College Professors Are Stunned The “TikTok Generation” Can’t Sit Through Long Movies In Film Courses – But What Did They Expect?
For a lot of us of a certain vintage, especially those who grew up without a smartphone welded to our palms, film study sounded like a dream. Honestly, it bordered on a vacation. Going to school to watch movies and talk about them? “Sign me up,” cried generations of bright‑eyed youths who mistook their extremely average taste for latent auteurism. It didn’t feel like homework, or so the brochure implied.
Take it from someone who actually trudged down that well‑worn path: spending a few hours a week in a dark classroom watching movies is fun. But the moment you’re expected to think critically – and worse, produce 20 pages on the French New Wave or the Hays Code – the dream curdles into a chore. Like playing in a garage band or wrestling on the indie circuit, the joy has to be its own reward. No one’s paying you in anything more glamorous than pizza, hot dogs, and gas money.
And that’s assuming you put the work in – which is a big assumption these days. You have to be invested, dialed in, and actually care about what you’re doing. That used to be a basic courtesy, maybe even a craft, that older generations (yes, including some Millennials) managed to master. The next wave (the one supposedly destined to “change the world,” as every generation is told) seems far less interested in dialing in – not even for a couple reels of prestige cinema.
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At least, that’s the picture painted by modern college “professors” surveyed for a piece in The Atlantic – which, granted, is your cue to take everything with a generous grain of salt, but let’s proceed. According to the article and The Hollywood Reporter, 20 film‑studies professors reported students who can’t sit through a film without checking their phones, and who can’t answer basic questions about the movie they just watched.
There’s now such a staggering attention deficit that students can’t recall a single thing about an art film playing directly in front of them. And trust me, these aren’t tiny laptop screenings in a dorm lounge. They’re watching on a massive projection screen, in a cavernous room, with surround sound that could wake the dead. I know because I’ve sat in those very seats.
Take University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Jeff Smith, for example. The man couldn’t coax his students into anything resembling a spirited discussion of François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. A landmark of the French New Wave, reduced to background noise for kids who can’t go ninety minutes without checking whether someone liked their latest post.
“More than half the class picked one of the wrong options, claiming the characters were hiding from the Nazis (the film is set during World War I) or getting drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who, shockingly, does not appear in the movie),” writes Atlantic reporter Rose Horowitch. And so, in a move that feels depressingly familiar, some instructors have resorted to assigning “portions” of films – the cinematic equivalent of the way high‑school English teachers now assign “portions” of novels.
THR contrasts this with the very real phenomenon of young people flocking to theaters, logging every viewing on Letterboxd, and helping generate the kind of grassroots buzz that turned several films into breakout hits last year. Northwestern professor Lynn Spigel points out the obvious truth: “the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”
So here we are again: the youth are supposedly getting dumber and lazier, except for the chosen few who rise above the sludge. Nothing new under the sun; I’ve heard this chorus before, so forgive me if I don’t start doomsaying. It’s the same anxieties in a new era – or, more accurately, new kids with the same parents. And I’m not here to romanticize countercultural trends that were only ever countercultural in hindsight. That stuff never goes away.
What these academics are clutching their pearls over is, frankly, a two‑part problem: on one hand, the predictable fallout of a world rewired by technology, and on the other, a wound their beloved industry and art form managed to inflict on themselves. Let’s be honest: the “self‑inflicted wound” here isn’t exactly a mystery. Movies have swollen into full‑blown endurance trials.
We’re in an era where filmmakers mistake runtime for genius, cranking out four‑hour odysseys, multi‑chapter “events,” and self‑important epics that treat the audience like marathon runners instead of viewers. Between the Brutalist‑length slogs and the ever‑expanding Avatar installments, half of modern cinema feels like a flex. Pretension and self‑indulgence have become du jour, and then everyone acts shocked when Gen Z‑ers tap out long before the credits roll.
These are the vanguards of the TikTok Generation whom were raised on bite‑size content, microblogs, and doom‑scrolling as a sport. And sure, Avatar is an outlier, mostly because it has a built-in fanbase, even if it evaporates from the cultural conversation the moment the Christmas lights come down.
But let’s be real: aging Boomer James Cameron isn’t making these movies for Gen Z‑ers anyway. He’s making them for himself, because he has the money, the clout, and absolutely no one left who can tell him “Maybe don’t make it three hours and forty‑two minutes.”
Maybe that’s the real punchline: we keep treating this like a moral failing when half the problem is the ecosystem we built around them. And then you have the rest of the cultural circus – the endless discourse, the think‑pieces, the way every movie somehow becomes a referendum on civilization. It’s exhausting by design. So of course Gen Z‑ers are opting out. Who wouldn’t, when even escapism comes with homework?
And honestly, if the choice is between a four‑hour opus weighed down by auteur ego and a 45‑second clip of a raccoon stealing a doughnut, I can’t entirely blame them. At a certain point, you start to wonder if Idiocracy (and especially the “OW! MY B*LLS” show) wasn’t a warning so much as a slow‑rolling prophecy; not because Gen Z is doomed, but because Boomers and the self‑styled visionaries of modern cinema keep mistaking excess for enlightenment.
If that’s the present and future before us, then the raccoon might be the only one making sensible life choices.
