Cribbing another post from BoingBoing: Cory Doctorow posted the above video as a complaint against a lazy plot device. But I suspect dead cell phones in plot lines to be part of a greater anxiety, and began to craft a response in my mind, but bingo! the commenter Tdawwg nailed it. Without further ado:
Maybe this issue points to a problem with plot-heavy storytelling in an increasingly deterministic, mapped-out, known, surveilled, mechanistic, etc., world.
Think of a similar genre, the Wanted Man-Technothriller: Enemy of the State is an early example from the nineties. In these films, endless (and endlessly tiring) instances must be concocted whereby the harried protagonist just barely manages to slip by the evil conspiracymongers’ (or corporation’s, or gubbmint rogue death squad, or….) Nefarious Web of Ubiquitous Surveillance. Whereas if we’re to accept the central premise of the film, that there exists a They Who Are Evil And All-Powerful, They’d have fucked the hero three ways to Sunday in reel one: but somehow the hero always always slips past the ever-tightening net of surveillance and control.
In the suspense-horror case, the fear comes from the existential threats of not being able to plug into the Grid (loss of safety and security); in the technothriller case, the fear comes from the existential threats of not being able to jack out of the Grid (loss of freedom and agency). And since these aren’t so much reflective or exploratory arty films, but plot-heavy popcorn summer blockbusters or the reliable, cheap thrills of contemporary horror flicks, so these completely stupid, adventitious reasons for tech failure keep popping up.
Thinking more about it, I really like how the clips above make technology the real monster-threat of the films. Good stuff.
