St. Martin's has just published The Florence King Reader, an anthology.
THE American attention span always has gotten a lot of attention. The first to note our easy distractibility was Alexis de Tocqueville. His findings were echoed by Frederick Jackson Turner, but being an American, Turner used the more tactful and romantic ``restlessness.'' Other commentators were people with a stake in concentration, such as teachers, inventors, bridge players, and Jobean old salts who made boats-in-bottles. These earlier critics, who tended to use words like ``stick-to-itiveness,'' held that Americans could not concentrate because we could not sit still. This opinion prevailed until the television age, when a new kind of critic announced that sitting still was destroying our ability to concentrate.
Sociologists of the Fifties warned that TV viewers were falling into the habit of thinking in clumps of ten or fifteen minutes, until a commercial came on and temporarily shut down the cognitive process. Actually this was the Golden Age of the American attention span. Early TV had some meaty shows such as Hallmark Hall of Fame and Playhouse 90 that were presented live within the traditional boundaries of the drama, so the resultant thought-clumping was not very different from what playwrights had been doing for thousands of years.
The logic-friendly format of the theatrical act went out of style around the same time that more artistry went into commercials. Our attention span consequently shrank to about five minutes, according to the sociologists. It went on like this, with a new official attention span announced every few years, until it was down to thirty seconds. It stayed at that for a while, long enough to begin acquiring the cachet that attaches to permanence, but then the soundbite came along and turned thirty seconds into an eon.
No one has announced our new attention span yet, but there are hints. Bill Clinton promised to ``focus like a laser beam'' on the economy. A current bumper sticker, ``Practice Random, Senseless Acts of Kindness,'' effectively says that if you help more than one old lady across the street, instead of leaving the second one standing there while you rush off to hug the squeegee man, you are in a rut. Computers are getting faster and faster, with each new speed advertised as ``blazing,'' and Internet messages of ``snail f---!'' greet those who still use a 386.
Movies are becoming increasingly incoherent as scriptwriters strive for new ways to keep the restless interested. Gone is the orderly approach that Old Hollywood called ``backstory'' -- filling us in on the action up to the point where the movie begins. It's a technique as old as storytelling. Hamlet: the king has died; Rebecca: the first wife has died; The Odyssey: the hero is setting off for home after a long absence. This is all we need to know to follow the plot, but we need to know it right away.
Apparently feeling that logical narration is for snail fanciers, today's movie makers eschew both backstory and the traditional flashback in favor of the staccato technique known as ``cutting in and out.''
The movie opens with a scene of bankers in conference. We barely know who everyone is, when suddenly the dreary discussion of loans is interrupted by a split-second shot of a naked smooth leg draped over a naked hairy leg. This means that an affair was had, but we have as yet no idea who had it. Back to the bankers for a few minutes, then another split-second shot of a knife on a kitchen counter. When the bankers adjourn for lunch we see the entwined legs again. This time the hairy leg fades out and immediately fades in again, covered now in prison orange. The orange-leg shot is mixed with a shot of a boys' baseball team in orange socks; back and forth, faster and faster, man's leg, boy's leg, bad orange, good orange, while the soundtrack emits whirring, clicking noises to suggest someone snapping still photos as fast as humanly possible.
Never mind the popcorn, the best accompaniment for today's movies is a surge protector. Other cinematic devices designed to nail our elusive attention are the split-screen telephone conversation and the zoom shot that pulls a human dot on the horizon into an extreme close-up so fast that our stomachs turn over. But of all the techniques for concentrating the mind, the most ironic is the freeze frame. A character who stops dead in his tracks and assumes a basilisk stare is probably supposed to remind the audience to focus like a laser beam, but in fact it resembles nothing so much as that menopausal dilemma of standing motionless in the middle of a room, trying to remember what it was you came in to get.
MUCH of our flagging attention is a natural reaction against the unnecessary tedium we create for ourselves. As the country that enshrined the clarion call of ``quick 'n' easy'' and still believes ads promising mastery of a foreign language in only ``ten minutes a day,'' wouldn't it make sense for us to be on the parliamentary system? We could have got rid of Bill Clinton long ago, but no, we wait out the whole grinding, nerdy, petulant four years, and then wonder why we can't keep our minds on anything.
Our distractibility is also the inevitable residue of our undisciplined feelings. The American proclivity for leaving our emotional lights on has drained the battery of our attention span dry. The human spirit can take only so much of 24-hour coverage, memorial services, ribbons, teddy bears, crisis counseling, and moments of silence. We pay such obsessive attention to disasters and tragedies that we end up seeking respite in forgetfulness. (Quick, name one Teheran hostage.)
Welcome to America the Flea Circus. We now have a new disease, Attention Deficit Disorder, and like all democratic diseases, it does not discriminate. The good news is that by the time we run the gauntlet of ADD resources, clinics, programs, workshops, seminars, CBS Specials, and Sally Struthers promos, no one will remember what it is. J
-- FLORENCE KING