#cinema

The internet has given us access to an almost limitless amount of knowledge at the touch of a button, which our generation uses to watch videos of kittens and make sarcastic edits to wikipedia pages. Our technology obsession has drifted in to the movie world, with the births of Facebook, Apple and Wikileaks getting the big screen treatment in recent years. So, how would some of our favourite classic films be different if the characters had access to the technological advances of our time?

Some movies lend themselves surprisingly well to the social networking fad. Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind’s self absorbed protagonist, would have been the queen of the Instagram selfie when she wasn’t dealing with that pesky Civil War. Her facebook relationship status alone would put Kim Kardashian to shame: Scarlett is now married to Charles Hamilton; Scarlett is now married to Frank Kennedy; Scarlett is now married to Rhett Butler, ad nauseam.

Technology may have also been helpful in protecting some doomed characters. If Marion Crane from Psycho had access to tripadvisor, she probably would have avoided the Bates Motel and avoided being murdered by a creepy mummy’s boy. The king of the madmen, The Shining’s Jack Torrance, might not have gone crazy with an axe if he’d packed a laptop loaded with games and porn, thus avoiding forcing his son in to a lifetime of therapy.

As important as technology might be to the modern world, it undoubtedly has the potential to take some of the magic out of the movies. One of my favourite films, The Breakfast Club, would have been fundamentally different had the teens had iPhones. The bonding experience shared by a group of misfits would never happen in a modern day school where the kids are more likely to be playing Candy Crush than sharing their darkest fears with one another.

For all the benefits the tech boom has brought us, our parents are unfortunately correct when they complain about the damage it has done to communication. Watching two girls play on their laptops for 90 minutes is basically a documentary of my daily life with my flatmate, but no sensible person would pay £7+ to watch that. Even the language we use has been degraded by text speak. Some of the most iconic films earned their reputation based on great dialogue, and I can hardly imagine Quentin Tarantino and Woody Allen breaking out the YOLOs.

Classic movies earned their status for a reason. As desperate as I may be to see Ferris Bueller’s tweets and get a semi-nude snapchat from Tyler Durden, I have to admit that the internet and movies should only meet on Netflix. In the cinema we can put aside our carefully constructed online personas to focus on pure fantasy for a few hours, and that’s the way it should stay.