anecdata | On Habits and Hot Fuzz

As for routines in of themselves being a necessary evil for making us more machine like. I say like in most things, they are not good or bad, they simply are. What matters are their outputs.

A friend wrote the following in relation to this article . I agree that routines and habits are not morally good or bad- they just are. They are shorthand by which we have managed to survive. But like any solution, they can overstay their usefulness and welcome.

I have struggled with adopting good habits and leaving behind bad habits. And what surprises me the most is how resilient they tend to be. These shorthands that we develop stick around. You may have managed your bad habits for over a year, or more but slip up once and it is a short drop down. Last year alone, I slipped up more time than I can count. It gave me a newfound respect for folks who have stayed sober after once being alcoholics. I also understand why they never leave the label "recovering alcoholic". Because you never fully get rid of the beast. The neural connections lay there in rest, waiting for the off chance you rekindle them.

New habits are made more difficult when they tend to give you the same chemical rush, albeit much slower. Your brain just wants that next dopamine. It does not care that you will enjoy learning chinese in the long run. Because right now it does not give the same amount of dopamine as 10 minutes on instagram/snapchat/social media of choice. I imagine it is the same with smoking and drinking. Yes, you could meditate or go for a quick jaunt in the park to feel at ease, but is it not just so much simpler to grab a pack or bottle? Why spend more time doing a thing, when you could get the same (or similar) feeling from an act that takes considerably less time? In a society so consumed by effectiveness, it can seem backwards to let things take the time they do.

While reading the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, I encountered the german word "Eigenzeit". It translates to intrinsic time, or a perception of time that is outside of clock time. The author interprets it as the time something just takes. Reading a book, often feels like this to me. You cannot rush it. But I realize now that my rejection of this applies to movies, tv shows, and even friendships.

I tried watching Hot Fuzz, and was uncomfortable the whole time. In fact, I needed to pause halfway and go for a walk because it commanded my time. There was no way to get the experience of the movie without watching the movie. You cannot rush it. Whilst sitting down for the movie, my mind ran through millions of other things that could be done with my time. Things that I could not do.

This was already a concern for me even before starting the movie. My friend had recommended the movie to me last week. Yet, it took me nearly the entire week to watch it. Not from a lack of time. I had stayed home from work two days out of illness, the timing was perfect. What else were I to do while ill? Watching a movie seems like it would be a perfect sick-time activity. Yet the Eigenzeit of watching the movie seemed unbearable. The two hour movie demanded felt like an eternity. It streched out considerably in my mind. I was being pulled in million of other directions by the tyranny of shoulds.

It was not until I succumed to deciding that I could actually sit to watch the movie. Even then, it took a while to actually stop my habits and consciously choose to watch it. Watching this movie would mean doing things different. The movie would take the time it took. The clock time of two hours was true, of course, but it felt much longer. Upon my second seating to watch it, I did not stop halfway or at all for that matter. Once I accepted that I was going to do nothing else, and that there was no cure to make it so I could do two things at once, I enjoyed it.

The movie's main character was likeable. I had a peace lily plant as well, and kept it alive for three years. It ultimately fell, like all other plants do, to my black thumb. But it holds the record for the one I kept alive the longest.

The MC has a fixation on his work, felt a little more than familiar. One of the thing that really continues to pile up on his psyche is that he seems to see things quicker than his contemporaries. Especially following his move to the village. Even though he turns out to be right, his concern is not their understanding but their acccepting his reasoning. Without much reasoning being given. And in the first few acts, he doles out his immutable application of the law habitually. Machinelike. There are several scenes where it is made clear that he is unliked by the other officers. He makes little effort to develop camraderie or trust. He just performs habitually. Of course these were the same habits that had allowed him to excel as a MET officer in London. Cream of the crop, actually. So much so that the top brass sent him to a middle of nowhere village to police because he was making everyone else look bad and had absolutely zero self-awareness to the fact.

Of course, the beginning of last act of the movie marks when he recognizes this. He sees the Bad Boys 2 dvd in a gas station shop and understands that his habits had not worked here. The dvd serves as a callback to a conversation with his PD Partner, about how he could never turn off his mind. And him sharing how it had interfered with his romantic, personal, and apparently professional life. He needed to do something to break out of his mechanical application of the law. And he does.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the last act is insane. Does everyone in this village have guns? Well, yes. They foreshadowed this in act one when one of the detectives said something about everyone in the village packing heat. Diverging from the habits topic, it is amazing how many things this movie subtly foreshadows. Heck, one of the main antagonists basicaly comes right up to the cop and says "arrest me, I'm a slasher"... "of prices!" Guess what he turned out to be? Yep. Incredible.

By the concluding scene, we can see that the MC has learned to roll with the punches in the office. He has broken the mechanical application of habits, and embraced the unpredictability. There are small hints of his growth throughout the movie. But the real pay off does not come until the end when he's made time to go get flowers for his PD partner's mother's grave. Something he mentions much earlier in the movie as having missed because he "could not turn it off".