There is a very good brain reason why iPads will ruin movies or, more precisely, the movie watching experience.
Our brains only test the reality of things in relation to our moving our bodies through the world. If we know that we can't act on something--and I mean really can't act, not even if we took a rocket ship to it--then we don't judge its reality. And that's the situation with movies and other works of literature and most works of art. We know that we will not act on them. We know that we cannot change them. There is no need for us to test their reality, for they present no threat, offer no opportunity for food or sex, and in short offer nothing that would enhance our evolutionary chances.
If we know we can't act on a movie, then we can have that paradoxical experience of believing it despite knowing that "it's just a movie." We can believe for the moment in Iron Man or the Mad Hatter. For two centuries now, critics have followed Samuel Taylor Coleridge and called this paradoxical experience, the "willing suspension of disbelief."
There are some exceptions: postmodern museum works,performance arts, or interactive fiction, where we do act on the work of art. With these works of art, we are acutely aware of their reality. Do you remember those theatrical pieces in the '60s when we were all supposed to take off our clothes? That kind of art doesn't offer the "escape" that movies classically gave us, and still give us.
So long as we are not just watching them on an iPad.
With an iPad, the world and its distractions and its realities is all around us. We are, after all, holding the one and a half pounds of iPad in our hands. We are far from inactive so far as this movie form is concerned. We are poised for action.
And it's not just iPads that will ruin the movie experience, but laptops, SONY Readers, cell phones, iTouch, and all the rest of our vestpocket connectors to the World Wide Web that can show movies. Even watching streaming Netflix on my computer, I am still immersed in my nine-to-five concerns. Writing about films with improbabilities, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane notes, "Watch [them] on DVD and you find yourself scoffing at the unlikely curves and switches in the plot, whereas the same setups, viewed in the dreamy imprisonment of a movie theatre, feel like the machinery of fate."
Watching in my living room or on my iPad, I can start and stop the movie as I please. I'm in control. It isn't. And the result is I don't "lose myself." I am not "transported." The whole movie experience is changed and not for the better.
Notice that the same agument applies to television. It's the reason television will never be great art. Even the finest of television like Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective is designed to be watched in your living room with the kids yelling in the background and the telephone ringing and everything around you to remind you of all the stuff you need to do tomorrow. It isn't the digital material itself that robs tv of artistic immortality, although the slapup way most television is created doesn't help. It's the fact that you won't be watching that digital material in a theater but surrounded by distratioins.
Sadly, the argument applies as well to DVDs of films. They, too, form fare for the living room, not the theater. While the DVD is are great for a critic like me who wants to watch and rewatch and study a film, regular viewers get shortchanged. Or they shortchange themselves by watching DVDs at hom. But, of course, where else would you watch a DVD.
Sadly, it seems to me that our new technology, starting with television but now with these vestpocket film viewers, we are going to see the end of what seems to me the greatest way of telling stories since the invention of writing--the movies.
Items I'm drawing on:
Lane, Anthony. 2008. "Beautiful Friendships." New Yorker, 26 May.
Holland, Norman N. 2009. Literature and the Brain. Chs. 6-8.
