another scene from the digital life

anna & i were watching a christmas hallmark movie.  you know the subgenre.  always a pair of beautiful people with terrific lives who are miserable & alone on christmas.  thru dint & trade & luck & a bit of santa's help these two people find each other & fall in love.  happily ever after. 

i'm a sucker for this kind of pablum.  a crude AI program can write these scripts.  & yet, sometimes the films feature an actor of astonishing range & proportion.  & i do love a good romantic movie.  

but tonight's feature was execrable.  i won't name it.  why would i.  almost all these movies have 'christmas' in their titles.  however, the male love interest, a man who hates all things christmas, is a writer.  this scribe is suffering from a massive writer's block.  

this is the 21st C so of course this youngish author composes on a laptop.  i don't blame him.  i do too.  yet, writing on a computer means that the writer does not have any need or even compunction to print a hardcopy of the text.  just open a file, start typing, delete when you must, arrange as you need to, & save your file.  

easy peasy.  but this is a movie.  a visual medium.  our young writer in this flick is stuck.  we've already witnessed his deleting a whole, mind you, a whole fucking paragraph of his work.  on his laptop.  later on, we see this shakespeare at his desk, hating christmas, while his love interest is in the house next door & making a racket, & he can't write!  to prove it, on his desk, beside his laptop, were several crumple sheets of paper.  the kind you would find in an earlier era of typewriters.  

anna pointed out the anachronism & mentioned she didn't see a printer in shakes' office.  we both use computers for our work.  & we hardly ever need to print out drafts.  i'm a poet.  i do keep a notebook, when i feel like it, but, hell, i write using both my laptop & the notes app on my phone.  so why the hell does this romeo need crumpled up pieces of paper to prove to us, the viewers, that he is so constipated he can't compose.

because, i guess, we still use paper to publish books.  & the mad genius poet surrounded by mounds of crumpled paper remains a strong image.  & yet, this error in the art direction of this particular film, as pointed out by anna,  had me in stitches.  it might be a while for our imaginations to catch up to our life in this digital century.