Inward Futures

This Flavorwire piece wonders if movies will ever accurately represent online dating, but it also opens the broader question of whether going forward movies will ever be able to get anything mundane right, given the increasing amount of time we spend staring at screens. I guess there could be clever ways of replacing traditional dialogue with chat boxes, but we sit so still and type so much, it’s like going back to 2D. How will movies keep up/follow us down? Or maybe there’ll be something new, like a movie but different, that jumps out in front and addresses this. Hm, maybe it’s the same problem with books. “She looked at her phone and saw she’d missed his call, so she called him back, but he didn’t pick up,” the opening line of my new great American novel will go. “She hung up before leaving a voicemail, but then did send a text. Right after it went through, she saw the little ‘dot dot dot’ bubble on his end indicate he was immediately typing a response, but then just as quickly it went away. An hour passed, and it did not return. Was he agonizing over his response, or had she simply texted him while he was texting someone else — omg what if were Eileen — and therefore caused him to momentarily type into the wrong window, her window, giving her an essentially false ‘dot dot dot’? She wasn’t actually sure if that could happen with text, though, but she knew it could happen on Gchat. And that was something she knew because she’d done it herself. I guess at times, she thought, we are all someone’s wrong window.” Actually that is the whole novel.

Also this is a fundamentally flawed question/argument, since movies always skim over the boring parts of regular life, but you never know.