Nichols: What's the best way to spend 121 hours?

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Your palms sweat. Your mouth dries up. Your nervous system starts to shut down. You bleed from your unmoving, unblinking eyes. You can feel your melted brain seeping into your spinal cord.

Only 20 movies left to go.

This will be you if you're one of eight competitors in next week's Netflix Movie Watching World Championship. Between Oct. 2 and 7, five “endurance champions” and three ordinary citizens will watch 56 movies in a row for a chance at $10,000, a Netflix lifetime subscription (which seems odd since the event will probably turn the winner off to movies forever), something called the Popcorn Bowl Trophy and a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 121 hours of movies, each interrupted only by a 10-minute break to do silly things like use the restroom.

My gut instinct is to make fun of the people in this competition. After all, who has the time to spend an entire work week doing nothing but watch movies? People who don't work, that's who.

It's easy to dismiss this as the ultimate waste of time, as something that is less than true sport because comatose people could legitimately compete. If sloth is truly a deadly sin, a meteor should strike the Plexiglas Netflix Movie Watching Arena in Times Square a day into competition.

But how easy can it possibly be to do anything for that long?

Here is the complete, unabridged list of things I can do for 121 consecutive hours: breathe

Even that depends on the mold count.

As reluctant as I may be to call current movie-watching world record holder Ashish Sharma an “athlete,” that sort of dedication to anything is commendable. Anyone who has sat through “Shrek the Third” knows it can be hard to keep your eyes open and on the screen for even 90 minutes. Imagine that 56 times over, with the added pressure of having medical professionals there who will monitor the contestants to see if they are actually watching the movie or just staring at the screen, according to a Netflix press release.

That kind of intense scrutiny over five days will make even the most passive, mundane and sedentary activity seem like running the Boston Marathon... in a blizzard... while on fire. (No, the snow wouldn't put out the fire, because the snow would be on fire, too. Nice try, though.)

If that doesn't convince you that movie-watching is a legitimately tough task, maybe it ought to be combined with another oft-derided pseudo-sport whose supporters point to endurance as a key factor: NASCAR. Try going around a track at 200 miles per hour while keeping all your attention on the complete works of Tyler Perry.

Maybe then you'd appreciate what these unsung heroes will go through in the pursuit of glory.

Nichols is an Overland Park sophomore in creative writing.

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