The Art of Re-watching.
The Other day, I did the trending NGL thingy on Instagram. This app lets your Insta followers send you anonymous messages. One of the queries was which is my favourite movie. Like many cinephiles I don’t have a single favourite cinema; I have multiple movies that I adore. I tried to think and list down my all-time favourite movies. There were too many. But it was easy to recall the ones which I have rewatched. Not once or twice, but a number of times.
What is it with re-watching? I have watched the TV Series Friends a lot of times, I would have completed the whole series from the first to the last episode at least four times. Almost 100 hours X 4 = 400 hours of my life (So well spent XD).
This is apart from watching random episodes on Moody Mondays or those ‘Friends comedy clips’ or ‘bloopers’ on YouTube channels during crampy periods.
When it comes to rewatching Friends or The Big Bang Theory, I used to think it was because of the humour. I know each and every turn of the scene, piece of dialogue and at what exact moment the unnecessary laugh track would play; I still watch them again, laugh and enjoy. Yet, rewatch value is not always about the comic quality of the content.
Arrival by Denis Villeneuve is a rather serious film which I have watched five or six times. The gripping and thrilling, Gone Girl is another one. I have rewatched A death in the Gunj multiple times however unsettling and poignant an experience it is. Then I realized it is just not movies or series that one chooses to re-watch or re-experience. Or songs that we re-listen to in a loop.
We save our favourite memes and funny videos for the same reason. Like the video of the kid who keeps on saying ‘I didn’t poop but I peed’. I rewatch it when I need assurance about the ways of the world and hope about tomorrow’s children.
Just like we all have our ‘comfort go-to food’, we have our comfort content too. On many days, with hectic work and so, we would not have the right mind to process new content. Instead, we crave the comfort of the familiar…yet enjoyable. We wait to watch what we already know, yet we laugh again at that punchline. It doesn’t have the inhibiting newness which demands new thoughts, new comprehension and new-post watch googling. Still, it might provoke new thoughts in an already aware direction.
We love the passivity of re-watching especially when our brain is too dead to deal with new content — no new storyline, no new character arcs, no suspense. The research by Robert Zajonc in the 1960s was the initial turning point in psychology to identify the concept of the “mere-exposure effect” — This explains that we humans tend to prefer things with which we are already familiar. In another sense, the more we see something, the more we love it. This is much used in advertising to propaganda.
This is coupled with the concept of Perceptual Fluency — the ease of processing stimuli due to familiarity. The more easily we process something, the better we like it. Yes, that kind of explains (some of) our love for cheesy romcoms!
It could also be the memory of the first experience; how you began watching that TV show at an uneasy phase in life and how it got you through it. Or how you watched it with someone beloved and bonded over it.
Rewatching also stems from the pure joy of the art of appreciation. Every time I watch Arrival I adore how marvellously the plot comes full circle. In Gone Girl, I love how the character of Amy Dunne delivers the bloody sweetness of vengeance. We rewatch because we can appreciate the craft of creation again and again.
It is refreshing to re-experience something old and familiar. The ‘not-new’ is not always boring. It evokes memories and marks the possibility of enjoying something known in a new unknown way.
