The stress of FOMO at the movies

I have long been a sufferer of FOMO, and I’m glad somebody finally put a name to it.

The clever acronym – which stands for Fear Of Missing Out – may have been around longer than this, but only in the past couple years have I started noticing people mentioning it as a specific phenomenon that affects people in a specific way. I’m sure social media is a big part of it. In a way, each tour through your social media is a tour of things you are missing out on.

In my own life, I think of this specific example from when I was in journalism school. It was just a one-year program at Columbia (yep, I dropped that name), so everything was a bit more intense as the experience was finite. The capper of this single year was a booze cruise in the harbor out by the Statue of Liberty. Everyone dressed up and everything. Because the subway I was on was having mechanical problems – and because, let’s be honest, I probably didn’t leave my apartment as early as I should have – I nearly didn’t make it on time, and started suffering an emotional breakdown right there on the subway. I imagined all my other classmates departing for this magical evening and all going home with new sexual partners and all the other things I imagined happening that night, and me being stranded on shore, and it was more than I could handle. (As it turned out, they compensated for late arrivals by leaving at least 15 minutes later than the scheduled departure time – and as it turned out, I did go home with someone that night, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, that experience and others in my life help explain why I get so stressed out when I’m watching a movie that causes me to get vicarious FOMO.

This happened most recently during Booksmart. In a way, the entire movie of Booksmart is about FOMO, as the lead characters realize they missed some essential part of their high school experience only after it's too late to do anything about it. But within that there is a more specific kind of FOMO about a specific party happening that last night before graduation. The two leads are monitoring videos posted to social media by people at that party, and it looks great. Meanwhile, they are suffering through all sorts of ridiculous delays, first getting taken to a party thrown (on a boat, like mine) by a rich kid that nobody is attending, and then ending up at a dress-up murder mystery party. They do finally get to the party they’re meaning to go to, and thankfully for them, it’s still in full swing.

I’m not sure how these girls weather all their various delays with equanimity. Me, I’d be losing it, like I did that night 20 years ago. And I’m sure I was kind of squirming there in the movie theater. WHY are they not getting to this party and WHY is it not bothering them more? I’d venture to say it took me out of it a bit. I couldn’t relate to the lack of a reaction.

It's not the first time I’ve noticed this happening. In fact, it seems to be a common occurrence in movies about parties to have the characters take a long time to get there, meanwhile getting embroiled in all these other shenanigans. I think of The Night Before, the Seth Rogen movie from a couple years ago in which they’re trying to get to some amazing Christmas Eve party in a secret location. If memory serves, they have a half-dozen seemingly avoidable errands to complete on the way, including a wild goose chase to get some drugs (which are not even for them) as well as a Christmas Eve dinner at somebody’s mother’s house. I do think there may have been a bit of stress and FOMO by the characters in that movie, but not the kind I would experience in that situation.

However, the stress of FOMO does not always decrease my appreciation of a film. FOMO is a major motivating factor for the characters in one of my favorite films of the last decade, Spring Breakers. There was the opportunity for major stress on my behalf in the first section of the movie, when our four main characters are some of the last students on a ghost town of a campus that’s lost all its students to spring break. They can’t join their classmates until they have a little cash, which they get by robbing a restaurant. Once they do arrive in party central, they seem not to have missed much. The rest of the movie is about FOE, Fear of Ending, which is a lot more melancholy and with which I can a lot more easily grapple.

I think the difference between those first two films and Spring Breakers is that the characters in Spring Breakers are not getting waylaid on ridiculous tangents. The tangible stressful aspect of FOMO for me is being so close yet so far. If you’re broke, it’s not like you’re almost at the party but not quite there – the situation is hopeless until you do something about it. The characters do, and then they beat feet to Florida post haste. What I really can’t stand is the continual delay of a gratification that is almost within your grasp, but is ephemeral, so if you don’t grab it quickly it will be gone. That’s present in both Booksmart and The Night Before.

And now I must leave you due to the fear of missing out on the other aspects of my day.

Attention spans > seasonal appropriateness

A person in one of my film discussion groups on Facebook noted today that the February 23rd DVD release date for The Good Dinosaur seemed to serve as a particularly swift response to its underperformance at the box office. As you might imagine, the discussion that followed revealed that a three-month journey to video was pretty typical these days.

That led to the larger discussion of delays that violated that ever-shrinking three-month window, and I brought up Christmas movies. Last time I noted it, Christmas movies were still taking more like ten months to arrive on video, the thinking being that you want to have your big video unveiling at a time when people are actually thinking about watching Christmas movies.

That, too, seems to have changed.

I gave as my example the fact that I expected The Night Before not to release on DVD and BluRay until late October or early November. I had to provide an addendum to that comment when a quick internet search revealed March 1st as the date for its video/digital release.

It's a depressing concession to a reality we have willingly acknowledged elsewhere in our lives: Any particular phenomenon's window is extremely short-lived, and if you don't capitalize on that window, it will just disappear into the ephemera along with everything else we pause on for a moment before discarding.

Not that The Night Before is worthy of gaining a solid foothold in our cultural legacy. It was a disappointment. And even though some people in my audience were laughing, I don't see them collectively conferring the movie a new-classic status. Movies like Elf only come along infrequently. Elf was 13 years ago, and we're still waiting for something else like it to really captivate our hearts.

But I sort of liked the past scarcity of the Christmas movie. If you missed it one Christmas, you had to wait until the next one -- at least upon its initial release. It was like egg nog in that way.

Given what else I know about our society, I'm kind of surprised you can't actually get egg nog year round. Sure, it would make it less special, but what do its manufacturers care? If it meets a craving, people will buy it. And if that craving were being satisfied by something else, you'd think egg nog purveyors would take note and take corrective action.

I don't really have a point, I guess. If I sound disappointed by what I've learned today, it's probably a small case of devil's advocacy. More than anything it's just interesting to note that the thinking has changed on this topic. I don't usually follow these types of things, but I'll try to make a note of how The Night Before sells on video (physical and digital) when it releases on a date when most people symbolically start to think about spring -- which is actually the first day of autumn in Australia. (They change their seasons on the first of the month in the southern hemisphere -- Lord knows why.) More likely, I'll forget to do that.

More than anything, I just wanted to get a new post up so that Zac Efron and Robert DeNiro would not continue to greet the visitors to my blog.

Some silly notions of promotion

So I went to an advanced screening of The Night Before on Monday night (it doesn't come out here until Thursday), and was greeted in the lobby by three dudes with oversized heads.

The oversized heads were those of the three main characters in the movie, played by Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie.

It's not like oversized novelty heads are completely unheard of, but I feel like they're something that would have gone out in the 1990s. Or if they hadn't gone out, then at least they would be reserved for use with characters we know and love, like Darth Vader or Batman. Oversized heads of actors, only one of whom (Rogen) has what you would call a distinct look, seems like a funny choice indeed -- especially when it's anything but clear that this film will be a hit and give these characters an ongoing presence in popular culture. (It took in less than $9 million on its second weekend of release in the U.S., bringing the total to just over $24 million.)

Then the oversized heads were actually giving out t-shirts. At least, I assumed they were t-shirts. They looked smaller than your average t-shirts, and all I saw in the scrunched up balls of fabric in their regular-sized hands was the color white. But when I put up my hand to try to claim one, Oversized Anthony Mackie confused my intentions and came over to slap me five.

Then on each seat there was a postcard-sized advertisement for a Seth Rogen-inspired donut that had been created by a placed called Doughnut Time. Not just inspired, but actually named "The Seth Rogen." Mind you, this was not a card offering you a free "Seth Rogen donut" if you went to Doughnut Time -- it was just announcing its existence. As I said, there was one on every seat in the theater, even though probably only half of them were in use. What a waste of paper.

I will say, however, that I appreciated the fact that everyone got a complimentary ice cream upon entering. Typically it would be popcorn or maybe a soda, but I assume someone thought ice cream was more "stonery."

All in all, a promotional mixed bag.