At the end of State of Play as the credits roll, the main characters wearily but with a certain sense of satisfaction walk off into the shadows, but the movie, like a cheapjack version of Antonioni's La Notte, chooses to follow the path of the story they have just completed as it makes its way from preparation to paper, and we watch as huge rolls are tuned into individual folded newspapers that make their way across the press room like so many atavars in a game of Chutes and Ladders.
As I watched this elegiac exercise, as I watched the huge, cumbersome, slow, wasteful machinery of the modern newspaper grind into action, I pondered the movies lament for the passing of the old ways and it was difficult for me to suppress the feeling, "Good riddance!"
Remember the Filofax? That was the glorified wallet that contained a yuppie's whole life, a kind of file folder and address book in one. They were expensive, and once you had one, you were required to purchase equally expensive annual updates. There was even a Jim comedy based on the horror of losing one's Filofax, called Filofax for a time, before a name changed to Taking Care of Business (1990). Within a decade or less, the Filofax was superseded by the personal computer and all many of subsequent portable digital storage spaces. Whenever I think of the Filofax, I think of the scene in Other People's Money in which Danny DeVito brandishes a buggy whip before a group of stockholders as an example of well-crafted but left behind technology.
Originally published in the Vancouver Voice, February 2010
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