Vulgar Boredom, or What Andy Warhol Can Teach Us aboutCandy Crush

<jats:p>This article is an investigation of boredom in the company of screen-based media. Working across film theory, media theory, affect theory, and game studies, the author argues that boredom is at once a useful counterexample to the common presumption of a saturating aesthetic encounter in film and media studies, and an affective correlate to media theory’s figure of the withdrawal of digital technics from the grasp of human perception and attention. Furthermore, he argues that boredom is not necessarily something we wish to avoid, but rather a relational state that we sometimes aim to achieve in relation to media objects that are not engrossing, interesting, engaging, beautiful. His argument unfolds across three stages: a description of modernist ‘profound boredom’ in Andy Warhol’s early film ‘Stillies’, in which boredom is converted into interest by means of intellection or criticism; a theorization of the ‘vulgar boredom’ of mass culture, in relation to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, using psychoanalytical object-relations theory to help understand what happens when we seek out cinematic or mediatic boredom; and finally, a discussion of these results derived from the cinema in relation to King’s blockbuster casual game, Candy Crush Saga.</jats:p>