Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

The Mind-Game Film 33or technological. Cinema thus rehearses and readies the human sensoriumfor the tasks of “distracted attention,” especially with respect to the perceptualorganization of the visual field at the place of work and in everydaylife (for instance, when crossing a street with traffic, as in Harold Lloyd orBuster Keaton films).Thus, on the one hand, Benjamin’s thinking seamlessly precedes (andin its historical reference, follows) that of Foucault about the body and thesenses in the “classical age,” except that for Foucault, the micro-systems ofpower (of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) had ways of inscribingthemselves directly onto the body, in the form of sexual mores, rules ofhygiene, or the rigid time-tabling of the working day, rather than “mediated”by modern audio and visual entertainment forms. On the other hand,within an apparently quite different ideological context, because given apositive turn, one finds a similar argument made by the American socialanalyst Steven Johnson, in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You (2005).There, Johnson develops a theory about the “post-industrial” role for themodern media, by arguing that computer games, and especially contemporaryAmerican television, notably some of the HBO-produced orinspired programs such as The X-Files, The Sopranos, 24, or Lost (as wellas “weird” movies: more or less the same titles I cite as mind-game films),are “good” for the young, because they train new cognitive skills and teachappropriate ways of responding to and interacting with automated systemsof surveillance and control, such as increasingly predominate on thework-floor and in offices, as well as in the home and in interpersonal discourse.Johnson, in other words, takes a pragmatic and proactive view ofthe new control society, making the best case for America’s mass mediafulfilling their historic role in adapting the working population to the socialtechnologies that promise their economic survival, maintain civic cohesion,and assure America’s hegemonic position in the world. Trend-watcherMalcolm Gladwell’s review of Johnson’s book, tellingly entitled “Brain Candy”(a possible alternative for mind-game), sums up the case as follows:To watch an episode of “Dallas” today is to be stunned by its glacial pace –by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciatingsimplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of “TheSopranos,” by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozencharacters who weave in and out of the plot. [. . .] The extraordinaryamount of money now being made in the television aftermarket – DVD sales