Movies about Texting
It’s 2016, and we still don’t have a foolproof solution
12. července 2016, 4:24 UTC | Komentáře
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How do you translate our increasingly digital lives into compelling, dynamic on-screen action? It’s one of the biggest questions facing the people making 21st century film and TV, and it remains largely unresolved. Some directors are setting their entire movies within the contexts of desktop screens and captured webcam footage; others are sticking with traditional conversations and analog characters, even if it means their show-worlds are more and more distant from the way we actually talk and live. Others still are trying to find a middle ground between convention and realism, with mixed results.
The tension between these two approaches is most visible in the way TV shows and movies handle texting. Using phone calls to facilitate conversations between two separated characters feels hollow when billions of people around the world use apps like Messenger and WhatsApp (not to mention good old-fashioned SMS) on an hourly basis, but there’s still no foolproof way to depict a text-based chat on screen, and directors have been trying to find one for nearly two decades. Shows like Sherlock a House of Cards threatened to crack the code earlier this decade, but new shows are still struggling to bring chats into their dialogue toolboxes in an effective way. That’s why we’re getting together for a text-based conversation of our own: to review the state of cinematic texting in 2016, and to propose some solutions to this complicated problem.
Jamieson Cox: Lizzie, I have a confession to make: like most of my pieces, this started with unsolicited whining about something I enjoy. I’m a big fan of Projekt Mindy, the Mindy Kaling-led sitcom that just wrapped its first season as a Hulu original. There’s only one thing about the show I just can’t stand, and that’s the way its characters text.
When characters on Projekt Mindy send each other messages, the show’s viewers see the contents within standard-issue text bubbles. They come with little avatars so you know who’s talking. That’s all par for the course, right? There’s more: while you’re reading the contents of a given message, you hear the actor reading it as if it’s a line of dialogue they’re speaking. How does that work in practice? Look back at the text above, which is cut from an episode that’s just a few months old. You’re reading that text in your head while Danny (Chris Messina) says out loud, «Hey, do you want to come over for story time again?» And when someone sends an emoji, like in the season two scene below, you often hear that actor read out the corresponding emoji name. (Imagine Kaling saying «winky face» as the text below pops up.)
This would be laudable if it were part of a show-driven accessibility strategy, but it’s a terrible storytelling choice otherwise: it slows the show down, and it doesn’t respect your intelligence. You can read the words faster than the actor can speak them, so you’re left waiting a few extra seconds for them to finish the line before the show moves on. It sounds like a minor gripe, but it really adds up over the course of an entire episode, and beyond that it’s just frustrating to hear someone say the words «heart emoji, party emoji, eggplant emoji» out loud. I complained about it at a recent meeting like the cantankerous co-worker I am, and now we’re here. Do you run into this problem with any of the shows you watch?
Lizzie Plaugic: Ah yes, the ol’ saying-a-text-out-loud-while-texting quadrant of television that ignores how people text in real life (silently and stone-faced). I too enjoy Projekt Mindy on a cloudy Monday night, but the show’s texting style never really started to bother me until you pointed it out. I kind of liked hearing the texts spoken with different characters’ inflections, because when I read texts in my mind, it’s just in a dull monotone. This technique added a level of sentience my own internal consciousness usually lacks. And the emoji-reading, while odd, also seemed like an accurate representation of how Mindy Lahiri would text. She says «exsqueeze me» out loud, so I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t hesitate to say «eggplant emoji» in her head. But once you pointed out that it was annoying, I went back and watched an episode, and the texting did frustrate me more than usual. Maybe just because I was looking out for it.
The thing that peeves me the most about texting in TV shows and movies is when I’m forced to read a text off someone’s phone screen. Take that scene in the second season of Pravda detektivka when someone blackmails Paul Woodrugh:
Why would I want to look at a fictional screen while already watching a show on a real-life screen? Maybe this has to do with the fact that I don’t like looking at other people’s phones in general, or maybe it’s just because I usually have a hard time actually reading texts when they’re presented on TV this way. I get caught up in the surroundings and usually forget to look at the actual words.
Jamieson: Yeah, that’s totally frustrating — and it’s inefficient, too. That phone can’t be taking up more than 50 percent of the screen, meaning the remaining half is just empty, distracting space. If you’re going to opt for the «shoot the screen» method, you might as well get in as close as possible, right?
I wasn’t sure how to articulate my problems with texting on-screen until I watched an expert do it for me. Každý snímek je obraz’s Tony Zhou tackled this issue through a cinematographer’s lens in a 2014 video called «A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film,» tracing on-screen texting back to the early ‘00s and isolating the reasons why some popular texting-in-film methods fall short. Focusing on a screen-based text conversation is expensive and time-consuming, because you can’t see the character react and respond while they’re moving the conversation forward; having characters read their texts or share the information some other way is too far removed from how we actually communicate to make sense.
Trust your viewers to connect the dots
I think the quality that defines the gap between good and bad cinematic takes on texting is trust. When texting is successfully depicted on screen, it’s usually because directors are trusting their viewers to connect the conversational dots, and it’s treated as an opportunity to express some style rather than a utility and nothing more. All you need are a few lines of text in a readable font — it’s simple and surprisingly elegant, like the House of Cards shot that opened this conversation. You don’t even need to make the sender and recipient clear, because your viewers are smart enough to figure it out for themselves.
Zhou’s video is almost two years old, but I think the commentary contained within still holds up. There are a ton of movies and TV shows out there that are still getting texting wrong, and even savvy, stylish showrunners can trip themselves up trying to communicate information through text alone. (Here’s looking at you, Scream Queens.) Now that we’ve established a few shows with room for improvement, I’m curious: what have you seen lately that gets texting právo?
Lizzie: I’ll do you one better than a show and talk about one specific scene that I think does texting right: Amy Schumer’s sketch about sexting. A lot of times, texting on television or in movies feels superfluous, like the directors just threw in a texting scene just to prove they could. Even House of Cards, which I think usually does a pretty good job with this, sometimes allows text conversations to drag on too long without actually relaying any information. But texting is the entire premise of the Schumer sketch, so it’s done in a more methodical manner than on most shows, and it actually feels relevant to the subject matter at hand.
Here, the sexts are portrayed as on-screen bubbles, a format lots of shows use. But the viewer also gets to read Amy’s texts as she types, deletes, re-types, and sends them. The style might slow down the pace of the sketch, but I think it shows an awareness of how people actually text. Even Frank Underwood probably rethinks texts sometimes, but all we ever see on House of Cards is the text after it’s been sent.
When the texts have actual utility, they shine
Jamieson: I think successful on-screen texting is less dependent on technical details (like the ones in Zhou’s video) than the importance of texting within the world of the show. When it’s just being used for stylistic purposes, it has to look perfect or it falls flat. When scenes and dialogues are reliant on texting and the unique things about it — like Schumer writing and rewriting messages ad nauseum, or Susan Sarandon’s character relentlessly poking her beleaguered daughter with blippy texts in Lorene Scafaria’s delightful Vměšovač — it shines, because you can’t imagine the action without it. If there’s a recommendation emerging out of this conversation, that’s it: don’t make your characters text unless it’s a fundamental part of the action.
Why are movies so bad at showing what texting is really like?
Texting is one of the most popular forms of communication in the world today, so why are movies still so bad at capturing what it’s really like to text?
At this point, it’s likely that if you watch a movie set in present day, cell phones will make an appearance. Like it or not, cell phones have become a permanent fixture of our every day lives, dictating various modes of interpersonal communication. It’s only natural that this would also show up in our movies.
Unfortunately, for all the good that cell phones do for shrinking the space between people and places, the portrayal of texting as seen in movies is straight up bad. As iMessage and WhatsApp remain two of the most dominant forms of text messaging around the world, movies still struggle to portray text messaging with authenticity. They fail to capture both the mechanics and culture of texting, giving us depictions that feel akin to watching a grandparent learn to use emojis.
Let’s get specific, shall we? There’s a laundry list of things wrong with texting in movies:
First: movies fail — either due to ignorance or inability — to get the mechanics of texting correct. Assuming the movie shows the audience the screen of the cell phone, something is usually off. Either the shape or color of the text bubbles is different from what it should be. Read receipts and the typing symbols are all over the place. Seemingly no one has discovered that they can turn their phone on silent.
Most of the time, movies — and TV for that matter — project the texts onto the screen onto blank space next to the character to make it easier to read. All of these things contribute to repeatedly unconvincing and uninspired portrayals of an everyday activity that should feel familiar to audiences.
Moreover, movies consistently miss the mark on the culture of texting. Characters seem to always know exactly what to say, responding to texts with confidence and articulate answers. Most conversations are far too formal, especially for those between friends. Most of the time, movies approach texting as an expository device — present to serve a specific informational purpose, rather than the revolving door for jokes, rants, and event planning that it really is.
Článek pokračuje níže
Movies also approach texting as something you do when you’re not doing anything else, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Texting is that thing you do while you’re working, while you’re on the train, while you’re cooking dinner, working out, arguing with your roommate, or watching TV. Unlike how it’s portrayed in movies, texting is not an activity that’s performed a few minutes a day.
All of that said, the issue goes beyond the various ways movies fail to accurately depict the mechanics and culture of text messaging. The foundation of this problem is that there’s just nothing particularly cinematic about texting.
Until now, most depictions of text messaging in movies have been strictly informational. Text exchanges exist to answer one or more of the following: who, what, where, and when. Rather curiously, there’s little to no attempt made to define proč this exchange is meaningful outside of the context of plot.
The why — or rather, the reason why the text exchange is meaningful, is strangely and artificially absent. The why is what takes something from a straightforward plot device to something more important. It’s especially frustrating how stale portrayals of text messaging feel when you look at the ways movies have made other forms of communication meaningful, inspiring, and engaging.
From emotionally overwrought handwritten letters in perfect cursive narrated over long, pensive stares to to late night, intimate phone calls made from a landline while snuggled in bed like in Když Harry potkal Sally, movies have a long history of taking written and verbal communication and turning it into something visually significant.
Most movies refuse to treat texting in the same way. Seemingly no one has found a way to make text messages any more than that — little blurbs of text shot from the hip in order to convey information to the audience.
That’s not to say some haven’t tried. Most recently, a montage at the beginning of Crazy Rich Asians uses an inventive style to show how quickly news can spread within an intimate community using text messaging, taking the text of the messages off the phone and onto the screen, embedding it within the visual text of the story.
Olivier Assayas’s film Personal Shopper is arguably the most cinematic representation of text messaging. In the film, Maureen (played by Kristen Stewart) begins receiving strange texts from an unknown number. Maureen, who happens to be a medium, believes that the messages may be coming from her recently deceased brother.
In Personal Shopper, text messaging is a central mode of communication that anchors the film’s stranger elements. The banality of texting compliments and balances the uncanny supernatural pieces of the movie. In this way, Assayas elevates texting so it becomes more than a basic mechanism for delivering plot.
The texts Maureen sends and receives have significance; we see her struggle for the right thing to say and cope with the erratic responses. The film acts as an interrogation into how technology — and texting in particularly — mediates our interpersonal relationships and shapes our own perception of what is real.
Na rozdíl od většiny filmů, Personal Shopper demonstrated a clear understanding for how to portray text messaging in a way that engages with the significance and style of the medium.
Admittedly, this is a rather minor problem to take issue with, but as texting remains a ubiquitous influence on the every day lives of millions of people, it seems wrong that portrayals of text messaging should feel so disparate from reality.
Watch a brief history of texting and email in movies and TV
In the last decade or so, as internet speeds have risen and cell phone plans have been pre-packaged to death, texting and the Web have become increasingly reliant sources of exposition in film and television. Sherlock, The Social Network, and more have used texting and the internet to tell story versus the advent of the spoken word. And just recently, texting has been used to expose philandering spouses on Jak se zbavit vraždy and show how bored spouses seek sexual fulfillment via the Internet in Men, Women & Children.
Technology has become an acceptable way to convey that «This mother in Muži, ženy a děti is overbearing,» and «This woman wants to sleep with Benedict Cumberbatch»—er, sorry—»Sherlock.»
But it wasn’t always such an effective shorthand. Earlier this year, Tony Zhou created a video explaining the trend of phones and the internet in film and TV, exploring the advent of the floating text message and how visual exposition has developed over the years. (Although it would be interesting to see how this trend is portrayed if there were a period piece regarding dial-up Internet.)
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