The Right to Sit Still

In this essay, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece considers how criticism, spectatorship, and the markers of the procedural overlap in a contemporary moment where leisure has been ceded to work. By reading across multiple objects, from MovieTok film and television reviews and YouTube video essays, to prestige film and television, to Marxist provocations, to cultural criticism, this essay argues that simply looking at media has been replaced by an obsessive drive toward content creation. Because watchers in late capitalism are encouraged always to produce and never to sit still, the liberatory potential of spectatorship has rapidly eroded into a race to treat every film and television show as a puzzle to be decoded rather than a mystery of ultimately unsolvable contemplation.