I was watching an old suspense movie the other day for lack of anything more appealing to do, and I had to laugh because this story would never work in the modern era. This woman was trapped inside her house and a creepy stalker guy was trying to break in. She rushes to the phone to call for help, only to find it dead. “He’s cut the phone lines!” High drama. Much tension. If you’re in an era without cell phones.
It must be a lot more difficult for writers to come up with a viable plot these days. For example, it’s harder to turn a story on a secret in an age where no one seems to keep them anymore. It’s harder to shock a small town with a scandal when we no longer find anything scandalous. And conspiracy theories are a lot harder to pull off in the age of camera phones, surveillance videos, satellite imagery, and twitter.
I saw the movie Summertime recently, in which Katherine Hepburn, “an aging spinster” (Their description, not mine. She was my age when she played the part.) goes off to Venice on holiday and has a steamy romance, much of which you don’t see because they cut away for, I swear to God, fireworks. But the whole premise of this movie is that this highly repressed woman has to go to Europe to let her hair down. It is a lovely romantic story, but it probably will never be remade because nowadays she wouldn’t go to Venice, she’d just go to Match.com. That’s hardly exciting.
I think future generations are missing out on quite a bit. Gone are the days when we will see people being threatened by impatient thugs as they make a call from a phone booth, or cub reporters click clacking away on typewriters, or operators listening in on your conversations (theoretically).
It kind of makes you wonder what’s coming. I’m waiting for the first movie that employs a 3D printer.
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