Screen culture
Hot Links: Hypertext and George P. Landow
‘It was probably late and we had certainly been drinking. The conversation turned to ‚Äì guest stars from M.A.S.H.? One-hit wonders of the 80s? The fictional biography of the Fonz? The actual biography of Henry Winkler? Something. This was the mid 1990s, and we could, in theory, have dialled up and posted a question on the Usenet, maybe even consulted the Internet Movie Database, a resource that came into being just a little before the first web browser was launched, but none of us even thought of that. ‘
Writing in Images and Sounds
‘In hardboiled crime/detective/gangster films of the 1940s, there is often a scene where one character confronts another and hints at something unstated and highly menacing, but awesomely present in the air – usually leading to the utterance of the classic line: ‘Do I have to spell it out in words?’ This excellent phrase often comes to mind when reading the criticism devoted to almost every art form: film, painting, music, theatre, TV, sculpture. Because the dominant assumption, operative for a long time now, is that we do need to spell it all out in words – that our responses to creative works are only genuinely articulated, and furthermore legitimated, when we put them into ordered, written, rational form. ‘
How does it feel to be famous?
The End of the Tour is the product of this posthumous celebrity. This is true in the obvious sense that neither James Ponsoldt’s film nor the book on which it is based would exist if David Foster Wallace had lived. But it is also true in the more complicated sense that the film both relies on and participates in the construction of Wallace as a cultural symbol.