Last night I re-watched the film Single White Female (the 1992 original version of course). In the film, Ally, played by Bridget Fonda, is an ambitious, young, computer software designer. Looking back, the technology displayed at the time is the equivalent to paintings on cave walls. Theres a scene where Hedra, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, looks on in amazement as Ally books their plane tickets on her very primitive looking laptop. Now, not only do we book travel online, but our entire lives are there as well; Every credit card purchase, travel arrangement, email, phone call, text and Google search is monitored, recorded, scanned for keywords for advertising placement and stored on giant servers. I read a comment a while ago in which the commentator said that he never realized, while living in them, how quaint the 90s were. This was with regard to something called Manhattanhenge, which like everything else before we lived entirely online, used to be something that just happened, that a few people may have noticed and paid some attention to, rather than now having its own website and being tweeted about thousands of times. This film (SWF) always brings that quaint feeling back. The scene below is one of my favorites because it flashes a brief glimpse of the Triangle Building, in the then deserted Meatpacking District, when it housed an actual fetish club. (The interior shown here was shot on a soundstage and always makes me chuckle, as its a very Hollywood version of what nightlife, and that scene in particular, was like.) Anyway, its nice to have time capsules such as this around to put things into perspective. Now we can all get back to arguing about which social networking site to leave/join.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 14:00:54 +0000
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