? I think I felt at the time that there needed to be enough words in the text for it to be meaningful.

There are a lot of rules like this. In general, a movie needs to be around 80 minutes to get distribution, albums are generally over 30 minutes, but a single needs to be around 3 minutes to get radioplay, TV series (in America) need to cover half a year minus some days off, so around 23 episodes, a book of fiction needs to be around 90.000 words, and even the popular and trade articles I wrote as part of my work have very strict character counts (5000-7000 and 3000 respectively). These are all quite constrictive.

The problem is that different things do require different lengths. Like Nick Riggle. He has written (as far as I know) two books, How to Be Awesome and This Beauty. They are both little over 200 pages with quite a big font and weirdly big margins. So, they were pretty forced into that length. And it shows in the text as well. The former has enough material and ideas in it to make up a nice little essay, but those don’t make money, so the book was padded… and padded and padded again to get it to that length. This Beauty is just bad (it’s supposed to be written by a professor of philosophy, but the ideas in it are very similar to what I hear from friends who are high), but it also goes back to same ideas over and over again to get it to that length.

Another example would be Why the Museum Matters by Daniel H. Weiss (a former CEO of Met in New York). It’s a part of a series of of books by Yale University Press and it sucks. It’s under 200 pages, but the few good points it makes are surrounded by long digressions about the complexities of funding at Met, the problems with less than scrupulous donors at Met, and the problems with less than ethically obtained items… at Met (actually, he does cover other institutions in the last one). It’s like the ramblings of an old man, who can’t keep it on topic. Additionally, he is very myopic and can’t really look at the field as a whole. Sure, he knows something about places like V&A, British National Museum, Guggenheim and Versaille, but those are all huge organizations, while most of us don’t really experience museums that way. So, again, the whole book, while short, feels stuffed and thus misses the whole point.

Richard Osman, the author of Thursday’s Murder Club and it’s sequels, said once in his podcast (with Marina Hyde) that one of his books has 90.004 words, because he was expected to submit something with at least 90.000. I don’t know if it was the first one of the series, but I actually enjoyed that book quite a bit, so apparently the length worked there very well.

Partly the problem is that we are used to a specific kind of formats. Like the Almodovar short. It’s nice enough, but feels kind of rushed as it tries to have a three act structure in 30 minutes. It just doesn’t feel right. We want things to have time to simmer. Half an hour is what we are used in comedy series, which have a much faster pace, not westerns about gay cowboys.

Giving up these restrictions would make room for different kinds of storytelling, but it might be hard. Sometimes people do manage this. Love Actually is a movie a lot of people like and essentially it’s a bunch of different stories with only the first and last acts, so if you would reedit it, those individual stories would feel awkward, but as a whole it works. Then there’s movies like Satantango, which is seven hours (in Europe). It’s great, but the length alone will be too much for most (I watched it in three parts).

One would assume that streaming would be helpful in this. With streaming you don’t need to think about timeslots in your TV channel’s schedule or filling half a year worth of those slots, you don’t need to think about how many times a movie theatre can put your movie on during one day, you don’t need to think about the bladders of your audience and you don’t need to limit your music to what a CD can hold.

On the other hand, this has also lead to misuse of that flexibility. Some movies are overly long, because the pressure to cut them down is not there in the same way and in some cases directors are apparently pressuring studios for resources to make their movies as long as they want, as the streamers want all the talent they can get.

So, it’s all complicated. There’s benefits to traditional forms simply because that’s the way we have learned to consume media, but there’s bad sides as well, because certain people need to fill the assignment.