Text Messaging in Narrative Film: Intermedial Intertemporalities

Abstract

For over a century narrative film has always adopted new technologies, while also fluidly establishing visual conventions for representing new technology’s interfaces with embodied experience. Text messaging on mobile devices is a remarkable exception in this history. 31 years after Nokia introduced phone SMS, texting has become a ubiquitous mediation in every aspect of embodied and mediated experience, but narrative film has yet to learn how to represent this activity with the fluidity in which film represents every other human activity. This text/film dissonance stands out starkly in our age in which intermediality has been normalized and we so fluidly move between, and through, multimedialities – which are now seamlessly integrated with embodied life. Film’s inadequacy in this matter represents a visual challenge, but arises from a temporal challenge. Both film and texting are media temporalities operating profoundly differently from embodied temporalities. More significantly, film and texting temporalities differ radically from each other. Hence, in addition to proposing a study in intermediality I am offering a study in intertemporality. With this I hope to develop dimensions of intermedial studies as intertemporal studies. Texts are generally expected to be read and replied to ASAP, introducing a mediated temporal anxiousness here-to-for nonexistent. Of course, face-to-face encounters also demand temporal immediacy, but this challenge is supported by bodily presence congruous with millions of years of evolution. In the blink of an eye, historically speaking, social media has compelled instantaneity in contexts of non-physical presence. Texts – so simple to compose, send, receive, and resend – are the most temporally anxious aspect of social media. In this paper I briefly contextualize texts as media relative to somatic life, and then examen how this temporally-most-anxious media is represented in the first temporal media form, film. Examining how texting is, and is not, represented in film we find increasingly complicated layers of intertextualities, multimodalities, and inevitably contradictory reader/reception dynamics and interfaces. Now that digital intermediality has been completely integrated into somatic life, what can the misfit of text messaging within narrative film’s representations of embodied life tell us about the limits of our supposedly normalized experience within intermediality?