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Ministry of Innovation / Business of Technology

How movies and TV give life to the mundane text message

TV and films show texts don't have to be unemotional throwaways.

House of Cards gets in a scene within a scene using text messaging.
Note: this article contains minor spoilers for seasons one and two of Sherlock and season two of House of Cards, and major spoilers for the short film Noah. Tread carefully if you've yet to consume these bodies of work.

In the last decade, movies and television have sprouted a new plot weakness: if tension hinged in any way on a situation that could have been solved by a simple cell phone call or text message, the call was never placed and the text was never sent. To forget the pervasiveness of cell phones, and the ease with which we can tell each other things, is a crime.

But cell phones and digital messages have managed to worm their way into the storytelling in movies and TV despite a supposed natural ineptitude at stirring up drama. A text message is dispassionate, free of emotion and all too open to interpretation, according to some literature on the importance of, say, tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. But TV shows and movies have managed to integrate these dispassionate messages to logistical and, surprisingly, emotional effect, reflecting the significance that messaging has gained for us over the years.

Moving messaging into the plot line

BBC's Sherlock regularly integrates text messaging into its plot lines. In its first 2010 run, the show was an early instance of the medium's representation in a way that didn't amount to tokenism. In one of the opening scenes of the first episode, a press corps is receiving answers on questions about a string of suicides. As Detective Lestrade delivers his theories about the case, Sherlock playfully texts the entire crowd: "Wrong." The message is toying with the room as well as the person delivering the official speech.

Enlarge / Early in the show, Sherlock looped texting in as a way of communicating, establishing character, and moving the plot along.
Enlarge / A Sherlock text parallel-process: a character subverts her intent in the scene by surreptitiously texting a third party.

Occasionally, Sherlock texts get over-stylized into the crumbs of clues building to a solution of the episode's mystery, but they are also occasionally used to subvert the scene. In the first episode of the second season, after Sherlock offhandedly decodes the meaning of a string of digits, his partner/adversary Irene Adler surreptitiously texts the meaning to a third party, a swift move that both reveals her less-than-ingenuous intentions and gets things moving off-camera without breaking the scene, changing the conversation, or involving a new character.

The most recent season of House of Cards has taken up Sherlock's style of technology integration, making liberal use of text messages in turning the events of scenes, even doing some parallel processing of different plot lines. What House of Cards does better than other TV shows is formatting the communication format into a generic set of text bubbles overlaid on the events of the screen.

Like Sherlock, House of Cards uses texts to show turns of parallel events without changing the scene, or even keeping interested parties unaware of information they might be interested in. Texting can also be passive-aggressive, the laying down of information that might, in an actual conversation, enrage another without having to actually show that exchange—for instance, when call girl Rachel Posner informs Doug Stamper that she's letting a friend stay in her house when she's supposed to be remaining under the radar.

Enlarge / A passive texting event in House of Cards.

The use of texting in these shows is reflective of the attempted-multitasking way we live now, constantly jumping between information streams. Texts can be more private and personal than a phone call, and a smartphone obscures all activity-identifying information. A character on-screen on a phone call having a tough conversation is fairly obvious to anyone present; a character receiving information they've dreaded via text message might have just lost a round of Temple Run. Formatting that communiqué the way House of Cards does still lets the viewer in on the personal experience of the text without necessarily changing the outside flow of the scene they're in.

Emotional investment

Messaging can easily be an effective storytelling tool, but it can also be a compelling one. Late last year, the short film Noah (NSFW), which notably takes place entirely on a teenager's computer screen, displayed some of the emotional investment we can have in these strictly digital media.

Enlarge / A screenshot from the short film Noah, where much of the drama turns on a Facebook chat and the browsing of a Facebook profile.

Two of the major plot elements in the film are video chats, one of which sets the action in motion when Noah's girlfriend hints that she wants to break up with him. But the analysis and subsequent "action" of the film takes place over Facebook chat and through the browsing of a Facebook profile, two elements that should ostensibly be obscured in their emotional value by the ambiguity of fully digital communication.

Except they're not. Noah's friend encourages him to log in to his girlfriend's Facebook account and check her private communications for an indication of cheating, so, like a jealous teenager, he does. And what he finds is the lipstick-on-the-collar smoking gun of our time: a Facebook chat with another guy, filled with seemingly flirty messages. Noah reacts by preemptively, passive-aggressively changing his girlfriend's relationship status to "single."

This is a set of events that should be, by the traditional definition of how humans communicate, largely free of conclusive emotional evidence: there is no body language, no tone of voice, just words and symbols on a page. And yet, everyone who has ever been in a romantic relationship in the last ten years can relate to the feeling of betrayal they might feel after seeing a conversation between their significant other and a third party where every other missive is accompanied by a smiley face.

What this suggests about the way we communicate is that digital communication is not actually that ambiguous or emotion-free. Instead, it was lacking emotional shorthand and personal experiences. Witness the important decision of accompanying anything you say with a period, or the ominous feeling you get anytime someone responds to something you say with "I see." Now that messaging sans gestures or voice tone has embedded itself so deeply in our lives, the "language" of it has also evolved to a point that it is easily interpreted from an emotional standpoint.

The joke of Noah is that the object of his girlfriend's apparent affection turns out to be gay. Other in-person signals could have been misinterpreted to the same effect, but they may not have resulted in the same drastic action—immediately and irrefutably ending the relationship—that Noah took.

One of the problems of Noah is that the fallout of his online actions, which are pretty gripping, don't feel like they really come to a head. There is an indignant reaction by his girlfriend for "hacking" her account, but by that time, the excitement of discovery has already receded. The next step the film takes is a reflective conversation with a random person Noah meets via Chatroulette.

There have been plenty of TV shows and movies that have represented messaging in one way or another, but it's still not often done in a way that amounts to more than tokenism. If done right, though, the impact of messaging can be elevated.

If drama lies in interpretation, ambiguity, and passive aggression, communication via text message has those in spades. But now that we're all so familiar with it, we can reliably interpret it in an emotional way, without the usual trappings of personal interaction.

Video storytelling can't completely reflect the way we use texting—I have yet to see anyone on screen using their phone in a bathroom—but for the purposes of plot, it can move things along in a way that resonates with the way we process information. If the presence of texting in narrative media stops the lazy storytelling that tends to come from relying on the technological limits of communication and instead represents the human limits to communicating unambiguously, accurately, and fairly... so much the better.

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