Cell Phones Ruin Everything

The other day I was watching someone on YouTube react to the movie Die Hard. As John McLain was running around the building trying to get communication with the outside world. The reactor commented, “oh, this was before cell phones. I guess there wouldn’t be a movie if they had cell phones.” As a writer, there is something I have known for a while now. Cell phones ruin everything. If Romeo and Juliette had cell phones, neither of them would have died, but it would have been a much less moving story.

I write fiction and sometimes write plays. If I have a plot device that is set on a communication or lack of communication issue, I must think about how to deal with that. Do I want to set it prior to 1990? Do I want to set it in a place that has no cell service? Or do I just change the story? Because cell phones ruin everything! This is generally not a problem when I am writing a science fiction story because hey, I can do whatever I want with technology in science fiction. It becomes more a problem for me writing a play, which tends to be much more grounded in the everyday.

It is not the first time that innovation has ruined drama. I imagine before cars, it was much harder to have your antagonist skip town or skip the country. Then there is the whole internet/Google thing. You can watch a police procedural from the 1960’s and the detective’s team might spend days combing through paper records to find information that would be at your fingertips today. If it was a time-sensitive case, that could affect the storyline.

So, writers have had to adapt to the post cell phone, post Google age. It changes the stories we write, but that’s the way life is. You have to invent different problems. You have to adapt.

Star Liner

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