Most of the time when I’m working I need a little background noise. Sometimes that means music, sometimes podcasts, sometimes streamers. Most recently I’ve been working with the Criterion 24/7 channel on my second monitor, and I swear to god it’s fixing my mental health.
My husband and I are very aware of how much bullshit we let into our minds. We try not to binge television shows—after three episodes, we watch something else. For every fluffy blockbuster we watch, we make an appointment to watch something off the beaten path. We pop on an episode of The Gilded Age before embarking on an hours-long baseball game. It’s all about balance: If you’re going to have cotton candy, you have to eat your vegetables too.
But when I work, I often seek out the kind of slop I try to avoid in the rest of my life. For a long time my bread and butter for working was extremely long Let’s Plays, but I also keep podcasts in the rotation for a similar reason: I just like to hear the sound of human voices while I work on something. Streamers like NorthernLion and Hasan Piker have also worked their way into my routines, though there’s only so much I can take of grown men playing video games at this point in my life, as amusing as their anecdotes may be.
Reality television (my husband hates it, so I can only watch it in my office), podcasts and streamers genuinely do help me to get started with my work, because they help me feel like I’m not just typing alone in my office with my cat. The problem with all these sources of “content” is that they make me feel like my brain is melting after a while. So last week, on a whim, I tossed on the Criterion’s 24/7 channel, which plays movies from the Criterion Collection 24 hours a day, and I had the complete opposite effect.
I know that watching a dense, foreign language film like Ceddo while working on an essay or typing emails isn’t going to help me retain much of what I’ve seen. But that said, looking over to my second screen and seeing a frame that’s been arranged deliberately, with care, makes me simply feel more like an adult. I know I can’t really watch the movie with the focus it deserves, but at the very least it’s another really cool film to add to my list, and my growing collection of Blu Rays from Criterion.
Because of Criterion 24/7, which is available with a subscription to the Criterion’s streaming service, I’ve enjoyed the pleasures of Orson Welles’s The Trial, Pierre Creton’s experimental gay coming of age story Un Prince, as well as In Celebration, which features a very young Brian Cox. Sometimes I’m still in the mood for slop, but it’s a more balanced diet. Even if I’m not grasping every detail from these films, I still feel better off for having seen them—and am sometimes drawn into ten or fifteen minute stretches of beautifully framed shots. Since all of these movies are already in the Criterion streaming collection, I can always watch them again when I’m not working. But when I am working, they remind me that I am not sitting around bullshitting. Like these artists, I have the ability to make things with care, too.
My mom, who is a professor, used to watch Turner Classic Movies all day long while grading papers before she formed a mild addiction to home renovating shows on Bravo. Maybe I picked up this habit from her instead of inventing it wholecloth. Either way, watching images that are more than incidental, and aspire to more than just entertainment, is healing my neural pathways. It gives me no joy to admit this, but my mom had a point there.
