Last week, Sal and I watched the coming of age classic, "Stand By Me." These are some of my favorite sort of films. Teens going on an adventure and by the end of the movie, they have had a major change in their life.
I started looking for some good coming of age stories like Goonies or Now and Then. I couldn't find much that was made in the past decade. Why is that?
Cell phones. It's got to be cell phones or technology in general. It's also the reason why it's hard to make horror movies work anymore.
If you want to make a story about a bunch of kids that go off the grid on an adventure or a horror movie where a bunch of teens are about to die because they did drugs, you have to spend at least a scene setting up why their cell phone doesn't work, why they don't have access to a computer, and why they don't have a GPS device.
It really takes away some of the magic of these sort of stories. Can we build a coming of age story set in the modern day or will they always have to be set pre-2000?
One of the first novels I wrote in college is going to require a complete rewrite just to account for this. I either need to speak about it as if it were the past or I have to bring cell phones in.
I don't know, this is sort of a ramble. I just feel really bummed out about it. I've sort of been anti-technology the past week or so. Feel like I'm getting sick of it. Maybe this weekend, or even for a day, I'll just turn my phone off. See how it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment