#74: Separation Anxiety
This time of year, among other things, is the time when we watch and reflect upon Home Alone. Released in 1990, Home Alone is one of the best examples of a movie whose plot is no longer possible due to technological change—particularly due to the advent of mobile phones and the internet. The plot revolves around Kevin McCallister's inability to communicate with his family who accidentally leave him behind on their holiday vacation; all Kevin needed to do to fix his problems, in theory, was make a phone call, which he couldn't do because a storm had knocked out his house's land line (never mind that he was able to walk around the neighborhood and visit the grocery store). Imagine this premise even a decade later: Under any imaginable circumstances, Kevin would have been in near-constant communication with his family via multiple platforms, which may not have solved everything, but would have certainly reduced the tension that drives the movie and gives it dramatic weight.
Home Alone resembles another film from the same period, also written by John Hughes: Planes, Trains and Automobiles, in which a businessman struggles to make it home to Chicago from New York in time for Thanksgiving, as weather and other mishaps epically derail and prolong his travel plans. Both of these movies grapple with humans' relationship to space, mining dramatic urgency from physical separation, which the characters experience more intensely because family holiday celebrations are at stake. In both movies, the world feels big, the way I described in another newsletter about Martin Scorsese’s After Hours: Being stranded in an unfamiliar NYC neighborhood without cash, like having a 2-hour flight to Chicago expand into a multi-day odyssey or having one's family stuck in Florida while home alone, assumes an exaggerated significance that doesn't resonate as heavily in always-in-touch 2018. We still endure painful separations from loved ones in physical space, and might still miss holidays due to canceled flights, but the temporary estrangement that Hughes explores don't necessarily make for compelling stories anymore, maybe because those situations are usually tempered by constant communication between the separated parties.
What watching these movies reminds me is that presence, physical or otherwise, was scarcer and more precious even twenty years ago than it is now. At least, the kind of presence constrained by technology was. Today, physical togetherness is threatened by other factors that we might label "political" rather than technological, such as immigration policy and incarceration. These have always existed too, but they stand out more now that the world is otherwise so completely connected and we've eliminated so many other limits to global mobility. The world gets smaller as communication and transportation keep shrinking it, but it's smaller for some people than others, and it can't compress to a size smaller than the largest nation state. As logistical borders disappear, artificial borders are what we have left, and that contrast makes them matter proportionally more. This (joke) observation about Home Alone—that Kevin could have called someone, he just didn't want to—is a more accurate truth about the world that emerged after the movie: still disconnected, but without any downed power lines to blame.
Reads:
Cory Arcangel on how EDM is the perfect reflection of contemporary commerce. "[DJ Steve Angello] is a drone-delivered, next day package from Amazon, or a nomadic freelancer behind a standing desk in a rented office share." It's interesting to consider how other artistic movements have similarly embodied the economic conditions in which they existed.
"What the Boston School Bus Schedule can Teach Us About AI" by Joi Ito. A good essay about the politics of algorithm design and why people affected by a publicly-commissioned algorithm need to understand what it's optimizing for.
A random Koyaanisqatsi generator that recreates the film with GIFs (thanks Kyle).