Shrink Rap
I dropped my MOTORAZR V3m phone in the parking lot a couple of months ago, splintering the little LCD screen. Such are the vortices of fate that change our lives. Now I’m considering an upgrade, but buying a mobile phone these days is an act of consumerism not to be taken lightly. This is a powerfully deterministic choice that will--for the duration of the abusive, overpriced calling plan, at least--pin me to the demographic corkboard in a variety of ways: age, income, education, my relationship to the larger electronic culture.
Do I just want a phone--who ya gonna call, grandpa?--or do I want, as they say, a robust multimedia solution: phone, camera, media player, WiFi-capable browser, qwerty keyboard, e-mail and assorted other productivity “tools,” which, as I think of it, is a good nickname for people who use these devices.
Telephony as destiny.
Naturally, I want to be one of the cool kids. Which means I’m gnawing my fist in anticipation of the Apple iPhone. First unveiled by fruit merchant Steve Jobs at the Macworld Conference & Expo in January, the iPhone’s to-market date has been pushed back recently, to mid-June. I hereby predict lines around the block like the ones for Sony PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii.
As part of Apple’s push to offer consumers an all-in-one mobile uplink to Creation itself, the iPhone will also be a portable multimedia player (PMP), similar to the function of a video iPod (except the calculator-sized iPhone will have a “widescreen” viewing option). Pod people will be able to download video files from the iTunes online store and take them everywhere--indeed, they will be able to download them from the ether over WiFi connections. Electrocenti know there are lots of PMPs on the market--Microsoft’s Zune, for example, or the iriver clix. But iPod (which recently passed the 100 million-unit mark) and iPhone are the 800-pound iGorillas.
What’s astonishing to me is that--while consumers blow billions on high-def big-screen TVs and the fate of empires hang on the format wars between HD DVD and Blu-ray--anyone could possibly care about portable video. Make up your collective minds, consumers: Either you want the immersive, blue-pill simulacra offered by IMAX and 3-D digital projection--both technologies are booming in theaters--or you don’t.
What put all this in my head was the announcement in April that MGM--which has a vast and sacred film catalog--would be joining Paramount and Disney in offering downloadable movies on iTunes. With more than 2 million films sold since September 2006, iTunes is the most popular online movie store.
MGM? You mean, like, Vincente Minnelli’s MGM? There is something deeply inappropriate going on here, some illicit congress between medium and material. How can you possibly squeeze an overripe, color-drenched masterpiece such as “Singin’ in the Rain” into a low-res 2.5-inch screen? It’s not right. That’s not a movie; that’s a cast album. And while I appreciate that Cecil B. DeMille was a cagey businessman, I suspect that if he discovered a commuter podding the biblically proportioned “The Ten Commandments” (a Paramount title now on iTunes), he’d throw him or her under the train.
And so, an experiment: I borrowed an iPod from the office and downloaded, more or less at random, “The Prestige,” a recent magic-and-mystery revenge drama starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman and David Bowie as electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla, whose great lightning machines were, sure enough, reduced to mere static on the iPod. “The Prestige” isn’t an epic by any means, but it does help the storytelling if you can follow the action, you know, visually. For much of this film, set in turn-of-the-century London, the characters disappear in liquid-crystal obscura. It’s an AV flea circus.
Also, to watch a full-length motion picture on an iPod is to give oneself an iHeadache.
In other words, the iPod sucks down the months of moviemaking precision--lighting, cinematography, set design--into a tiny, blurred nullity. Personally, I’d sue.
So let us, collectively, make a rule: Nothing great can be downloadable at 160 ppi. As a matter of common decency, you can’t be allowed to miniaturize a wonderful theatrical film down to the size of a shot glass. “The School of Rock,” “Foxy Brown,” “RoboCop,” “Rocky V”? Sure, these are films that can endure the compression. Season 1 of “The Office” or daily feeds of “The Colbert Report”? No problem. But “The Ten Commandments”? Let there be an 11th.
Not to go all Marshall McLuhan on you, but it’s worth pondering what the sudden ubiquity of low-res small-video--YouTube has something like 100 million downloads per day--implies for our artistic enterprise. It seems to me that the smaller the work of art, which is to say the louder and broader and less subtle, the better it plays on iPods. Just as film directors began framing their shots in anticipation that they would one day be shown on square TV screens, I have to think this generation of filmmakers will feel obliged to play to the tiny grandstands.
Hollywood doesn’t need any help phoning it in.
