What creative plot devices have been ruined by technology?

August 5, 2009 7:16 PM

What inventions/societal changes besides cell phones have effectively "ruined" plot devices for stories in movies, TV, books, and so forth?

It used to be that you could write a story in which tension is built or a problem is created because someone is trying to get in touch with someone else to get them information that they need immediately, but they have already left their house and will not hear the phone ringing. Nowadays, it is much more likely that the person would be carrying a cell phone and be reachable at almost all times. Have there been other inventions throughout history or massive changes in societal norms that have "ruined" similar plot devices?

Are there more that are endangered due to up-and-coming technologies that may not be extremely widespread yet, but are showing a promising adoption rate?

posted by ckolderup to media & arts (50 comments total)

Improvements in transportation could ruin the long journey story. Particularly common carrier transportation, not buddy road trips. For example, a bunch of strangers have to be on a boat together for a long period of time because that's how you cross the Atlantic.

Also, I imagine the trip to Mordor would have been a hell of lot easier with an Apache helicopter.
posted by ifandonlyif at 7:24 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

I think many technologies qualify. DNA tests eliminate a lot of "who really is my father" storylines, for instance - though others remain intact. (It's not like Luke could have gotten a blood sample from Vader. Though my head is about to explode as I approach thoughts of testing for -gag- "midichlorians.")
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 7:28 PM on August 5

The first thing that popped into my head are advances in medicine, lab work and changes in how doctors operate. Healthy people don't die of pneumonia because they get cold and wet. Doctors don't make house calls. A rabid dog that bites you is not a death sentence. You'll leave fingerprints and DNA at the crime scene. Princess Amidala aside, women don't die in childbirth without some explained, extenuating circumstance.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:34 PM on August 5

Funny you should mention phones ruining plot devices. Right now I am reading Ripley Under Water (a sequel to The Talented Mr. Ripley), and much of the mystery comes from Ripley making and receiving mysterious phone calls. I keep wanting them to use *67 and *69 (though there are ways around those blockers now too).

But back to your question: what about cars that do not run on fossil fuels at all? I'm not sure how promising it is right now, but hopefully it will happen someday. A car falls off a cliff, and the battery pack cracks open, in a huge display of...sputtering, leaking, and a bit of melting.

Your characters would be unable to fake a suicide by pushing a car off of a cliff, but more importantly, how would Jerry Bruckheimer make movies in a world like that?
posted by lesli212 at 7:36 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

Well, before phones, telegraphs, and radio, it used to be that you could write a story where the tension was dependent on someone not getting a letter within the days/weeks before the whatever-it-was happened. So that horizon keeps getting shorter and shorter.

(It's kind of mindboggling that the astonishing apprehension of Crippen, thanks to the then-newfangled trans-Atlantic radio, happened in 1910. Crime and detection have changed a lot in just 100 years.)

Of course, photography and fingerprinting (not to mention DNA testing) killed the Brat Farrar/Martin Guerre/Tichborne Claimant plot device pretty dead, too. Similarly, the old Western novel plot device of "I don't know which of these strangers is the Amarillo Kid and which one is the new marshal" has been dead since the first photograph was sent by teletype.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:37 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

While I didn't see it, I would suspect the entire movie of Phone Booth suffered from this issue.

(It was originally pitched back in the 60's, then again in the 90's.)
posted by Lucinda at 7:39 PM on August 5

Are there more that are endangered due to up-and-coming technologies that may not be extremely widespread yet, but are showing a promising adoption rate?

Pretty far out, but I think remote medicine and surgery will eliminate tension where someone has to get to a specific place at a specific time for a specific treatment.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:39 PM on August 5

Also, fathers and relatives are often in the birthing room with their wives / daughters / relatives / significant others. The common trope of the nervous father pacing in the waiting room is a quaint anachronism. The new experience is often subverted now, where a father that expects to be in the delivery room is shoo'd away by nurses because something has gone very wrong with the delivery.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:39 PM on August 5

People don't get lost anymore because of GPS.

Well, I guess some people do, but one would have to imagine that in the reasonably near future, the idea of being lost could be a thing of the past. More people will have GPS devices and they'll be more accurate and user friendly.
posted by swellingitchingbrain at 7:41 PM on August 5

I came in to suggest airplanes and helicopters and satellites.

There is no "mysterious place beyond all knowledge" anymore. No place is really remote. Looking for the Lost City of El Dorado? Just do a satellite flyover and then drop your expeditionary force from helicopters.

A car falls off a cliff, and the battery pack cracks open, in a huge display of...sputtering, leaking, and a bit of melting.

Have you ever seen a lithium polymer battery explode? It's a big deal in the RC model world. They're far scarier than a gas fire, IMO.
posted by Netzapper at 7:43 PM on August 5

Oh, and you have GOT to see this video from CollegeHumor. "24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot." You don't realize how much of that show is based on our current expectations of technology, and how much a difference 15 years can make.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:44 PM on August 5 [9 favorites has favorites]

the phone as a tension device isn't dead - they just spent 30 seconds where one character says "i don't have any service out here!" and then you're right back to isolation as a plot device.
posted by nadawi at 7:45 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

While I didn't see it, I would suspect the entire movie of Phone Booth suffered from this issue.

No, the explanation for why the Colin Farrell character was using the phone booth rather than his cell made sense (though I have now forgotten what it was). Phone booths still exist, after all.

It was a crap movie, but not because he was trapped in an outmoded technology.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:46 PM on August 5

One "upcoming" one (well, here now for many people) is Internet access via cell phone. Being able to hit Google/Wikipedia/IMDB/etc makes finding answers to obscure questions much easier. If some plot point hinges on knowing where Grover Cleavland's VP was born, there is no need to head to the library or spooky local historian.

Another big one is GPS, now also available on your phone. How many plots have depended on people getting lost?
posted by fings at 7:46 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

I found the 'let me move the clock 45 minutes around to my convenience' plot point in 'The Three Musketeers' relatively implausible. Time is more, I don't know, standardized? If you ask someone the time, are they going to look at the clock on the wall or their own watch/phone, especially if they think it's later/earlier than they thought?
posted by cobaltnine at 7:49 PM on August 5

I found the 'let me move the clock 45 minutes around to my convenience' plot point in 'The Three Musketeers' relatively implausible.

It was perfectly plausible for the 1620s, when the story was set; time wasn't standardized and almost nobody had watches.

But I agree it would never in a million years work today outside of some very special circumstances that would probably seem too contrived to put into a story.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:53 PM on August 5

No, the explanation for why the Colin Farrell character was using the phone booth rather than his cell made sense (though I have now forgotten what it was). Phone booths still exist, after all

Well, I suppose that's open for debate. He used the phone booth so his wife wouldn't see the "other woman's" cell phone charges/number on his phone. Still seemed to me they were kind of grasping at straws to give him an excuse to have to be stuck at the pay phone.
posted by The Gooch at 7:54 PM on August 5

Meh, it worked for me at the time, to the point where I didn't remember it as stupid. And I remember a lot of other stuff from The Phone Booth as stupid.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:57 PM on August 5

Eesh, I meant 'implausible for a current storyline.' I originally wrote about slow letters and then realized I'd skimmed over a mention of it previously. Slow letters show up in tons of literature.

Some old scams - eg, kiting checks - which feature in various crime/heist stories, aren't going to fly today.
posted by cobaltnine at 8:07 PM on August 5

Some sketch comedy show should do a Blair Witch 2009 movie remake where they go into the woods, get lost, argue about which way to go then pull out the GPS to settle it. The end scene showing a frustrated witch angrily stamping her feet as they safely drive away.
posted by any major dude at 8:20 PM on August 5 [5 favorites has favorites]

The internet; it's really easy to look people up and find out things that you wouldn't know otherwise. Of course, the internet makes up for it by creating a ton more plot devices.
posted by Nattie at 8:25 PM on August 5

The espionage genre has absolutely tanked in the arse since 1991. And don't give me the corporate spy story; the Cold War gave us Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, corporate espionage gave us The Insider with Russell Crowe fatting about. Tension FAIL.

No-fault divorce has removed a whole subset of the detective and thriller novels. Why murder when you can separate legally and file amicably?

Enlightened attitudes to race have destroyed a whole genre of "invasion" thrillers (at least, that's what I keep telling myself).
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:29 PM on August 5

In older shows, you will see a bad guy call the cops and chat but only for 30 seconds or so. The trope was that's how long it took to trace a call. Nowadays, a call can be traced instantly and is often traced by caller ID more or less for free (yes, caller ID can be faked, I know).
posted by chairface at 8:38 PM on August 5

Well, if you'll allow for a flight of scifi speculation. . . it could one day be possible to "back up" your memories and personality every month or so, as a sort of insurance policy against unexpected death or brain injury. That way if a piano falls on your head, your health plan will cover downloading you into a body grown from your own stem-cells.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (and other "post singularity" fiction) features such technology. It does take some of the drama out of death, though not entirely.

-
posted by General Tonic at 8:46 PM on August 5

A clever writer will come up with a reason why the cellphone fails. i.e. Falls into the toilet, character falls onto it, no signal in rural areas, someone takes it away from them. While it's not in wide use quite yet, guns and cars with thumbprint scanners will change thriller movies drastically. Of course, then there will be a lot more dismemberment of thumbs.
posted by Sully at 8:46 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

Thanks to security "devices," it's a lot more difficult to shoplift, counterfeit, and rob a bank these days. Also, air line security post 9/11 means that there is no more catching a commercial flight at the very last minute in the United States.
posted by oceano at 8:54 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

I think that a lot of mistaken or secret identity plots would suffer from having the ability to search the internet for background information on people. Sure it still comes up, but in more of an airtight, Bourne Identity kind of way.

I feel like epistolary narratives are still popular (see: Lake House, ugh), despite having so little relevance for most peoples' lives. I guess when the alternative is manic typing shots a la You've Got Mail, maybe pretending the only way to communicate in writing is by handwritten letters is preferable.

Seeking out an expert as listed above - where you have to travel to some creepy librarian/historian/etc to find out some key piece of information. Now I think Wikipedia, etc, would trump having to go on a quest to find the guy who knows about the murder that happened back in 1912. In Now and Then (sorry) the girls have to go to the county archives to find a NEWSPAPER article and also have to speak to someone's grandma to find out facts about news stories from the past - this sticks with me for how difficult that is. And old mysteries often relied on specialized knowledge (ie: he was the only possible person who would have known that this particular snake venom would only temporarily paralyze the victim!).

The secret message, the hidden microfilm canister, etc, McGuffins or not, are now mostly replaced by information passed from person to person, or with some crazy kinds of data encryption/code cracking going on. And false or not, the common perception is that if someone dies, a forensic dude and an autopsy report will tell you precisely what happened to them within 48 hours of their death. Kind of takes the fun out of "Well, sir, the plain and simple truth of it is, he was SCARED TO DEATH" duh duh duh! And then one hour later it is revealed that weeks' of investigating and a few happy accidents lead to a confession by the person who poisoned them or whatever.
posted by SassHat at 9:00 PM on August 5

Not a new suggestion, but I thought you might like this: If All Movies Had Cell Phones
posted by Rhaomi at 9:09 PM on August 5 [2 favorites has favorites]

What ancient Greek work didn't end with Zeus or Athena flying out of the clouds and setting everything right? Once fancy technology taught us that the Pantheon did not exist, 'deus ex machina' had to become a metaphor.

Likewise, the mesmerism at the end of The Moonstone looks pretty archaic now.

Plenty of racist and sexist tropes have been "ruined" by societal change, but that's obviously for the best. Heart of Darkness would read very differently if published today.

iPhones and Blackberries will make it so that you won't be able to easily stump characters with random bits of trivia. Gollum could have just Googled "Bilbo pocket"!

A clever writer will come up with a reason why the cellphone fails. i.e. Falls into the toilet

Heh. I'm pretty sure that an author who drops the protagonist's phone in a toilet to build tension and advance the plot has lost all claim on the title 'clever'.
posted by painquale at 9:20 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

In older shows, you will see a bad guy call the cops and chat but only for 30 seconds or so. The trope was that's how long it took to trace a call. Nowadays, a call can be traced instantly and is often traced by caller ID more or less for free (yes, caller ID can be faked, I know).

This is still done. I just finished playing inFamous, where one of the characters only talks on short calls for this reason, but I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere. The writers just assume that the audience isn't necessarily up to date on all the phone tracing technology.
posted by motorcycles are jets at 9:23 PM on August 5

In Thomas Harris's suspense/murder mystery novel Red Dragon, (spoiler alert) the insane mass murderer chose the families he would kill from home movies mailed off to be processed at the film developing lab where he worked. There were two movie versions of the book released, the second one must have been long after home video would have made home movies shot on film obsolete, but I can't recall how the plot was re-worked.
posted by longsleeves at 9:26 PM on August 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

This is still done. I just finished playing inFamous, where one of the characters only talks on short calls for this reason, but I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere. The writers just assume that the audience isn't necessarily up to date on all the phone tracing technology.

Oh boy, I love that game.

The difference is that the caller was (presumably) on a cellphone. He was afraid of physical radio triangulation. That process does probably take some time--especially if, say, the triangulation units were on helicopters that had to be scrambled. And cell tower triangulation doesn't work especially well for a pinpoint location.

There were two movie versions of the book released, the second one must have been long after home video would have made home movies shot on film obsolete, but I can't recall how the plot was re-worked.

If I recall, he developed still photographs.

It was released just before everybody bought a digital camera.

So, actually, there's another plot-disruptive technology: digital cameras. There's no film. No negatives ("Did you destroy the prints? The negatives? What about his flickr account?"). No developing process. Nobody but the photographer ever needs to see the photograph (which has never been an issue for people with darkrooms, but is for you and me).

Plus, we have them on our phones. You can send photographic records instantly to interested parties.
posted by Netzapper at 9:55 PM on August 5

Readily available birth control and medical treatment for most STD's eliminated the "ruined woman" as a plot device; and introduced the "lighthearted joking about casual sex" story premise.

Modern large scale industrial agriculture eliminated the "desperate people who are starving to death" plot premise, at least for industrialized countries.

The tragic slow death from consumption has been partially replaced with the slow death from AIDS, cancer, etc.
posted by idiopath at 10:41 PM on August 5

I remember The Net being profoundly ridiculous even in 1995 (woman finds a secret link in plain sight on a web page so she puts it on a floppy disk and now the bad guys must get that disk), but there were probably enough audience members with only vague ideas of what the Internet was that they could get away with it. Now only your grandmother wouldn't be laughing — and even she might.
posted by argybarg at 10:50 PM on August 5

A lot of westerns have dramatic "deathbed" / impending-death scenes that typically don't happen anymore. E.g., where some guy gets shot and is lying around for a while, without anyone really doing anything, spilling the beans about where the gold is buried, or apologizing for his wasted life, whatever is required by the plot.

You have to work pretty hard to come up with a situation where that would happen in a modern setting. If someone got shot in the middle of the street today, they'd be lucky to get the opportunity to say anything, to anybody, before they were either dead on an operating table or alive in the recovery room. Plus, given any handful of random people, it's likely you'll have somebody who knows something about first aid, at least enough to not let the guy with the sucking chest wound just lie there and wheeze until he conks out.

Not only are those sort of deathbed scenes considered cliche, I don't think audiences would really accept them as plausible. (Except, somewhat ironically, in ER-type medical drama shows, where they construct really elaborate premises in order to allow them.) Someone getting shot or stabbed today implies a lot of frantic action as a result, except maybe during the ambulance ride (where you do sometimes get a cheesy quasi-deathbed scene), there's no opportunity for a Hamletesque exit speech; you either go out like Polonius ("I am slain!" *thunk*) or you do it silently at the center of this complex and frantic Kabuki dance conducted mainly by disinterested professionals.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:39 AM on August 6

it could one day be possible to "back up" your memories and personality every month or so, as a sort of insurance policy against unexpected death or brain injury.

This featured in a number of John Varley's stories from the 70's, and Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired IIRC opens with the restored protagonist trying to solve his own murder. The narrative feel is a lot like the "I have Bob's notes and diary leading up to his mysterious death/disappearance and am retracing his steps" plotline.

Widespread surveillance or sousveillance can change a lot of plots. No more searching for the eyewitness(es) to the crime, or figuring out where someone went after they left the bar on the night of the events in question. On the other hand, it opens new plot devices involving avoiding leaving such a trail. I watched a talk by a PI a while ago who said he was expecting it wouldn't be long before he saw a divorce case hinge on someone having turned off their (location-logging) cell phone at crucial times.
posted by hattifattener at 12:45 AM on August 6

The need for government ID has greatly reduced many stories that depended on characters being able to assume new identities on a whim. A 150 years ago one could move out west with a bucket of cash, start calling yourself JimBob and *poof* you were JimBob and few would be wiser. A travelling salesman could easily maintain two families in separate states.

Automatic switching removed the operator as a source of information/gossip in communities.
posted by Mitheral at 12:51 AM on August 6

A hundred years ago, you could plausibly write a story about visiting exotic people in uncharted territories. It's much harder to do that today. People aren't as exotic as they used to be. There may be culture clash, but you have to go way out of the way to get to people that don't have some exposure to television and the modern telecommunications grid.
posted by Loudmax at 1:20 AM on August 6

It was perfectly plausible for the 1620s, when the story was set; time wasn't standardized and almost nobody had watches.

But I agree it would never in a million years work today outside of some very special circumstances that would probably seem too contrived to put into a story.

Funny, I saw someone put it to use last weekend, and it worked despite everyone there having a phone or a watch on them. "But it's only 9.30!" "Our clock says 10. Goodnight!"

Under societal norms and not technology, I wonder how talk radio and tabloid newspapers should have impacted the mystery novel, and whether they have. The victim-gone-public-via-the-media thing should surely show up as a parallel to the killer or suspected-killer-who's-just-having-an-affair who fesses up to Jessica Fletcher/Miss Marple/etc.
posted by carbide at 3:11 AM on August 6

I argue that the ability of the Internet and the media to spread bad information quickly, only to have it discredited later, has ruined the trope in adventure stories of "finding out the details of the government conspiracy/cover-up and quickly sharing it with the masses via the media seconds before the government goons burst throught the door" (see the end of the Serenity movie).

There's so much crap that gets reported as true, online and off, and then shown to be false a day or so later, that lots of folks now take these things with a grain of salt and wait for independent verification later.

You also have the phenomenon of people on and off the 'Net continuing to insist something is true or false, despite actual, well-known facts. Thus, the danger from any secret the heroes try to share via media can be undermined without the conspiracy even bothering with an organized propaganda campaign--all they have to do is sit back and let "birthers" do the rest.
posted by magstheaxe at 6:09 AM on August 6

You know, though, a lot of these "advancements" can be thwarted. One example's been cited:

A clever writer will come up with a reason why the cellphone fails. i.e. Falls into the toilet, character falls onto it, no signal in rural areas, someone takes it away from them.

Someone else said that the phone falling into the toilet didn't strike them as "clever," but -- who here HASN'T had a problem with getting a signal in certain places.

As for tracing a call -- I can't say whether it's true or not, but Law and Order has come up with explanations for how someone could fake their signal's location that sound plausible enough to a layman like me.

As for "you have to go way out of the way to get to people that don't have some exposure to television and the modern telecommunications grid", it's not THAT implausible -- just one year ago the world was abuzz because we'd spotted some people in the Amazon that the world didn't even know were there, and who had no idea WE were here. And there are plenty of people who live "off the grid" by choice, and live reclusively -- the different right wing militia groups spring to mind -- or because they've had no choice, like some of the extreme poor in Appalachia.

Mind, this isn't to say that there are indeed tropes that technology's done away with -- to a point. But there are work-arounds for some of them, still.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:25 AM on August 6

Pervasive CCTVs. I can't think of an old movie whose plot seems archaic in light of modern security cameras, but I'm sure there are plenty.

There's a simple solution to the problems of cellphones killing your plot: make a period piece. I recall seeing a period movie (can't remember the title) that involved a scam where a betting parlor ran its audio feed from the racetrack through a jury-rigged tape delay, giving their own plants just enough time to place winning bets against the marks who were listening to the delayed feed. That kind of thing would be impossible to pull off these days.
posted by adamrice at 6:57 AM on August 6

Bag inspections everywhere ruin quite a lot of plots. Like the opening caper of The Thomas Crown Affair requires him to bring a rigged briefcase into the Met, but now the Met has bag checks on entry. (It's possible they did at the time too, and the movie just ignored it, but at some point in the past they didn't have them.)

Running through the airport to stop someone at the gate is a cliche that doesn't work as well now. The chaser now needs to buy a plane ticket as part of the scene. (Speaking for the US here, since other countries like Australia still allow this for domestic flights.)
posted by smackfu at 7:00 AM on August 6

Desk Set, which operated on the premise that computers and librarians don't mix.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:09 AM on August 6

"Smart" car technology like self-parking cars, ignitions that won't turn until you pass a Breathalyzer test, etc., will eliminate bad driving (like in Ferris Bueller, Blues Brothers, innumerable car chase scenes.)
posted by SuperSquirrel at 7:38 AM on August 6

"Tech Marches On" at TVTropes
posted by djb at 8:01 AM on August 6

magstheaxe writes "'finding out the details of the government conspiracy/cover-up and quickly sharing it with the masses via the media seconds before the government goons burst throught the door' (see the end of the Serenity movie)."

Well in that case vg nccrnerq gb or pbzvat sebz Ze. Havirefr. Ur unq n pregnva nzbhag bs perqvovyvgl.
posted by Mitheral at 8:10 AM on August 6

@adamrice: The Sting.

I actually was about to offer that as one that cell phones have ruined.
posted by chazlarson at 9:34 AM on August 6

Some people get lost even with GPS.
posted by Robert Angelo at 3:23 PM on August 6

he was expecting it wouldn't be long before he saw a divorce case hinge on someone having turned off their (location-logging) cell phone at crucial times.

In a sense we're already there. The Drew Peterson case in Illinois has cell phone GPS evidence that may have been faked as an alibi.

I think that also shows how things do change. It isn't that deception and knowledge limitations and such have disappeared, they have just changed how they are, or must be, used to be effective as plot devices.

A 150 years ago one could move out west with a bucket of cash, start calling yourself JimBob and *poof* you were JimBob and few would be wiser.

Of course, this was a plot device in There Will Be Blood, and it turned out someone was the wiser even then. Just a data point.
posted by dhartung at 9:46 PM on August 6