the m0vie blog

Ah, mobile phones. Or cellular telephones to our overseas readers. How did we ever get by without them. Can you imagine a time when you were actually able to have a legitimate excuse for ignoring people trying to get into contact with you? When you were unreachable, save at home or at work? I reached my teenage years just as mobile phones became truly moble – I came of age as they became standard accessories for everyone. So I’ve never really lived in a world without them. So I’ve never really had a chance to stop and think about how they’ve influenced movie-making and the like. While they’ve undoubedly made it easier to write genres like dramas or romances where you no longer have to worry about characters sharing a geographic location to have a conversation, I think their biggest area of influence has been on horrors or thrillers, movies which took great pride in isolating individuals and having them face threats or challenges on their own. How has this changed?

Is there a life on the line?

The truth is that relatively little has changed, at least for the most part. The appeal of the notion of individuals truly isolated to confront a challenge or personal objective is an appealing one from a storytelling point of view. The hero’s journey isn’t half as compelling if help is a phonecall away. Nobody wants to pay to see a slasher movie where the blonde cheerleader, on discovering his boyfriend’s mangled corpse, decides to call the police and allow them to swarm the area looking for the killer while she sits at the station drinking coffee and receiving counselling. We want her to scream, run away, defeat the evil sharp-object-wielding maniac (or not, depending on how bad the movie is) – all on her own. Imagine how much of an anti-climax the Shining would have been had Jack’s wife reached the police officers down the mountain and had them cart him off at the first sign of trouble. I doubt it would be the classic it’s considered today.

Mobile phones infringe on that tried-and-tested narrative. In fact, if present, they seriously undermine it. We live in a world where it is near impossible to be out of touch, so help should never be too far away. This undermines the basic and primal fear of being alone and being prey to something outside regular society – it’s kinda pointless if you can just call regular society to protect you again.

So a lot of movies just ignore this fairly revolutionary technology. Or might as well. How many black spots for mobile coverage are there in the United States (particularly the Deep South)? Hell, losing signal is perhaps the first sign that you’re about to find yourself fighting for your life or become the victim of a crazed clan of sadistic [insert horror menace here]s. Other movies consciously deprive the heroes of their mobiles – through theft, accident or conscious destruction. Other such movies couldn’t be bothered to muster up the energy to do even that. They allow the characters to use the mobiles, but ensure that help never arrives in anything approaching a reasonable time. It’s just another way of rendering the phones worthless. The amount of movies that would be cut short be a functioning mobile phones… well, I’ll let College Humour make my case for me.

I don’t mean this as an inherent criticism. Any number of good to great movies simply wouldn’t work if those plot devices weren’t used. It should be remembered that plot devices aren’t inherently good or bad when used properly (which is to enable storytelling), they just are. I simple cite this as an example of how mobile phones are, despite the fact they are everywhere, arguably a piece of technology that Hollywood has yet to come fully to grips with – not because they don’t understand it (which, I imagine, is why movies have a really bizarre understanding of how the internet works – for example), but because they would seriously impact the telling of a certain type of story.

Yet, for all the difficulty that this everyday device causes while telling a certain type of story, one imagines it must offer opportunities to tell others. If it hinders stories that rely on isolating the individual from protective social forces, surely enables further exploration about interconnectivity or the lack of privacy? The ability to reach out and grab someone across the globe – and, in turn, the ability to be reached and grabbed from across the globe.

There have been some great movies touching on the idea. In my opinion, the most inventive thriller of the last decade was Phone Booth. While it wasn’t explicitly about the era of mobile phones, being set at “the last phone booth in New York”, they cast a large shadow. The phone booth is a refuge and an escape. Ironically, in the era of the mobile, it becomes the most private place on earth (particularly for a man whose wife checks his mobile phone bill). In this era of rapid communication and instant accessibility, the phone booth becomes almost sacred: a confessional.

Similarly the thriller Cellular (a rather unseen vehicle for Captain America star Chris Evans), a decidely good-to-very-good thriller which based itself on the rather simple premise that hostage Kim Bassinger had rung a wrong number, making the poor soul on the receiving end of that call her last hope. Interconnectivity, see? Still, it’s hard to feel that all the potential avenues of storytelling that could be explored have been broached,. Surely there are more fascinating ideas out there? And, no, Pulse doesn’t count. (“How can a phone kill you?” to quote the meta-mockery that Forgetting Sarah Marshall makes of the Kristen Bell film.)

It’s interesting to reflect on how mobiles have changed out lives, but it’s also interesting to see how they’ve affected movies. I don’t think we’ve really seen the impact that these fairly influential devices could have on cinematic storytelling – I think, crucially, they offer a much larger potential for the types of stories that can told. Now we just need to figure out what these stories are…

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: cellular, cellular telephones, films, mobile phones, mobiles, Movies, phonebooth, phones, pulse |