"Why Doesn't He Just Use His Cell Phone?"

A common screenwriting mantra is “Force your character up a tree, throw rocks at him; then get him down again.” I try to watch movies with an eye to the tree and the rocks, taking note of the techniques writers use to generate desperate situations for their characters. Lately, I’ve noticed that writers of action and suspense films and TV shows are encountering an amusing new storytelling problem: How to explain why their protagonist doesn’t just use his cell phone to get him out of a predicament.

For the entire history of film, characters have found themselves alone in desperate circumstances, with no possible solution except using their wits to escape. These days, a litany of archetypal pickles find themselves easily solvable with the press of a few buttons. Lost? Kidnapped? Held hostage? Tied up? Trapped? What’s the problem? Whip out the Razr.

The recent thriller The Strangers, in which intruders terrorize a couple in a rural country home, dedicates nearly ten full minutes to ruling out cell phones as an option. Action-oriented scripts are full of these awkward, forced moments of exposition. A character’s cell phone conveniently runs out of power, gets no signal for no reason, is broken, dropped, or lost at the precise moment that he finds himself up that “tree.”

Comedies have it a little bit easier; they can turn it into a joke. On a recent episode of The Simpsons, Homer finds himself - disguised as a cow - headed for certain death in a meatpacking plant. Right before he accidentally enters the plant, he calls Marge to let her know that the plan is working perfectly so far. He then adds, slowly and exaggeratedly: “Now I’m turning off my cell phone to save the battery.”

I wonder what William Shakespeare would have come up with if Juliet had been able to simply blow up Romeo’s Sidekick and explain that she was going to fake her death. Who’d have thought that these convenient little devices would throw such a noticeable wrench into the gears of centuries of storytelling conventions?