Cell Phones

 

When I was a teenager I worked in a sandwich shop, whose owner was peculiarly obsessed with formalities and protocol: methods of wrapping paper packages around prepared food, for instance, or of cleaning the blade and sheath of the mechanical slicer with a rag moving in a certain specified direction, or sequences of giving a customer change while their ten or twenty was still visible on the shelf of the cash register. He instilled in me a kind of anal-Zen reverence for the observation of ritual in retail work, one which stayed with me long after I abandoned sandwich shops for used bookstores.

This shop owner insisted, as well, that we counterpersons observe a strict hierarchy as to the precedence of a real live customer, standing in front of us waiting to be served, over a caller on the telephone. Telephone customers, he explained, however preemptory and insistent, were to be considered as ghosts, non-entities, birds in the bush. They hadn’t made the commitment to appear in person in the shop, and so weren’t to be given any privileges to rival those customers who had. We shouldn’t ever make someone standing before us wait while we dealt with a telephone order; we were always to put calls on hold. I suppose this was where my notion of the morality of proximity was first instilled.

Cell phones exaggerate this consideration. Compared to traditional – I suppose I should call them primitive – telephones they break down space and time, the ordinary rules of access and proximity, to a bewildering new degree. I’ve always been particularly annoyed at overhearing someone else’s mobile phone conversation in the close quarters of a train compartment or an airplane on the tarmac. I admit I find it satisfying when that overheard conversation curtailed by instructions from the cockpit or by the train going into a tunnel. The cell phone line out of the sealed quarters of a train or bus or airplane seems particularly unfair, a betrayal of the ‘we’re-all-in-this-together’ contract to share the discomfort, the temporary democracy, of mass transportation.

An airplane or train car is one of life’s perfect traditional theaters, and we suffer its rupture by the Brechtian device of the mobile phone. The caller is breaking the fourth wall, converting our humble story of togetherness into a metanarrative in which he is the controlling narrator. The cell phone user has made irony of our sincere drama of grudging togetherness. As in a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, one person’s opting out of behavior which reinforces solidarity makes everyone else want to bail out as well. The cell phone user is like an airplane passenger who wears a parachute when nobody else has one. We wonder why he’s entitled.

I recently began re-envisioning my favorite filmic nightmares of transportation to include the mobile phone: movies like The Poseidon Adventure, or Lifeboat, or The Taking of Pelham, One, Two, Three, or Alive. The John Ford Western Stagecoach is probably the paradigm for this genre: the disunified gathering of Reformed Prostitute, Cowardly Salesman, Drunken Doctor, Proper Pregnant Lady, Snide Gambler, Pretentious Banker, Rough Outlaw, Bumpkin Stage Driver, etcetera, forced into temporary society by the marauding Indians on their tail. In my cellular version, the Salesman certainly calls out for a quick background-check on John Wayne’s ‘Ringo Kid’ character. Meanwhile the Banker will have gotten in touch with his broker:

“I want to divest from all stage-line and road-building holdings immediately, put everything into bullets.”

And the Drunken Doctor no longer has to fight his urge for the bottle long enough to perform the delivery of the Proper Pregnant Lady’s baby: she delivers the baby herself, out of sight of the men, while taking blow-by-blow instructions from a medical helpline. It’s impossible not consider how easily the introduction of a cell phone wrecks the traditional tale of a misfit microcosm banding together against external threat just as easily as it wrecks the banal solidarity of the daily commuter.

In the dire lifeboat of the real, however, things are not quite so simple. For, if mobile phones offer a path out of the humble, everyday communities created by the close proximities of transportation, they’ve also recently proven to offer an eerie path in to the privacies of the communally doomed. In September, 2001 I was, as a New Yorker, asked to erase any stored messages in my voicemail, because the city-wide system had been strained by the families of World Trade Center victims all desperately saving last phone calls made from burning and collapsing buildings. The phone company wanted to find a way to preserve those messages, and their computer system was at a breaking point. More famously, the calls made in and out of the fourth and final hijacked airplane were the key to creating a passionate and instantaneous unity among those temporary heroes who are presumed to have smashed into the cockpit to bring the plane down, causing a crash which harmed only themselves and their attackers, sparing any target on the ground. Without knowledge of the larger situation they’d have remained as passive – and perhaps, as distrustful of one another’s theories or plans – as the four squabbling actors in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. The image of their action, in turn, has become an irreducible evocation of fortitude and grace among strangers, too morbidly selfless to arouse any cynicism, though, alas, not too pure to appropriate for reprehensible politics.

Communication with the ground enabled those passengers to understand that they were seated in the larger stagecoach of history. Our Poseidons and Pelhams and Lifeboats are only, after all, poignant stand-ins for the whole world, for the vast continents of Bankers, Bumpkins, Prostitutes, Proper Ladies, Outlaws, and Drunk Doctors who must find ways to coexist. Yet, if all men are brothers why does it still stir our annoyance when one of them opts to speak with those-brothers-not-visible-at-this-precise-moment-in-space-and-time? Perhaps we’re not ready to admit to the largest, the most global priorities, at least not until the choice is between crashing our airplane into a building full of others or an open field. Short of crisis, we prefer to keep our attention on local, visible, fleshly humans, not remote, theoretical, staticky ones. And so we neglect the ringing telephones from remotest precincts, unsure whether those passengers are even really in the same stagecoach as ours.

I wonder what it will feel like when the cellular phone is invented which can receive calls from the future? Will we choose to take the calls those generations following us, whose needs we barely manage to acknowledge between our batterings-away at the polar ice and the rainforest, or will we let them go through to voicemail? I suppose it will annoy me, the first time someone I’m speaking with puts me on hold to take a call from 3006. Shouldn’t a call a co-inhabitant of the same year be more important? What’s that person from the future got over the immediacy of me? I suppose the answer will be the the person from the future has something to tell us. Perhaps a suggestion about where exactly we might want to crash this plane.

BBC Radio, 2002