Stop binge-watching. Start micro-dosing.

I now obsessively watch the same movie over and over again in tiny doses — and I'm loving it

A woman with a tiny television on her tongue.
(Image credit: Illustrated | UberImages/iStock, AF archive/ Alamy Stock Photo)

Last year, after 20 years of hardly thinking about it at all, I became obsessed with James Cameron's Titanic. Though this fascination manifested in all kinds of theories — that it was a movie about gender, about capitalism, about Cameron accidentally preparing a generation of viewers for the world as they knew it heaving and cracking in half beneath them — it was really, in the end, about love. I loved Titanic, I had always loved Titanic, and at the end of the day, for the period of about four months that I spent thinking about it and theorizing it and enjoying it over and over again, there was rarely anything I wanted to watch more. And so I would often relax in the evening, or power up in the morning, by watching a just a bit of Titanic: the scene where Jack and Rose meet on the prow of the ship, or the first 15 minutes, or the last 15. I would pay the movie a little visit, as if I was riding my bike around a crush's house. And then I would move on.

Titanic was the movie that taught me what I now think of as the art and joy of the media micro-dose: the practice of integrating a movie — or a "text," if you want to sound fancy and academic and potentially even productive — into your life.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us

Sarah Marshall's writings on gender, crime, and scandal have appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Fusion, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015, among other publications. She tweets @remember_Sarah.