Monday, September 25, 2006

Don't Bother Calling

I left my cellphone at my parents' house over the weekend. I was there to watch the Redskins game; I usually catch about half of the games there with my father and younger brothers. Four grown men(the youngest is now 18...wow) hooping and hollering at a big-screen TV, some of us in jerseys and all of us having a great time. We get down if they lose, sure. And we bitch about it afterward...but always with each other.

Anyway, it's amazing how dependent I am on that damn phone. I didn't realize I had forgotten it until I was almost back to my apartment, and being a car-less DC citizen it was impossible to go back to the house to get it. With no landline, I couldn't even call my family to tell them I had forgotten it.

I imagine the cell only phone arrangement is pretty common today, especially among twenty and thirty somethings. Instead of supplementing a "home" phone, the cellphone is the home phone. Why pay for a landline when you have your cellphone with you all the time anyway?

I think that's the big change that has occurred in the last five or so years. That's when it seemed that the cellphone stopped being an extra phone, an emergency phone, to just being a phone. They have replaced "normal" phones.

In fact, cellphones have replaced normal phones to a such a degree that many movies are now ruined simply because it's hard to fathom a modern world without cellphones. There are tons of movies from the eighties and early nineties where a crisis could be solved if the protagonist simply had a cellphone. The "world" of these movies looks modern enough to us that it seems like they should have cellphones. They have computers, ATMs, cars, and twenty-four hour grocery stores. Doesn't seem too different.

Anything made before 1983 seems to be immune. Poltergeist, released in 1982, features a plot that hinges on the audience understanding what a god damned test-pattern is. That right there marks the movie as before cellphone. I've never met anyone younger than me, and I'm 27, who was not baffled by that scene in Poltergeist where the TV station simply signs off late at night. We can barely comprehend a world without cable, but now you want us to believe that in the past TV simply...signed off? What kind of hell is that?

However, everything after Poltergeist just seems like it should have cellphones. We have to suspend disbelief and treat this bubble of movies like period pieces, the period being "Before The 'Can You Hear Me Now' Guy, but after 'They're Here'".

I think Clueless ended this era, but I can't be sure because Cher was among the elite of society in that movie. Mobile communication might have still been only for the upper-class at that point. She is the first major film character I can remember, though, who used a cellphone all the time.

I'll have my phone back tomorrow. Until then, I'm stuck like Officer John McClane in Die Hard, wishing there was a some kind of device that I could use to just dial 911 so I didn't have to go to the roof with a radio and get yelled at by snippy emergency operators while being shot at. Seems like one of those yuppie hostages should have had one too.

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