Is technology killing movies?

And with that question, film critic Joe Queenan isn't questioning movies like Beowulf or 300, with CGI background or characters. I might have been with him on that.

No, Queenan is lamenting what the advent of the information age has done to movies. His case in point: Psycho. If it were set in today's world, TripAdvisor.com and her PDA could save Janet Leigh from that fatal shower at the Bates motel.

I sort of see his point: I'm as tired of post-Matrix computer-age drivel as anyone else. But the pre-cell-phone-era films Queenan applauds, such as Beowulf, American Gangster, and No Country for Old Men, have something in common (aside from limiting cutting-edge technology to spear manufacturing or bolt pistols): a decided lack of strong female roles. You might as well call the Coen brothers' movie No Country for Women at All.

Queenan contends that one reason the Coen brothers set the film in the late 1970s was to make “a perverse point about the way gadgetry frustrates drama.” (Apparently forgetting that the movie is based on a novel by Cormac MacCarthy, who set it in 1980 himself. Ahem.) Anyway, Queenan's point is that easy access to information and tools by tech-savvy protagonists ruins movies.

His example of the computer-age action hero who ends up looking more like a typist than an action figure is Eddie Izzard in Ocean's 13. The lameness of the star-studded love-in that is the Ocean's franchise aside, let me offer a translation of what he wants: More bloodshed, please. He says,

If it were up to me, every movie would be set in an era without mobile phones and Google, every movie would put the hero in a situation where he could not call in an air strike via his BlackBerry but would actually have to slit the terrorists' throats and strangle their frothing dogs with his bare hands.

I don't think it's an accident of grammar that Queenan sticks to the male pronoun here. Queenan points out that in the tech-free days of yore, “if you want to find out where Grendel hails from or how many soldiers Xerxes has on hand, you're going to have to rely on spies, traitors, camp followers, ex-girlfriends, information-gathering goatherds or duplicitous dwarves — not a database search.” Notice that the only room for women in these scenarios is as the ex-girlfriends or wives.

My girlfriend and I were actually discussing this trend in epics the other day after we saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. We actually liked the movie, but agreed that confining Mary-Louise Parker, who played the wife of Jesse James, to a role limited to shooting dirty looks at Casey Affleck and crying over Brad Pitt's body was absolutely criminal. But there was no room in this period film for a larger female role without a serious reconceiving of the entire project.

My point is this. Technology doesn't ruin movies; lazy plot devices and poor character development do. And gendering action roles as male so that women are shunted to supporting characters is nothing new, but it's still disappointing. Give me a strong female lead. It doesn't matter to me if she can heft a spear or hack into a military high-security database.