Stories and the internet

New technologies have an effect upon the way we 'consume' fiction (amongst other things), but they also have an effect on the kinds of fictional scenarios that are plausible if stories are set in the present. 'Don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie' is the tagline of and premise behind a still-current series of Orange cinema adverts (which, although they do not 'ruin' my trips to the cinema, certainly constitute a source of irritation).

Mobile phone technology has affected dramaturgy. It is now less likely that someone who finds themself sharing their house with a killer will not be able to get to the phone. Surely they can just reach into their pocket? Thankfully, loss of battery power and failing reception can still come to the rescue, so to speak - but there is a difference, and possibly a thematically significant one, between being cut off from contact with the outside world by a malevolent force on the one hand and failings of technology on the other.

I used my mobile phone at work today to text my good friend James MacDowell to pose an open, film-related question, as I often do. 'Can you think of instances where characters in fictions use internet search engines'. The first one that sprang to my mind was actually from a novel: in George Pelecanos's The Turnaround, a character goes on the internet to research an old local news event. James replied that the old trope in horror movies of characters going to an old dusty library to find out a key piece of plot information appears to be being replaced by them looking on the internet.

As is so often the case with film studies questions, it pays to start with Hitchcock. James's mention of the library made me think of the scene in Shadow of a Doubt where Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) runs across town to the local library - catching the stern, spinsterish librarian just in time, after being reprimanded by the traffic cop for stepping out in front of a car - to read the news of the 'Merry Widow Murderer', putting together a few other things she knows and deducing that it is her beloved Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). Following this revelation, as a shocked Charlie walks numbly across the library floor, Hitchcock's camera executes a rhetorical flourish, moving up and away from Charlie and taking up 'the high angle of knowledge' (is this William Rothman's term?).

If we were in the twenty-first century and not the 1940s, Charlie would not have to interact with the members of her local community or worry about closing times (much as the contemporary television viewer does not need to worry about getting home in time for their favourite series, and therefore does not necessarily watch it at the same time as everyone else, thus feeling part of a communal experience). She wouldn't have to leave her laptop in her bedroom, thus precluding the social encounters and spatial possibilities that are so readily available to Hitchcock.

As James also pointed out to me, the bookshop scene in Vertigo would probably have to go too, at which point I ceased to be able to think analytically, and could only reply with 'Nooo!' (a response that James admitted was also the way he had thought of ending his previous message). Perhaps Pop Leibel and google are interchangeable to Vladimir Propp, but they are not to me.

A collection of quotes

From an article in The Economist:

Universities are feeling the strain in various ways these days. With government funding under pressure, Cambridge is [...] considering tapping the bond market for the first time in its 800-year history, to raise some £300m for building projects. There is a massive debate about the purpose of higher education. At the heart of it all is a widespread perception that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are being unfairly barred from Britain's most famous universities, and thus must struggle harder than the more privileged to escape a lifetime of mediocre job prospects.

Which reminded me of this exchange in George Pelecanos's The Way Home (a haunting novel which I'm still trying to get my wife to read):

"Don't... don't compare yourself to me. Back in my day, with only a high school degree, you could still make something of yourself. But now there are two distinct societies, Chris, plainly separated. The educated and the uneducated. You don't just go to college to learn. You go to mingle and forge a permanent network with people who all move up the chain together. Don't go to college and there's going to be a ceiling on your earnings. The pool will be limited on who you date and marry. Not only will you probably live in a lower-income neighborhood, but so will your children, and their peers will be lower income, too. Don't you see how it works? There are people who strive to make it to the upper level of society and then there are the other people who stay down below."

"It was you who was always cracking on the lawyers and doctors in our neighbourhood. Saying how they came up from privilege and money, and how they had a leg up. Being all sarcastic about how they never got their hands dirty or broke a sweat. Like how you sweated every day."

The Way Home's epigraph is from Bruce Springsteen's 'My Father's House':

Last night I dreamed that I was a child

out where the pines grow wild and tall

I was trying to make it home through the forest

before the darkness falls

Pelecanos's Hard Revolution also has a Springsteen epigram, this time from 'Adam Raised a Cain' (on Darkness on the Edge of Town) - a song that also features in yet another Pelecanos novel, which my wife is currently reading - but in a part she hasn't read yet (I'm very excited about her getting to it):

Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain

Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame

You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames

The last two lines quoted here definitely form part of the epigraph; I can't check it as HR is one of the GP novels that Pete owns. We have kind of a joint collection. I haven't yet found the movie equivalent of Springsteen, but I'd say Pelecanos is definitely the novel one.

We listened to some Springsteen tonight, but also to the Traveling Wilburys:

Well it's alright, riding around in the breeze

Well it's alright, if you live the life you please

Well it's alright, doing the best you can

Well it's alright, as long as you lend a hand

I'm slowly getting through Gaye Tuchman's Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University One of its epigraphs, from Robert Birnbaum, is:

An educational philosopher might claim that those things of greatest value are precisely those things that cannot be measured [...] If we cannot measure what is valuable, we will come to value what is measurable.

We watched Lifeboat this evening too. In Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Robin Wood, reviewing his earlier description of the movie, comments:

I would now wish to offer a more political reading, examining the film's very subversive critique of capitalist values: the way in which, by paralleling the Nazi captain and the American self-made millionaire, it suggests that fascism is an extension rather than the opposite of capitalist democracy. This is [...], however, too simple a formula for this extremely complex work, one of the guiding principles of which seems to be that every position, once established, is elsewhere qualified or contradicted.

The movie contains a very moving reading of a psalm that in any case never fails to move me, probably the most famous of all the psalms:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.