essays & articles
Short Cuts,
Youtube Shorts
Youtube Shorts
by BASHIR ADEN
November 20th, 2025
During a viewing of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts for the first time in a while, I was reminded of our growingly stale short form content platforms; YouTube Shorts.
This is probably not what Altman intended with his three hour film, a mosaic of Raymond Carver adaptations braided together across twenty-two characters in Los Angeles, which is very much a product of a certain idea of what ambitious cinema. But something about the process inwhich Altman cuts between these parallel storylines, never letting any one breathe too long before pivoting to another, made me feel like I was watching something that understood, at a molecular level, what is working for short form storytelling.
Youtube is a platform embedded with the inherent approach that short form storytelling is essential. So when Youtube Shorts became a permanent staple in their function, the demand for shorter consumable narratives. Much like the soap opera inspired plots, the infidelities and quiet despair and sudden violences in Short Cuts, this works precisely because we never spend too long with any of them.
The conversation about film length has never been at a confused stalemate than it is right now. Three hours is treated as either a badge of serious artistic pretenstion or an act of attention aggression against the audience, depending on who you ask. But this framing misses vital. The question of whether something is long or short has never been the right question. The right question is whether the form matches the feeling intended to be produced.
Television understood this and then forgot it and then rediscovered it on the internet. The golden age of prestige TV was built on the idea that serialized narrative could do things cinema couldn’t, that depth would accumulate the way it does in life. And that was true, for a while. But what actually happened when television moved online is that it fractured into something more interesting. The episode got shorter. The clip became the unit of culture. And then the clips got digestible in the way that a short story by Carver is fulfilling: precise and loaded and aware of everything it is leaving out. Look at the narrative complexity of this ridiculous comedic skit on Youtube. Short form creators figured out, almost by accident, a grammar of compression that constrains and produces its own aesthetic, and that aesthetic is not inferior to cinema’s, it is just different.
What complicates all of this is that the opposite tendency is also thriving. The best YouTube essayists are doing film criticism and cultural history at a level that most magazines abandoned years ago. Kick streamers are broadcasting themselves doing nothing for twenty-four hours a day for a month straight. People are watching hours of someone else playing a video game not because anything is happening but because the ambient continuity of it is comforting. This is not so different from what soap operas always understood, which is that some audiences don’t want narrative resolution, they want narrative company. These two tendencies, the compressed and the infinite, seem contradictory but I think they are responses to the same thing: an environment of total algorithmic information overwhelm where people reach for different kinds of anchors. The short form gives you something you can hold in your hand. The long form gives you somewhere to live.
What has quietly collapsed in the middle is the ninety-to-one-hundred-and-twenty minute theatrical feature, which asks for a sustained and undivided attention that feels increasingly like a historical artifact. However, the Backrooms, beginning as internet lore, crystallized by hundreds of long-form additions to it’s ever-growing narrative has finally spawned into, ironically, a 1.45 hr A24 film.
The future of the internet and cinema at large, is short form, and everyone more or less knows this. The platforms are optimized for it, the algorithms reward it, and the aesthetics of it have matured to the point where it doesn’t feel like a consolation prize for people who can’t sit still. Which brings me back to Altman, who made a three hour film out of the instinct that the Present adn the perspective was actually right. The stories in Short Cuts don’t resolve so much as they bleed, the way Carver’s stories bled, at the moment when life has revealed something true and can’t think of anything useful to add. That feeling, of being dropped into something mid stream-of-conciousness and then abruptly returned to your own life, is more or less exactly what it feels like to live in 2026. Altman got there first.