Like frames that shape our way of seeing, films play a crucial role in shaping social discourse by helping us achieve the distance to reflect on the present. With better representation of contemporary life in film, what modernism encouraged, will come a more nuanced understanding of the psychological implications of phone use in the cultural imagination. What we do on our phone screens represents an extension of our psyches — it’s a part of character that contemporary stories can’t ignore. Some filmmakers are starting to embrace this fact, which is especially true for stories about characters coming of age today. Bo Burnham’s 2018 film Eighth Grade, for example, includes countless scenes of Elsie in isolation, scrolling through social media and filming YouTube vlogs that hardly anyone views. And in Mishka Kornai and Zach Wechter’s 2019 short Pocket, the entirety of the story is told from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy’s smartphone. It’s designed to be viewed on a phone.
Film and television will always have crackle, but stories that help us understand the present and situate its place in history are a necessary antidote. It’s an unavoidable reality that films that depict phone use tend to date themselves before they see theatrical releases. Perhaps this is a good thing. Documenting the elusive present restores some sense of historicity by giving audiences a recognizable past to remember for more than its styles.
But it wasn’t just climate change that made both the 2016 and 2018 Ellicott City floods so lethal, many locals believe: Some blame the decades of suburban development patterns in the hills above the historic town, which replaced forested slopes with impervious surfaces that sluiced stormwater into town.
After the 2016 flood, county leaders debated a range of costly mitigation strategies, which involved constructing more stormwater ponds, building stream walls, widening the culverts beneath the streets, and building parking garages engineered to catch stormwater. A moratorium on new development was proposed, but didn’t pass.
That debate took on a fresh urgency after the Memorial Day disaster, which emphasized how fundamentally vulnerable the town was. In its third century, a picturesque mill town faces a profound reckoning, one that mirrors the challenge so many human settlements worldwide are confronting: When does retreating rather than rebuilding become the only rational choice?
So what is a mnemic symbol? It’s the trace of a trauma. A kind of parasitic image or word or memory that lingers in the mind. A minor hallucination presented to the ego by itself, to give it something to focus on, hiding the horrors of the id. It’s a recurring symptom. It’s Andrew Hodgson’s latest novel.
Published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Mnemic Symbols dances the same fine line that many of the new publishing house’s best works do in being both unashamedly experimental and rooted in a recognisable, swearing and smoking reality. The action of the novel is fragmentary, a series of mnemic symbols strung together by association, with memories emerging that range from the cringing to the tragic. Just as our reveries are liable to return to our father’s funeral one moment and a terribly awkward encounter with a faraway barmaid the next, so does Hodgson’s narrator reel from moment to moment, sometimes heroic and sometimes confused — sometimes both.
Chiang is a writer of precision and grace. His stories extrapolate from first premises with the logic and rigor of a well-designed experiment but at the same time are deeply affecting, responsive to the complexities and variability of human life. The impetus for a story will often be a potent philosophical question — free will versus determinism, the purpose and meaning of life, the relationship between memory and truth, the essence of one’s personality — but their denouement hinges on quiet moments of human illumination or connection. His work offers glimpses of a possible future wrought by technology, but more importantly, it interrogates who we may become in this future as technology changes the patterns of daily life.
Alfred Hitchcock once said that a thriller is a whodunit, an intellectual process, but suspense is an emotional one. Friis knows this — and slowly, slowly takes us by the hand and draws us into a seductive, and dangerous, summer.