Why Hollywood Movies Don't Show Cellphones All That Much
And other reasons Hollywood is woefully behind the times
Watching the new Netflix hit Christmas movie yesterday, “Carry-On,” I was struck by the gigantic technology plotholes that the screenwriter blithely ignored.
In the movie, a hitman tries to smuggle a nerve-gas bomb through LAX’s TSA security scanners. Nevermind the overall plot for now: this hitman just walks around LAX nonchalantly. He talks out loud about his plans, using words like “bomb” in your normal everyday parts of the terminal.
And he doesn’t cover his face, at all. Nor does he ever change his costume, even though by the end of the movie, everybody’s looking for a six-foot man in his fifties with a black baseball cap.
Ignoring the movie’s thousand action-movie clichés, it was the lack of facial covering that bothered me.
Because just recently, about a couple of weeks ago, in real life an alleged killer of an insurance CEO was caught using security cameras and — my presumption — facial-recognition technology.
I’m sure most of you have seen pictures of Luigi Mangione, including video of the actual shooting, which I was able to see on X almost instantly. That’s obviously because cameras are everywhere.
Why aren’t they presumed to be everywhere in “Carry-On” though? Why does the screenwriter pretend that an unmasked bomber can get away with walking around LAX for hours?
I’ve got another one that’s been bugging me for months. The much-lauded 2024 movie “Civil War,” which depicts a civil war in the United States sometimes perhaps in the near future, does not use drones at all.
That’s despite nearly everybody and their mother acknowledging that drones are the present and future of aerial warfare, maybe all warfare.
This is possibly why, again in real life in the last two weeks, lots of Americans for many nights have anxiously spotted drones flying eerily above their heads.
And here’s a third one for you. For the first time ever at the movie, just last week I saw a film depict a streamer! That is, a video-game streamer.
It was only for about thirty seconds, in 2024’s “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies,” but finally, a movie uses the incredibly popular streaming of video-game playing, in a small part of its plot and character material.
So there’s three elements that I think Hollywood has been largely ignoring, except for a few thrillers and sci-fi movies. And we can add more to it. Here we go:
Everybody on their phones in public all the time
Ubiquitous cameras (except in a few thrillers)
Facial-recognition (ditto)
Video-game streaming
Drones
E-sports
People watching and making short-form videos
Memes, and people making or reacting to them
Virtual interaction on Discord, etc.
If you’ve seen these in a newer movie, you’ve seen a rarity. (What else do you think I’m missing? Comment below please!)
I am always struck by how few and far between that cellphones appear in films, compared to what I can observe in rural Middle-of-Nowheresville America on a daily basis.
Admittedly, these elements are in a few newer movies, but compared to real life, they are in far fewer than they should be. I say that having seen a decent amount of new releases over the years.
Because millions if not billions are participating in almost all of these things in the list above, all the time.
Why don’t movies reflect the totally dominate aspect of modern life, which is the ubiquity of technologies that most people use for hours a day?
I’ll give a quick answer below, but the truth is that Hollywood and movies in general have no good excuse for this.
Movie history is replete with studios trying to cash in on the latest and greatest, even trying to foretell the new future and hype it.
Anyway, the best practical reason I can come up with for new movies avoiding these technologies is that they are hard to film.
They are just hard to visualize, even cellphones, which on screen are little black box-like objects that, to a viewer, aren’t immediately recognizable on sight *as cellphones*.
This is paradoxical, since we see people every day on their phones and know instantly what they have in their hands. Yet the screen is a different medium than your visual system.
If we have to think for a minute about what we are seeing, the movie awkwardly has broken us out of our hypnotic trance state. This is rarely if ever the goal of a piece of entertainment. Usually it’s a total failure.
That’s why they put a loaf of bread or a head of lettuce in grocery bags, in movie scenes where a character is carrying a grocery bag. You just can’t process “man has brown bag” into the necessary conclusion that “man is carrying grocery bag” quickly enough.
If you as a viewer have to hesitate for even an instant, looking at some visual element that must be known instantly, the movie has failed to communicate quickly enough — assuming that the brown bag isn’t the focus of the scene, but is rather just a normal background prop.
Moreover, even if a viewer could see instantly that a character is holding a cellphone, it’s not at all clear what that character is doing on it.
And that may be a mystery that annoys an audience. We’re already being allowed to peep into a character’s world, so we might ask, why can’t we see what’s on the phone?
That’s why, when cellphone use is featured in films, you’ll often see the screen either cut to, else or doubled on-screen along with an external shot of the character looking at it. This is effectively a modern kind of “intertitle,” which they used to use in silent movies.
I submit that the lack of instant visual recognition of what the technology is and what’s going on with the use of technology is why Hollywood movies — and maybe most international ones as well — have gotten just plain lazy when it comes to depicting those technologies.
Look back at the list above. Take drones: unless the drone is massive and obviously a drone when a viewer instantly sees it, as in the opening scene of “Interstellar,” it’s hard to know what the tiny thing up in the sky is.
I also admit that in real life, when one buzzes above my head, it takes me a little while to figuring out what that buzzing is and what’s causing it!
Again back to the list. Take video-game streaming. Supposedly three million people at any moment are watching other people play videogames live online. That therefore should be a huge and massive topic for Hollywood to exploit!
Why haven’t there been several major movies featuring plots involving video-game streaming? (I note that back in 1989, Hollywood was doing this when it hocked “Super Mario 3” to me and millions of other kids with “The Wizard.” That was back when Hollywood was trying to be with or ahead of the times!)
But yet again, it’s not easy to depict online streaming. If a filmmaker shows the external shot of a character watching streaming, that’s much like the cellphone-depiction problem.
If however a filmmaker shows the streaming video itself, then it may lead to awkwardly cutting back and forth between points of view.
I am giving artists the benefit of the doubt here.
But really, it’s up to imaginative artists to find novel, cool ways to depict new things.
This has only been going on since Georges Méliès, whom I am confident would figure out how to properly depict mass cellphone use.
By not depicting technologies that dominate our contemporary lives, and doing so in a regular way that speaks to the lives of young people, Hollywood is blundering away its entire future.
That means that movies, by and large, have embraced cultural stagnation. They’ve taken a fundamentally conservative stance, by sticking with tried-and-true ways of depicting reality but not adapting to newer ways that people inhabit and experience reality, which is dominated by the virtual worlds they partake in all the time.
Movies need to develop a filmic language for depicting virtual worlds and real-life uses of technologies that connect to these virtual worlds.
As a filmmaker, this is where you could get a massive edge, and right now.
If movies don’t do it, some artistic medium is going to have to figure out how to depict that. In my opinion, it should be film that innovates, since film itself is in the same medium — video — as almost everything in my list above.
Shoot, film created the basic grammar rules for these newer techs, including how to properly shoot selfies and stream live video!
I’ve been on a spree of watching newer releases, those especially from 2024, and I’m almost betting that most of them will mainly ignore cellphone use, streaming, short-form video consumption, and a hundred other things that millions of people engage with on a daily basis.
If I could bet on this, I’m pretty sure I could become rich, unfortunately.