Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

This weekend the live-action version of the ‘60s animated series Speed Racer is hitting theaters. Or rather, given the overwhelmingly negative reviews the film has so far received, it seems more like it’s crashing into theaters. One of the reviews that caught my eye was Richard Corliss’s in Time Magazine. Entitled, “The Future of Movies,” Corliss seems to think that the multitude of computer-generated special effects in the film are a sign of things to come (for a long, long time): “Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you’re seeing, here’s the happy answer: the future of movies.”

I don’t agree with this, mainly because it doesn’t have to be as either/or as Corliss describes. Just because moviemakers now have computers to help them make films, it doesn’t mean that the ensuing movies need to be wholly computer created. (Even Tron, oh so many years ago, featured more of Jeff Bridge than it did the light cycles.) So instead of creating candy-colored worlds where human heads are the only real thing on the screen, while everything else is computer-generated, moviemakers will use computers to tell their stories, not be the stories.

For instance, I recently watched Charlie Wilson’s War on DVD, and during the movie Tom Hanks visits a refugee camp in Afghanistan where he’s horrified at the tens of thousands of people living in squalor. In the past, this scene would have been a David O Selznick moment: a wide-angle crane shot gradually revealing more and more bandaged extras; dozens becoming hundreds until you finally wonder where they could have even found so many people, not to mention get them all into costume and array them on the battlefield. But today, with modern technology, computers can help create just as effective a shot (without having to rely on hundreds of extras). In the refugee camp scene in Charlie Wilson’s War, as the camera pulls back, you see all the tents with all the people and even though you can slightly tell that the scene has been not only digitally altered but computer-created, it’s okay; the scene is using computers to do something easily (and cheaply) that would have been too expensive and painstaking to do for real. Besides, it’s just one shot in a movie filled with flesh-and-blood actors.

Yes, this is same technology the Wachowski brothers use in Speed Racer to create an entirely synthesized world, but the Charlie Wilson’s War example shows that special effects need not batter us upside the head. Instead, they can be used for accents and nuance, not as bread and butter. (Remember that in even the ultra-influential sci-fi noir film Blade Runner, the amazing special effects and set design were in aid of what was a pretty kick-ass story.) So when another review — this time in the San Francisco Chronicle — declares about Speed Racer that, “If this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it’s going to be a sad, dead and awful future,” I think there’s plenty of time to make sure this doesn’t happen. The future’s a long way off, and hopefully by the time it arrives we’ll have learned to put story ahead of effects, and people above computers.