![[the who-baba oreilly]](https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/d3LgENio20wXD8pDyrbSb7cd9qd.jpg)
[the who-baba oreilly] (2026)
Directed by Eric Schuman
Eric Schuman's [the who-baba oreilly] is a three-minute documentary short about people waiting.
Consciousness Markers
The film documents whoever happens to be at a karaoke bar waiting through a synthesizer intro. No casting agenda is detectable, because there is no casting.
No LGBTQ+ themes, characters, or commentary are present. The film's sole concern is the patience, or lack thereof, of karaoke participants.
No feminist framing, messaging, or subtext is present. The patriarchy is not implicated in the length of the Baba O'Riley intro.
No racial consciousness is present. The film does not examine who gets to sing The Who, or who historically has been denied that opportunity.
No climate themes are present. The carbon footprint of running a synthesizer intro on a loop at a karaoke bar is, regrettably, not addressed.
No anti-capitalist messaging is present. The film does not interrogate who owns the rights to Baba O'Riley or the exploitative economics of the karaoke industrial complex.
No body positivity themes are present. The film is indifferent to the bodies waiting for the intro to end, however they are configured.
No neurodivergence themes are present. The fidgeting impatience of karaoke patrons is not framed as a neurodivergent experience, though the argument could be made.
No revisionist history is present. The film does not recontextualize The Who's legacy, Pete Townshend's intentions, or the cultural meaning of 1971 British rock.
The film has zero lecture energy. It observes. It does not instruct. It is, in this specific regard, a marvel.
Why it received this score
Eric Schuman's [the who-baba oreilly] is a three-minute documentary short about people waiting. Specifically, people waiting through the two-minute synthesizer and organ introduction to The Who's "Baba O'Riley" before they can sing at karaoke. That is the film. We have examined it from every available angle and can confirm that it is, in fact, still about that.
In an era in which the documentary form has been conscripted into service as a delivery mechanism for moral instruction, Schuman's film arrives as a kind of accidental anomaly. It has nothing to teach us about systemic inequality, ecological collapse, or the violence of normative beauty standards. It has something to show us about the particular expression a human face makes when it has been waiting for forty-five seconds and knows it must wait forty-five more. This is, against considerable odds, enough. The film screened at the New/Next Film Festival in Baltimore, where the program guide reportedly described it with the phrase "everyone loves karaoke." This is the most ideologically loaded statement the film generates.
Our ten-point analytical framework, applied here with the full rigor the discipline demands, has returned a score of zero across every marker. We present this result not as a failure of the instrument but as a testament to its precision. The film contains no feminist agenda, no racial consciousness, no lecture energy, and no discernible interest in any of the categories we were prepared to measure. It contains, instead, people waiting for a synthesizer intro to end. We scored it accordingly. We feel fine about this.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
People wait for the intro of Baba O'Riley by The Who to end so they can sing the song at karaoke.