Internet and Films

I was just reading a review by Mike D'Angelo about a film called Reservation Road, which is a story of a lawyer, who gets into an accident and kills a kid while driving, but leaves the scene, and is later asked by the father to find who did it, and try to sue the heck out of the guy.

The point Mike finds fascinating is not the odd trap that the lawyer finds himself, and how he will deal with this situation, of a furious father asking him for help, and not knowing that the lawyer was the guy.

It's that the guy uses the Internet, mainly Google, to find information, and to find support in moments of grief, reaching out to strangers, rather than to his own wife.

The Internet is treated in a non-chalant way, instead of the way it's dealt with in older films like, say, Copycat, which uses huge fonts, and huge text so you can see the chat, or Mission Impossible, which uses a graphic of an email send randomly out by a flipping envelope. Or even more obvious film plots like You've Got Mail.

It's very much like the difference between the cyberpunk novels and Asimov novels. Asimov SF is very fascinated with the technology that Asimov has invented in his head, and the characters talk about it. In cyberpunk novels, the world is the way it is, and the people inhabiting it merely use the technology. There's no explanation of why or how the technology fully came about, even as the stories themselves to emphasize technology.

Unlike, say, Star Wars. Star Wars treats technology even more off-handedly. No one even bothers to talk about where this technology comes from. Who builds the ships? Where's the labor? Where are the smart people? All completely ignored to tell the story. But where the viewer is constantly being shown amazing images of a kind of future society (or the past, in the Star Wars mythos), it's a far remove from the culture we know today.

Certainly cell phones already make part of our current society, but the Internet has affected people more profoundly than films have represented, and in perhaps ways that are more subtle than film-makers would like. For example, people might really get into Facebook.

I've been using it lately to find some people I haven't met in a while, hoping, they, too, might have gotten on. Some folks have, while others, thinking that this is for kids, have avoided it. But it acts a bit better than LinkedIn for keeping up with people. Where's the dramatic value in that?

And more interestingly is how people are more willing to meet new people out of the blue, rather than simply restricting their circle of friends to merely the workplace or college. In that respect, the Internet allows people to meet others more easily, although possibly more superficially. It's hard to make a really good film that strikes the right balance, portraying accurately what happens to people, without seeming like some weird cautionary tale (such as the many movies or tv episodes about cyberstalking).

In particular, we now have the ability to find information about all sorts of things, from restaurants, to directions, to the origins of a holiday, to information about people, should they, for example, choose to blog about it. This is something that wasn't there before, but is there now, and the film industry has yet to popularly capture this.

And that's not even including those who love MMORPGs. I'm sure filmmakers know such players exist, but can't even imagine how that all works, or how to craft an interesting story from it.

But perhaps this is the first of more films that will treat the topic more maturely, more matter-of-factly.