Warning: Weak Language

The problems with Cinema and Communication

One of the strange things about communication in Post-Modern culture is how indirect it has become. Whether it is the use of emojis and gifs or through the use of oblique references to other media, the act of communicating has become a strange web of intertextuality. This is not to say that the message doesn’t get across but it has become emblematic of the apparent age of anxiety in which we live where unguarded honesty and vulnerability has become occluded through layers of digital deniability. When someone shows their unhappiness with their body, their joy with the sexuality or their hostility towards a current trend, there is a level of deniability baked into the medium. For instance, a knee-jerk response when found being dishonest about any of these things can be “Social media isn’t real”, or the fact that a post or a message can always be said to have been “ironic”, whether that was its intention or not. It also creates issues wherein the person you are communicating with may not be able to decode the many layers of subtext given to them, or, even worse, decode it incorrectly. Many are the stories of parents/grandparents using “the wrong emoji” when talking about what’s for dinner. But as much as this observation can be labelled as the rantings of an old man complaining about the kids and their new fangled slang that poor grandpa can’t understand, the fact is, this is precisely how I communicate as well. For instance, talking to my wife about the state of the news in the UK today, instead of replying to my wife “yes it’s awful, isn’t it?” I simply messaged her the the audio of The Sex Pistols’ song Anarchy in the UK. So while this strange mode of references as language is undoubtedly a confusing place to be for most of us, we appear to be navigating quite well. Or at least some of us are…

The trouble with this kind of abstract mode of communication that relies on a weird form of cultural knowledge akin to doing homework, is that it outpaces slower forms of communication and, more significantly, doesn’t always translate. Here I am specifically talking about film and how it has seemed so hilariously out of touch in representing the contemporary modes of speech and communication.

Every Frame a Painting did a short essay on a portion of this topic about 7 years…