This was going to be a whole Raindrops on Roses series but I couldn’t remember a book to match the theme. But it’s still something I wanted to write about, so here it is anyway.
There have been enough pieces of media focused entirely on the computer screen that I, someone who is definitely not an art critic, would call it its own genre. In a way, this sort of creativity, almost unbounded in variation up to this point. I first heard about it in an Every Frame a Painting video called “A Brief Look At Texting And Internet In Film,” which in turn lead me to the three short films, Noah (2013), a relationship drama/coming of age story; Internet Story (2010), a docu-thriller(?); and Transformers: the Premake (2014), a documentary. And since that video has come out, there have been three pretty prominent feature-length examples as well. Unfriended (2014) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018), both horror films; and Searching (2018), a mystery/thriller.
Stylistically, it makes sense. By cropping the film’s screen down to only parts of the computer’s, it’s easy to direct the audience’s attention to where it might be important. Noah has a whole gag centered around this idea, for example. It also allows for an easily-explainable diegetic soundtrack, which further increases immersion. Plus, because webcams have basically become default parts of the computer experience for most people, actor performance isn’t diminished at all.
What I’ve noticed, though, is that these screen-as-film ideas are one of the first ideas to become outdated. It really isn’t their fault; it’s just how the evolution of the internet works. Operating systems and the design of websites and applications continues to iterate upon itself, while these movies are stuck in their own era. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- we don’t hate older movies for not having cell-phones, for example -- but it is a noticeable one, made all the more prominent by the medium through which the film is conveyed.
What’s interesting, then, is video game’s attempts at the same presentation. Instead of film’s looks towards modernity and capturing the present, video games instead seem to be looking at certain aesthetics that only existed decades in the past.
I first noticed this in the visual novel Emily Is Away, which revolves around being in an IRC with an old high-school friend. It has a sequel, entitled Emily Is Away Too, which is more of a reimagining of the original’s scenario and has the same visual themes as its predecessor.
But there are other, more stylized games out there as well. Arc Symphony, for example, revolves around a message board back when message boards were tied directly to email accounts, and is played with a CRT-screen effect to further immerse the player in that era. It shares themes (fandom, discovery of identity) with another game called Secret Little Haven, which, as far as I’ve encountered, seems to take the best lessons from all the previous examples and wrap it into a single package.
The two examples I would have chosen for the Raindrops on Roses series would have been Searching and Secret Little Haven. And, to be honest, I still kind of want to. So here’s what I’ll do. These two works will be the next two posts for that series, and the third in the theme will be imagining what a book with the same visual aesthetic might look like.
See you then!
-F
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