Watching paint dry is an exercise in patience, watching Wavelength is an exercise in convincing yourself you are doing something more meaningful.

Wavelength is a 1967 experimental art film where you spend 45 minutes looking at a room. Roughly 3 events happen in said 45 minutes, and their importance to anything is questionable. As a film it dares you to get bored watching it, I instead, was fascinated. If you wish to watch Wavelength you can do so here Wavelength (on archive.org).

This is not a review of the movie, reviewing it to me is missing the point. This is a retelling of my experience watching the film. Tainted by only containing what I remember, as I took no notes while watching. To me, the point of this movie is what goes on in the viewer’s mind while watching it. As such, I explain what went on in mine. This will include discussing the movie only in so far as I was thinking about the movie while watching it.

To start the movie, I was aware this was going to be boring, or at least boring if you don’t know how to entertain yourself. As such, my first experience was to do what I always do when bored, look around the room. I observed the chairs, desk, the closet and tried to make out what was outside the window. This was complicated by the awkward lighting and frequent color changing, this was the first thing I spent time thinking about. I was unsure if it was maybe just an artifact of the time, but I didn’t believe it was, so why do the colors and lighting change so much? I never really found a satisfying answer, this bothered me slightly.

After this I was mostly thinking about why I was watching and what I was gaining from it. Why I decided to do it in the first place, and then something happened in the movie. Two women walked in and interrupted my thought process, which felt very strange, as by all means I’d been alone with my thoughts for some time. Now my brain was just fully focused on the movie and what was happening. In practice, nothing was, they sat down, turned on the radio for a few minutes, then left. But it did engage me the whole time, which is so intriguing. By sheer lack of stimulation even a normally very boring scene can be made to engage.

After that scene had come and gone, I started thinking about the experience of watching, mostly noticing I was not getting distracted, which surprised me. My mind was wandering, but almost all thoughts were still about Wavelength in some way. I had thoughts about whether we are expected to imagine a story happening somewhere off-screen. About whether the cameraperson was essentially having the same experience as I was. How someone who is not like me might experience this movie. This is also when the quote at the start of the post popped into my mind and stuck there. Because I could not fully decide whether I think watching Wavelength is more meaningful than watching paint dry. Is there existing an artistic—

A guy stumbles into the room, falls to the floor, seemingly dead. The camera doesn’t move, he is mostly off-screen but his jacket is visible—

I tried to capture the being snapped out of your train of thought by that moment in text. This was the most exciting thing that did so, although my intrigue about the film is that any noticeable change caused the same effect, the camera’s white-balancing changing so I could see outside slightly better also snapped me out in the same way.

The body itself is addressed later in the last of what I would call the 3 “events”, but ultimately I didn’t think that much about the guy, I wondered why he was added from an artistic perspective. Maybe it lends credence to the theory that you are meant to imagine a story happening outside the view of the camera. Maybe it is just meant to get less engaged viewers to pay attention again. As with most things in this movie, I don’t have a satisfying conclusion, only a thought process I found engaging.

After the last scene I was starting to get somewhat bored, which led me to once again consider why I was watching. Was I trying to prove my attention span wasn’t short, not really, but it’s a fun hypothesis my brain came up with. Would this be artistically less valuable of an experience if I stopped here and didn’t finish it? That question ended up getting an answer in my head of yes, after having led me back to thinking about watching paint dry. The existence of artistic intent in Wavelength helped my brain fill in the gaps between self-reflection in a way that organically kept me focused, which I don’t think would be possible for a purely patience-based exercise.

The last thing that popped in my head and I spent time considering was: If the artistic intent of the movie was counter to my experience, would it be less meaningful? The way I made that more concrete in my head was imagining “Wavelength but it ends with a jumpscare”. This would radically alter the tone of the movie, as the boredom is no longer self-justifying but meant to lull the audience into a sense of security, and yet, I think the boredom would be equally meaningful to me. As I would’ve had the same experience until the end. The jumpscare would’ve reframed the experience, but not undermined it.

Roughly here in my thought process, the movie ended. My thought process involved a lot of questions and few answers, but I don’t really mind that. Answers don’t make something interesting, questions you can keep pondering do.

I will say not every meaningful thought I had is present in this article, for example, I thought a lot about writing this article while watching. But I think it captures the experience reasonably well. If you wish to watch Wavelength after reading this, I am interested to hear your thoughts on it.