Doomsdayers are not done predicting the end of civilisation because of films.
Doomsdayers are not done predicting the end of civilisation because of films. The Day it Rained Letters, a book that came to us last week, presents this apocalyptic vision of the future: there exists a town in which people do not dream. Because they have no imagination. Because they've stopped reading books. Because they were too busy watching films. The written word has been phased out; books are extinct.
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One day it starts raining letters of the English alphabet; they fall one after another on the heads of children, who do not know what they are seeing (good thing the letters fall in a font size too small to hurt their precious heads). It's a snowfall of letters and the town is blanketed. No one knows what they are looking at until someone does... they start feeding their imagination with stories built with those letters and now everyone lives happily ever after, etcetera. One normally does not get riled when people make films out to be more nightmarish thanu00a0 Freddie on Elm Street. They end up presenting their thoughts in books and articles that are too boring to be read.
To see it in a children's book is astonishing... how many of us know kids who read preachy books? It also makes you wonder if the writer, Nuri Vittachi, has intended this book for kids or for parents already convinced about The Evils of the Modern Age. Parents have always been vulnerable to such scares. TV was the big bogeyman before films, and even before that, it was comic books.
There will always be writers who pull both children and adults back to books. One does not remember the Philip Pullmans, Eoin Colfers, J K Rowlings and Susanna Clarkes of the world preaching. They just wrote compelling tales that made millions read. Vittachi also suggests that it is possible to make films without imagination; and that filmmakers are people who cannot, do not, dream. To suggest that a film (however good or bad) can even be envisioned, much less executed, without any imagination is, to use an Americanism, like... lame. In one Pearls Before Swine comic strip series, Stephan Pastis's talking animals end up buying vowels on the black market because they've become scarce. Pig, who does not know their value, squanders the alphabets with his pointless hysterics. Vittachi's book reminded us of Pig, only not funny or cute.
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