With the advent of electronic hypertext, circa 1994, academics, authors, and readers began debating the fate of the printed book. As the traditional literary establishment delivered impassioned eulogies to glue, ink, cloth, and paper, postmodernists celebrated the signifier's triumphant liberation from Gutenbergian imprisonment, utopian technologists envisioned a day when any book could be accessed from anywhere via a few clicks of a computer's mouse, and students looked forward to "going to the library" in their pajamas. Librarians began updating their CVs.
Although many of these predictions, fears, and hopes proved premature, debates about reading from paper versus reading from screens still rage on today. When dominated by the institutional vested interests of academics, authors, librarians, technologists, publishers, and lawyers, exchanges often grow hostile and repetitive. But beyond the polemics and canned arguments lie genuine, serious, and intriguing questions about how different textual media and technologies help determine what we read, how we read it, and what we think of it.
In his recent New Yorker article, David Denby focuses not on the reading experience but on the movie-viewing experience, asking how technology is changing what Americans watch, where we watch it, and how we feel about what we see. With innovative companies such as Apple now encouraging customers to download and watch movies on its video-capable iPods and recently announced iPhone, what will become of the big-screen theater experience? And if the theaters are competed out of existence by smaller, flexible, demand-driven viewing technologies, what, if anything, would we lose? Quite a lot, Denby suggests, recounting his own experience of watching Pirates of the Caribbean on a video iPod:
The device was as elegant as an old cigarette case and not much larger than a child's palm. I was holding a video iPod, poised at the frontier of a new digital age, a new platform for movies, a new convenience that will annihilate old paradigms. Last spring and summer, when I visited a number of executives and tech guys in big-studio Hollywood, I kept hearing disdain for the mall cinemas and the multiplexes--the theatres in which most Americans see movies. And I heard a new mantra: "Content on demand--when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it." By the end of the summer, movies were beginning to flow into homes and portable devices through the Internet. In September, Apple began offering previously released Disney movies through its iTunes Store. I downloaded the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" onto my hard drive, then put it onto a video iPod. The screen was only two inches across.
If you are sitting down, the natural place for an iPod is in your lap; that way, your arms don't get tired. At that distance, however, I couldn't focus on the image. So I rested the iPod on my stomach. And there it sat, riding up and down every time I took a breath. I was on the Black Pearl, all right, standing on her foredeck like a drunken sailor as she plowed through heavy seas. The horizon line kept pitching and heaving, and I had trouble seeing much of anything. "Pirates" has lots of wide vistas and noisy tumult--a vast ocean under the dazzling sun and nighttime roughhousing in colonial towns, with deep-cleavaged prostitutes and toothless drunks. What I saw, mainly, was a looming ship the size of a twig, patches of sparkling blue, and a face or a skull flashing by. The interiors were as dark as caves. My ears, fed by headphones, were filled with such details as the chafing of hawsers and feet stomping on straw, but there below me Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom were duelling like two angry mosquitoes in a jar.
In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display--at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they'll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are "platform agnostic"--that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small. Most kids don't have bellies, and they can pretzel their limbs into almost any shape they want, so they can get comfortable with a handheld device; they can also take it onto a school bus, down the street, into bed, cuddling it under the covers after lights-out.
Hollywood executives' enthusiasm for "content on demand," and thus for a range of portable and home-theater technologies, raises questions about our future affective relationship with film. At their best, films can uplift, energize, motivate, and inspire. But how many of the AFI's 100 Most Inspiring Films of All Time, which include Rocky, Apollo 13, and Lawrence of Arabia, draw much of their power from their big-screen presentation? Can a twenty-foot-high Rocky convey something a two-inch Rocky cannot? And if children are as "platform-agnostic" as Hollywood claims, will they ever know or miss the cinematic experiences of submission and mastery that Denby emphasizes here?
Denby suggests that it matters deeply, affectively and aesthetically, how we watch our movies, where, and with whom. And he hints that if the media through which we view films is to change, and especially if the balance of power is to shift away from theatres and towards "content on demand" technologies, then the way the film industry conceives, finances, makes, and distributes films must also change. How, why, and when those changes may happen is the subject of Denby's lengthy but insightful article.