Mobile phones have shaped cinema for half a century

4 min read The Economist 28 Apr 2023, 07:56 PM IST

A history of portable devices on screen, from “American Psycho” to “The Matrix”

Martin Cooper with a Motorola DynaTAC in San Francisco on April 2, 2003 (Photo: AP)

In 1973 Marty Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, took out a bulky object that measured 23cm tall and weighed a little more than a bag of sugar. From Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, he phoned Joel Engel, his rival at AT&T’s Bell Labs, a telecoms giant. “I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real, hand-held, portable cell phone," he crowed into his prototype, a DynaTAC. That call on April 3rd, 50 years ago, was the first placed in public on a hand-held phone (earlier mobile phones had to be plugged into cars).

“The Brick", as the handset became known, revolutionised personal communication. Science-fiction writers had anticipated such hand-held devices. Mr Cooper has said he drew inspiration from the two-way wrist radio worn for the first time in 1946 by Dick Tracy, a detective in a comic strip. The modern flip-phone resembles Captain Kirk’s “Communicator", a gadget that featured in the original “Star Trek" series of the 1960s. In the real world, mobiles transformed storytelling: characters could speak to each other from anywhere, at any time. This opened up new possibilities for plot, setting and characterisation in film and television.

When the first commercial mobile phones arrived in 1983, only the mega-rich could afford them. In movies, the newfangled toy became associated with greed. In 1987 Michael Douglas spoke into one—a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X—as Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street", their first appearance on screen (pictured, below). (The device cost around $4,000 in 1984, about $12,000 today.) “Money never sleeps," the profligate financier lectures into the phone, as he strolls down a beach at sunrise. In “American Psycho" (2000), another film set in the Eighties, the cell phone is a permanent fixture for Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a murderous yuppie (pictured, top).

Hand-held phones remained status symbols into the 1990s. In “Clueless" (1995), Cher and her coterie (pictured, below) hold theirs glued to their ears like some sort of chic antenna; the items are vital to both managing and broadcasting their busy social lives. In cinema, wily electronics firms spotted an opportunity to promote their products. Nokia’s engineers modified the 8110 model especially for “The Matrix" (1999) by adding a spring-loaded mechanism that Neo (Keanu Reeves) flicks to reveal the keypad. At the turn of the century, phone companies pumped out increasingly dinky models. Ben Stiller lampoons this trend in “Zoolander" (2001): playing a dopey supermodel, he deploys a flip-phone the size of his thumb.

As cell phones grew cheaper, more people bought them and screenwriters needed to incorporate the ubiquitous devices into plots. But they complicated a trope of horror, in which victims find themselves isolated. The line “my phone is dead" soon became a cliché. “Saw" (2004) reinvigorated the phone’s role in scary films; the killer builds mobiles into the traps he sets for victims. Elsewhere, screenwriters amplified anxieties about the technology’s nefarious effects. In “Phone" (2002), a Korean horror, a mobile number is cursed; in “Cell" (2016), an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, a mysterious signal broadcast over the cellular network causes people to become violent murderers.

The phone’s rapid evolution was a boon for spy thrillers—particularly for gadget-obsessed Q. In “Tomorrow Never Dies" (1997), James Bond’s Ericsson handset doubles up as a touch-pad remote control for his car, allowing him to escape the baddies. The ability to communicate on the move allows Jack Bauer to thwart terrorists in pacey, real-time plots in “24", a television series. “The Bourne Identity" (2002) reflected fears about privacy: American spooks activate their assassins via text message and track the hero through his phone.

Just as phones have transformed society, some directors are ripping up the rulebook of film-making, swapping celluloid for smartphone cameras. Sean Baker shot “Tangerine" (2015), which follows a transgender sex worker, using iPhones, as did Steven Soderbergh for “Unsane" (2018) and “High Flying Bird" (2019). A clutch of recent productions even focus on the technology itself. “BlackBerry" (2023) is arguably the first biopic of a mobile phone; “Mobile 101, a Nokia Story", a Finnish TV drama of 2022, is a chronicle of creative destruction in the tech industry. It is only a matter of time before “iPhone: the Motion Picture" and “Motorola" receive their own cinematic origin stories.