What if E.T. really could have phoned home?

Randi Kreiss

While watching “The Social Network” last week, I was stunned — not by the movie, but by the audience. As the theater went dark, a thousand points of light beamed out from cell phones. Well, not a thousand, but a lot. Settling in to watch one of the most talked-about films in recent times, people in the audience were checking their phone messages instead. They apparently couldn’t bear to remain unconnected for even two hours of movie viewing.

We all know life has changed in the era of BlackBerrys and iPhones and Facebook. But the communications revolution, as portrayed in this trendy, edgy, geek-driven movie, got me thinking about other movies — the great films of the past 60 or 70 years — the classics that have become our cultural icons.

Hmmm. What if cell phones had existed a generation ago? Instead of the big goodbye between Bogie and Bergman that rips your heart out, she might have boarded the plane in Casablanca and said over her shoulder, “I’ll e-mail you tomorrow from Lisbon.”

Much of the drama in movies and in real life would have been pre-empted by instantaneous communication. When Sir Ernest Shackleton disappeared for two years in the early 1900s while exploring Antarctica (his ship was trapped in ice), one phone call could have summoned a rescue expedition. Instead, Shackleton eventually trekked out, he and every member of his crew survived and he became an international hero. He went back on another expedition and died there. Again, no global cell phone or GPS. Here I must reference Columbus, who would have found America a lot sooner with a global tracking device.

Much of the thrill and drama of our history would have been drained of excitement if the principal parties could have talked to one another in a timely fashion.
Consider the greatest movies. If Janet Leigh had a cell phone in “Psycho,” she could have called a friend and said, “I’m alone in this motel and there’s a very creepy guy at the front desk.”