Cameron Diaz's Last Comedy, and Science Fiction Become Reality: Thoughts on the 2014 Movie Sex Tape

I was not a particular fan of Bad Teacher, but I did end up catching the reteaming of director Jake Kasdan with Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel in Sex Tape three years later.

The film had me thinking of those who love to tell us that if the science fiction genre seems less fresh and visionary and original and vibrant today that is because writers cannot keep up with a reality where technological change is far outstripping the rate at which writers can work. "The whole world has become science fiction!" they tell us triumphantly as they lift their cell phones high. ("I am holding a cell phone! The future is now!")

This kind of talk has never impressed me--struck me as mere shilling for consumer gadgets, and propaganda for the "information age," all as one sees how much technological progress has actually run behind common expectations for decades (got that self-driving car yet?), how little change there has been in the more fundamental areas of life. (The smart phone has been around for so long now that you have people old enough to vote who literally do not remember a time before its appearance--all while such things as the production and content of food, shelter, clothing, energy, transport, medicine have changed very little, to name but a few of those essentials people rarely look away from their screens long enough to notice, except when they do not have them, or use their withering math skills to understand the bill for them and are horrified. No, this is not the world of revolutionized abundance you were promised.)

Still, Sex Tape seems to me to be a movie which really would be a good example of how what would have been science fiction once has become contemporary reality--in its depiction of contemporary mores, and communications technology. Written in 1964, for example, it would have been prophetic--rather like Murray Leinster's extraordinary extrapolation "A Logic Named Joe," which saw fifty years ahead to the era of the Internet very, very clearly indeed. But of course it was no such extrapolation--leaving us with, in this case, rather a mundane farce, rather than any great vision such as gives many a science fiction classic an interest even where it ceases to entertain in the usual ways.