Dial C for Cliche: A Brief Reflection

Plot elements destroyed by the invention of the cell phone:

1. Mistaken-identity situations that turn on the inability to see who is calling.
2. Picking up the house phone to make a call, only to discover that someone is already on the line on another extension, whereupon a portion of the conversation is overheard and misunderstood to comic or dramatic effect.
3. A stratagem: one roommate pretending to be the other when a boyfriend calls.
4. Teenage siblings intercepting calls from each other's love interests for the sake of cruel embarrassment.
5. Any uncontrollable spiral of events precipitated by a telephone message left on a piece of paper, with a concierge, etc., and never received.
6. Romantic tragedies involving missed encounters and the inability to make subsequent rearrangements (She thought it was for 3pm, and he thought it was for 4pm; she thought the meeting was in Portland, Oregon, and he thought it was in Portland, Maine; etc.)
7. Prank calls, pretty well altogether.

Plot elements introduced with the invention of the cell phone:

1. Accident victim struck by vehicle while staring down at cell phone.
2. Romantic tragedy: lovers fail to meet in line at the grocery store, as both are beguiling the tedious minutes of waiting by playing Angry Birds.
3. Deeper exploration of psychological interiority: long scenes of passive-aggressive silence, while two lovers sit at a table in a bar, texting others not present. Variation: texting one another.
4. Missing-person case solved shortly after disappearance by using "Find My iPhone" app.

Comments

[Lawrence JOhnson]

Interesting post. I would like to add another new plot element-- introducing communication & information into a space that would otherwise be isolated. I'm thinking of the 2010 film, "Buried", where the protagonist is buried in a coffin with a lighter & a cel phone. There's also the real life example of Flight 93, where during the 9-11 hijacking the passengers learned via their cels of the attacks on the Twin Towers & the Pentagon. Because this information was inserted into the otherwise isolated space of an airplane in flight, the passengers were motivated to counter-attack the hijackers, probably saving the US Capital or the White House from destruction, but not, alas, themselves.

[Craig Melhoff]

Good point--phones have created as well as destroyed in terms of plots. I might've represented that more fairly in the second list...