Confession

It's time I owned up: I rather like the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films that I've seen (all of 1, half of 2, fragments of 3). There, I've said it.

There's a lot of stupid mess in my head about why it's sort of shameful to admit this: all sorts of things around intellectual snobbery, received wisdom from critics, sneering differentiations between 'high' and 'popular' culture, the inability to give myself up to something simple and fun, and the associations between mainstream Hollywood money-making output and the decline of civilised values in the age of neo-liberal dominance and the commodification of everything.

But, leaving that aside, whenever I see a bit of these films, there are a number of things that appeal to me. At one level, I think the leads are attractive and funny, and the supporting cast is great (Tom Hollander and Jonathan Pryce, take a bow). And you could even make a case for Keira Knightley as something of a Bechdel-test icon.

The personalities thing has always been an important part of movies' appeal, and remains so for me. But more important for me is the 'world building' element. What I love about these films is the way that the world and its atmosphere is beautifully crafted through locations, props, sets, lighting and effects: this is a world that I would like to visit, a consistently-realised alternative universe where you know how things are going to look and feel. It's rather like luxuriating in a beautiful dream.

Thinking about this made me realise that I have similar sentiments with regard to literature: the books that I have really loved, and which I keep going back to, are appealing to me primarily because of their world-building, their atmosphere, and their prose. For me, 'plot' is just the thing that all these other elements hang on: even in Dickens, where the plots are as structurally integral as the steel rods in a concrete bridge, what's interesting to me is not the logic of the story progressing towards its conclusion, but rather the imagery that we see on the journey, and the vignettes of atmosphere, emotion and mood, and the playful language that sometimes stops you in your tracks and makes you re-read passage after passage.

I think this is why I often feel a sinking sense of disappointment as the pages held in my right hand dwindle down to nothing and the weight of the book is all in the left hand: the knowledge that the familiar patterns of redemption and conclusion are going to play out (which often feels like a bit of a cheat...), and - more - importantly - the sense that you will shortly have to emerge from this beautifully-rendered world that has entranced you.

An(dy)logue and Digital

I was thinking this morning about  that sequence in ‘Three Colours: Red’ [?] when the camera follows the path of the phone call being made by (Trintiginant?) - down the telephone line into the skirting board, into the external duct etc, then through the undersea cable and up to the phone ringing, unanswered, in an empty room on the other side of the channel…and then the return of the signal, as I recall, to Trintiginant’s phone…

And there’s also something here, I think, about how the metaphors we use to think about things are embedded in the *infrastructural technologies* of a particular time, and how those metaphors of the *technical* basis of things shape our thinking and ways of processing information. So the Kieslowski sequence works because, as someone who grew up familiar with the banal realities of analogue technology, you (I) understand that *physical* connectedness of things (also…there’s a point here about how you *accept* the technology that you are introduced to as a child as *normal* - so for (most?) ‘children of the analogue age’ the way that an international telephone call works is - in itself - not a thing of wonder…):

1a. You dial a number on the dial, which (somehow) translates into a connection, via the equipment at your telephone exchange, into a connection to some specific cables that will route your call to the desired destination’s telephone receiver; 1b. your vocal cords vibrate (let’s leave aside how the brain makes that happen…); 2. the sound waves propagate through the air, and impinge on the diaphragm of the (analogue) telephone’s microphone, which converts those waves into an electrical signal; 3. That signal propagates along the little phone line, into the wall, and out into the street, where it goes into a cable duct; 4. the signal whizzes along to the exchange and is routed to the target telephone, where the signal is converted into impulses that make the ringer ring; 5. If the person picks up, the circuit is completed, and the sound waves emitted from your vocal cords can be transmitted, converted back into sound waves by the receiver’s speaker, and your interlocutor’s ear starts of the process of turning those waves into meaningful components that can be interpreted by the incredibly complex hear-understand-formulate response-speak machinery of their brain…]

I realise that there’s *masses* of the technical components of this interaction that I don’t understand even in the analogue model…and the *digital* mode is even more mysterious. So my point here about the stuff you absorb ‘unproblematically’ holds, I think…I just ‘used the telephone’, focused on the speech act, and not thinking about the technology (while *hating* using it, a function perhaps of my Asperger’s, and not being able to see the person’s face…? So shy!), and not understanding the technology, or the infrastructure, beyond the most primitive level…

….but I think the difference for me between the analogue and the digital modes is that, because I was brought up in the analogue world, I had a *sense* of how it worked, and could construct - even if it was quite abstract - a *model* of how this activity might be embedded in concrete ‘things’ (even if some of those ‘things’ were ‘black boxes’) - you could still build a mental model based on electric current making some kind of actuator click, and that current then doing some more work somewhere else, on some other *mechanical* thing that moved, and did work…so you could create a model of *mechanism* that you could slot your understanding into. I’m much less confident in my ability to be able to do that for the *digital* model…maybe if I thought about it a bit more I *could*….but I also wonder if there’s something about the way that digital technology seems (for me at least) to *abstract* things away from the idea of ‘physical’ connectedness that renders the abstraction more profound? And whether this works in the same kind of way for the ‘digital natives’ of today?...