The menace of gadgets

Why are so many dramas and thrillers now set in the past? Is it because, in a world of mobile phones, satnav and Google, suspense is impossible? Joe Queenan reports. A CRITIC I usually admire completely missed the boat recently when he said he could think of no reason why the Coen brothers' latest film No Country for Old Men was set in the late 1970s.

Well, I could. As soon as I started watching the Coen brothers' dark shoot- 'em-up about a philosophical psychopath on the loose in rural Texas, I realised why the movie was set a full quarter-century in the past. No mobile phones. No internet. No Google. No easy access to phone records, maps, personal histories, criminal records.

No way to track the killer merely by pinpointing the last phone tower that handled his call. No easy way in; no easy way out.

In fact, the Coen brothers seemed to be making a perverse point about the way gadgetry frustrates drama by including the highest-tech device of the time in their film: a transponder with a homing signal hidden inside an attache case filled with drug money. (The killer also murders his victims by using a compressed-air bolt gun as a weapon.)

By comparison with wi-fi or Yahoo or Ask Jeeves or Gmail or even Guitar Hero III, a transponder is a joke, the sort of nifty thingamajig that may have seemed cool in From Russia with Love the first time anyone saw it, but now seems more antiquated than Nehru jackets.

The same is true of a bolt gun. By setting their film in an era that predates the sophisticated devices that have transformed the landscape in the past 20 years, ushering in the Orwellian nightmare, the Coen brothers seem to concede that it is impossible to make an old-fashioned thriller any more. There are too many ways to track killers, too many ways for killers to track the guys who stole their money. Technology is not just ruining daily life. It's ruining movies.

The week I saw No Country for Old Men, I also saw American Gangster and Beowulf. Like the Coen brothers' film, American Gangster is set in the 1960s and 1970s, so once again mobile phones and the information superhighway do not fit into the proceedings. It takes Russell Crowe, playing that bizarre anomaly - the working-class New Jersey cop who is not a crook -_about two-thirds of the movie before he even figures out who his adversary Frank Hughes (Denzel Washington) is, because Hughes has left so few fingerprints.

Were the film set in contemporary times, Crowe could simply log on to his laptop and Google Hughes, or, better yet, read a few dozen blogs discussing his quarry's latest depredations, some referring to him as "The Godfather of 125th Street". This would make his sleuthing job a lot easier, but it wouldn't make much of a film.

The fact that American Gangster was made by the same man who directed Blade Runner should tell us something. But then again, Ridley Scott directed Gladiator. Gladiator, of course, is mobile phone-free, as were 300 and Beowulf.

But even films set in more recent eras display a similar fatigue with cutting-edge technology.

Consider The Lives of Others, the German film that won the Oscar for best foreign film last year, a motion picture that revolves around the relatively primitive surveillance technology used by the Stasi during the waning years of the East German communist experiment. Downfall, which won even more awards, is set in an even earlier era, and involves even more primitive technology.

Even a dud like The Good German was a thriller set in an era - postwar Berlin - where if you want to find out where the Nazi scientists are hiding, you're going to have to pound the pavement and wear out some shoe leather.

And that's without mentioning all those gadget-free Jane Austen films, all those thrillers about enigmatic Victorian magicians and the revival of interest in Westerns: 3:10 to Yuma, The Proposition, Seraphim Falls.

At some subconscious level, the public is sick of techno-thrillers, sick of post-Matrix slop, sick of inanimate movies like Ocean's 13, where the talents of people like Eddie Izzard are completely wasted as they plant him in front of a computer.

Whatever the original appeal of films where computer hackers assume the role once occupied by gunslingers and hit men, the hi-tech dog will no longer hunt. People are tired of seeing movies where the action is dominated by typists, archivists, hobbyists, librarians; they want to see more movies where a man with a weird Fifth Beatles haircut roams from Amarillo to El Paso, blowing complete strangers to smithereens.

Or movies where a mysterious gangster personally executes everyone who interferes with his heroin operation. The public doesn't want to see bad guys get hacked. They want to see bad guys get whacked.

When I was 10 years old, I started reading comic-book versions of Ivanhoe and Waverley. Not until I got to college seven years later did I discover that these ripping yarns were actually thought of as serious literature, not merely escapist trash aimed at adolescents.

Only then did I learn that Scott's novels were popular with his contemporaries precisely because they constituted such a strong reaction against the industrial revolution. People who had seen the world blighted by factories and trains and modern weaponry yearned for an earlier, simpler time when chivalry was in flower.

This time had never existed, of course; the dark ages were authentically dark, which is how they got their name, and nobility and decency were always at a premium in Western society. But that is beside the point.

The important point is that many 19th-century readers loathed the modern age, and fell in love with thrilling novels set in a pre-industrial world where technology did not decide every dispute. They wanted to read books about a world dominated by men, not machines.

Something similar seems to be happening now. At some level, both the public and movie-makers themselves seem to understand that a horror film like Psycho could not even be made today. Films like No Country for Old Men and American Gangster are a much-needed breath of fresh air in a society that has allowed its toys to suck all the drama out of life.

If it were up to me, every movie would be set in an era without mobile phones and Google, every movie would put the hero in a situation where he could not call in an air strike via his BlackBerry, but would actually have to slit the terrorists' throats and strangle their frothing dogs with his bare hands.

If that makes me a Luddite or a reactionary, so be it. I have seen the future, and I prefer the past. In fact, I have seen the present and the future, and I prefer the past. And by the looks of it, so do the Coen brothers.