To some extent, the question would be: which Hollywood films don't address technology, and why? Of course there's verisimilitude in costume dramas (tho look at the anachronistic technologies in Swoon, and compare to the set for Hitchcock's version of the same crime story, Rope). The classic instance is Peckinpah, who is supposed to have said that the only technologies worth a damn were the six-gun and the movie camera. Now Sam P was given to role-playing the california ranchhand, but seems too to have had a genuine fascination and nostalgic commitment to the myth of the old west. To complicate matters, The Wild Bunch reflects on the good old days - and contrasts the cowboys' horses wqith the villain's car, for instance. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is set in the 'good old days' and is equally filled with nostalgia for an even older epoch. One technology in evidece is the contrats between Billy's romantic six-gun and Garrett's corporate rifle. A brief glance at Virilio's War and Cinema is probably not necessary to indicate the relation between the movie camera and the rotary action of the six shooter. I recognise that the object of discussion is the banality of technological devices' presence in Hollywood flicks. All the same, there is a fascinating insight to be gleaned from La Valley, Albert J (1985), 'Traditions of Trickery: The Role of Special Effects in the Science Fiction Film' in George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (eds), Shadows of the Magic Lantern: Fantasy and the Science Fiction Film, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 141-58. La valley argues that the narrative business of SF movies is to establish some sort of explanation, or victory or whatever, in the conflict between the photographic (human) and the special effect (alien). The notorious product placement of the Nokia mobile tumbling from the office block early in The Matrix seems to sit between your interest in the banal and La Valley's in the special (and banality, like realism, is also a cinematic 'effect' -- as Metz once said, to some extent all cinema is a special effect) Final note: I'm impressed by two essays of Michele Pearson, one in Screen 40.2, one in WideAngle 21.1, in which she argues for a periodisatioon of digital effects movies, an early era of effects as spectacle for their own sake, and a second she dates from the early-mid 90s where effects are far more bedded into the diegetic world. Pearson has a book on effects forthcoming from I believe California UP. Like Don Ihde's distinction between 'new' technologies of which we are constantly aware and 'old' technologies which, by familiarity, become transparent (like signage in your home language is transparent while signs in another tongue are not), Pearson in common with a lot of digital artists and critics observes the passage of digital comms from new to old status, but she also observes what aestehtic impacts that has, and opens the way to a sociological analysis of what familiarities are breeding among, in this instance, film audiences. best sean Sean Cubitt Screen and Media Studies Akoranga Whakaata Pürongo The University of Waikato Private Bag 3105 Hamilton New Zealand T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604 T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543 seanc@waikato.ac.nz http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/ Digital Aesthetics http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita The Dundee Seminars http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html