There’s a very famous book by Richard Carlson called Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… and It’s All Small Stuff. The mantra that Carlson preaches in his self-help book is that people tend to get worked up over everyday minutia and that the end result of this behavior is counter-productive to both their personal happiness and societal betterment. Shockingly, Americans really bought into Carlson’s message that they shouldn’t worry about much of anything. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff is one of the best selling books of the last decade and has become a metaphoric representative of the type of society in which a surprising majority of people think that we should be living.
I mention this here because I have a somewhat different opinion than Carlson. I believe the exact opposite to be true. My book would be titled Start Freaking Out Over the Small Stuff… and It’s All Small Stuff. I’d sell 89 copies to a combination of people who are as acutely aware of little things as me and people with bad eyesight who thought they were in fact purchasing Carlson’s book.
American culture (and really any culture) is not made up of four or five big ideas. It’s made up of millions of small elements that are very tenuously connected to one another that create an ever-changing whole. It’s the small stuff that makes up the big stuff. And it’s all small stuff. Particularly when it comes to shifting societal trends.
The best analogy for this is that old adage that everyone learned about in the sixth grade. If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump out immediately. If you throw a frog into a pot of luke warm water and slowly raising the temperature to a boil, he’ll stay put and ultimately be turned into a tasty soup. It’s the gradual societal-wide tolerance of these unacceptable small things that paves the path for greater manipulations and cultural malfeasances in the future.
Presently, one of America’s greatest cultural hurdles is the dumbing down of, well, really everything. It’s not just that ‘smart’ is becoming a niche, it’s that thanks to a weird friendship between political correctness and politeness, it’s finally okay to be stupid. Everything happens for a reason, every person is unique, everyone’s opinion is valid and one needs to hear both sides of every argument… even if it’s a debate over what color the sky is. This is the new American social contract.
This movement slowly built during the nineties and went mainstream with the Bush/Gore debates of 2000 where Gore won the issues debate, but lost the battle for the public opinion because, as so many commentators pointed out, he would often ‘humiliate’ Bush by correcting him when he made a false statement.
Rather naturally, this whole thing drives me absolutely crazy. It’s not simply the elevation of perception above fact, it’s that fact is now debatable or malleable in the proper circumstances. And people wonder why the test scores in United States are slipping so dramatically.
To this point, this column has all been a prelude to my vitriolic attack on one small, almost miniscule societal trend that has been rapidly gaining acceptance on the periphery of the film industry. This trend is so tiny that even people who are hyper-conscious of the minute details of American culture might overlook it; it’s doubtful that Carlson would even bother telling me not to sweat it. This trend is displayed in the below graphic, lifted directly from the Chicago Tribune’s Metromix web-page.
The graphic is, of course, a listing of the times that the movie The Bourne Ultimatum is going to be playing on its opening weekend at an AMC Theater in suburban Chicago. The movie officially opens on Friday, August 3rd.
When I showed the graphic to several friends, I was met with blank stares and confused hand gestures. “What’s wrong with that?” they asked me. I pointed at the listing for a 12:01 showing on Thursday. “That’s the midnight showing on Thursday,” my friends told me. “So?” I took a deep breath and said slowly, “There’s only one problem. That’s not actually taking place on Thursday. It’s on Friday.” Even after this revelation, I received more of the same from my friends; looks of wonderment and a long, drawled, “And…?”
As the expression goes, there is a time and a place for everything. There is, and can be, only one day of August 2, 2007, one time of 1:30 PM on August 2, 2007 and so forth. August 2, 2007 begins when the clock chimes midnight and ends after the 60th second of 11:59 passes that night. A 12:01 AM showing of The Bourne Ultimatum on the day it opens would distinctly be early in the morning of Friday, August 3. The date the AMC Theaters listed in the papers, on line and everywhere else for The Bourne Ultimatum was flat out wrong. If people actually showed up at the time listed, they would be 24 hours early for the movie.
Not knowing exactly what to expect or what I was looking for, I contacted the managers at three local AMC Theaters, the Quarry, River East and 600 North Michigan, all of which had incorrectly listed a midnight showing of The Bourne Ultimatum as taking place on Thursday night, and asked them why this was the case.
The first manager I spoke to listened to my question and said, “The midnight showing is on our books as a Thursday showing. Our business day ends when the theater closes for the night. Therefore, we list it as a Thursday showing.”
I took this in stride and said, “You can’t show the movie before it’s opening day though, right?”
“No. We can’t do that.”
“So then your midnight showing has to take place on Friday, right?”
“Right.”
“But you’re distinctly listing it as a Thursday showing.”
Silence.
Then, “Um, yeah, I guess it is a Friday showing.” She righted herself and said, “But it’s on our Thursday business day.” A pause. Then, “But that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
The second manager I spoke to was far more helpful. “Yes,” he told me, “the Thursday showing is actually on Friday.” He went on to explain that, for advertising purposes, it was easier to do it this way. “We advertise our show times in the papers every day,” he said. “If people picked up their Thursday papers at six in the morning and saw that we were advertising a midnight showing of the movie that night, they’d figure they already missed it. It’s in Thursday’s paper.”
“Do people ever show up at the wrong time, I mean, the right time, a day earlier?” I queried. The manager sighed and said, “Yeah, sometimes they do.”
When I spoke to the third manager, I began to ask her my question about the 12:01 AM Friday showing of The Bourne Ultimatum when she interrupted me. “Thursday, showing,” she said. “It’s between Thursday night and Friday morning at 12:01.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s Friday.”
“We call it Thursday,” she told me. She then asked me where I got the idea that it was on Friday. “Did you see it advertised somewhere as being on Friday?” she questioned, a little worried.
“It is actually on Friday,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But you didn’t see it anywhere listed on Friday did you?” I told her I hadn’t and she sighed, relieved. “That’s good,” she explained. “When people see that we’re having a midnight showing on Friday, they tend to assume that means midnight between Friday and Saturday.”
“So you’re purposely listing it on the wrong day?” I asked.
The manager didn’t say yes or no. Instead she said, “We list the midnight showing on Thursday because most people think of that as the showing between Thursday and Friday.”
On the outset, it doesn’t seem as though something like incorrectly listing the day of a midnight showing of movie is worth trifling about. It’s not until you look at the principle behind the incorrect listing—AMC corporate officers are figuring that they will get more people at their screenings when they advertise the WRONG DATE than if they advertise the correct one—that you realize that maybe, just maybe, we should start sweating some of the small stuff.
