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.

A Wilde Wilde Friday

You're getting sick of me telling you about the coincidences on my viewing schedule. Even I'm getting sick of me telling you about the coincidences on my viewing schedule.

But this one was too good to pass up.

I really like Olivia Wilde, and have since I watched her on a couple seasons of House back in the day. I think she's really talented.

But for some reason, she never became a big star. She's got the looks, she's got the skills, but she hasn't had the results, assuming that becoming a star was actually what she wanted, which it may not have been. She hasn't necessarily made the choices you would expect to earn greater exposure, but when she did make those choices, such as Tron: Legacy and Cowboys & Aliens in back to back years at the start of the decade, they were massive flops. But she's been terrific in more modest fare -- see her hilarious performance as a stripper in Butter -- and every time I see her, I'm saddened that I don't see her more.

Well, on Friday, for one day at least, I couldn't escape her. And, true to the requirements of a viewing coincidence actually being a coincidence, neither of two Wilde viewings might have actually happened that day.

The first was Wilde's acclaimed directorial debut, Booksmart, which only just opened here last week. I only had the chance to see the 3 p.m. screening if my 2 p.m. doctor's appointment proceeded expeditiously, which is no guarantee in a country with socialized medicine. In fact, as a result of checking in early, I finished at about 2:10 and actually had to kill some time before the movie started.

Then that night, when it came to my movie for a Friday night, I had planned to rewatch Under the Skin, which would be my fourth viewing of it overall (I guess I like this movie). However, when my wife heard that was on tap, she asked if we could delay the viewing until Saturday night and she'd watch it with me. So instead I turned to a movie I had downloaded for 99 cents from iTunes: A Vigilante, starring Olivia Wilde and directed by Sarah Daggar-Nickson.

I just wish the double dip of Olivia ended up showcasing her a bit better.

The better of the two is clearly Booksmart, but the margin of its superiority is not what I had hoped. I had hoped to love Booksmart, because it seemed like a good thing for a critic in 2019 to do. You always want to be on the right side of a movie that is earning raves for how it fares in terms of issues of representation, so I had hoped to go four stars or higher on my rating of it. I stalled out at 3.5, but I must say, that was a significant improvement from how I felt about it in the first half.

The other thing I'd heard about Booksmart, other than that people liked it, was that some people didn't see what was so special about it. I didn't want to be one of those people, but for a while I was. This walks and talks like a lot of teen comedies of recent years, with a lot of tropes like the slow-mo strutting of its main characters in scenes where they are either wearing special outfits or owning the moment, scored to hip hop that feels like a slightly self-conscious attempt to compensate for the fact that its main characters are white. There's accidental drug ingestion, there's the characters nobody likes because they try too hard, there's some kind of unclear commentary on social media. It wasn't anything particularly unexpected.

Then at some point in the second half -- at a number of points, actually -- an emotional intelligence that I really associate with Wilde as an actress rose up and asserted itself. In fact, I found myself surprised at how floored I was by certain moments between the two main characters, played by Beanie Feldstein (who I have always liked) and Kaitlyn Dever (who got a rough start with me but who I have started to like more lately). The soundtrack has some perfectly used songs -- I hurried to turn on my phone just so I could Shazam the song playing when Dever is swimming underwater at that party, but was too late -- and a number of other moments that really rise above some of the movie's cliches. These touches brought Booksmart into a territory where I could solidly recommend it, and for that I'm glad. (Oh, and the song was "Slip Away" by Perfume Genius. Check it out.)

Wilde doesn't even cameo in Booksmart, but she's almost never off the screen in A Vigilante, where she plays a woman who's fueling the pain of a trauma she suffered into helping women get out of bad relationships by roughing up their men a bit. It's got its heart in the right place, to be sure, and it's always nice to see some real dickheads get their comeuppance. But in terms of its filmmaking, it was just lacking a bit, and I'm sorry to say that Wilde's performance was one of its weaker aspects. She does subtle moments well in this movie, but she does not come off well in bigger moments, of which there are several, as we see her in full-on post-traumatic breakdown mode on a couple occasions. These always rung false to me, I'm sorry to say.

Which doesn't mean I wouldn't like to get another Wilde double feature on my schedule -- probably intentionally this time -- at my next available opportunity. I'm a big fan, even when she isn't at the top of her game.

Real love and spoiling what can't be spoiled

If you started reading this for a substantive analysis of the themes or filmmaking techniques of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I haven’t seen it yet. It doesn’t come out for another couple weeks in Australia.

But even without having seen it, I can tell you that it doesn’t seem like the type of movie that would be discussed on something referred to as a “spoiler special.”

That would be The Slate Spoiler Special, a recurring Slate podcast in which a roundtable of hosts (often featuring film critic Dana Stevens) goes through a recent film or TV show without worrying about keeping its secrets. I hate-listen to this podcast. Every once in a while it yields something I find genuinely useful, but more often than not, it inspires snark in me.

I won’t dredge all that up now because I’ve written about it before, but I often think the show is more appropriately referred to as Slate Plot Synopsis. That’s because the roundtable usually passes around the conch in a kind of tag team recitation of the plot, blow by blow, rarely providing what I would consider to be true analysis.

But the thing that’s annoying me in this case is that rarely does it actually involve spoilers. Oh, they tell you what happens in the plot, but more often than not, the plot is not particularly “spoilery.”

As in, it would seem, Booksmart. Now I understand that they have chosen to call the show this and they aren’t going to adjust the name of the show based on what movie they’re talking about, but I might suggest that it’s not that interesting to talk about a film on this show if it does NOT contain what we would traditionally think of as spoilers. As in, it would seem, Booksmart.

It just makes me laugh when they have this dramatic intro with lines of dialogue from the spoileriffic films The Sixth Sense, Soylent Green, Chinatown, Citizen Kane and Seven, then someone straightforwardly tells you that they’re going to be spoiling a teen romantic comedy that I understand has queer elements to it. (Maybe that’s the spoiler?)

If you’re wondering about the second half of my subject line, well, I’ll get to that now.

I didn’t listen to the Spoiler Special episode on Booksmart because I of course have not seen it yet. I did, however, listen to the segment they did on it on The Slate Culture Gabfest, on which Dana Stevens also serves as a co-host. And in a true case of the two shows cannibalizing each other, making the choice to cover it on Spoiler Special all the more ridiculous, Dana started by saying she thought she was all talked out on the movie after talking about it on the other show.

Dana did say she “really loved” the movie … which is not the same as loving it. (She went on to admit multiple problems with it.)

It made me realize that “really loving” something is kind of a ridiculous phrase.

When you say you “really love” a movie, that should be an instance of amplifying the degree to which you love it. But in reality, it’s a kind of backpedalling. If you really “really love” a movie, you just say you love it.

Which of these statements is stronger?

“I love Booksmart.”

“I really love Booksmart.”

Well, I guess the tone of voice factors in as well. And in Dana’s tone of voice, you could tell that “really loving” it meant being defensive about your affection for it and simultaneously acknowledging the reasons you might need to be defensive.

Love is love, someone wise once said.