Civil War shows how desensitised our phones have made us

Lee Smith can’t stop taking photos of dead bodies. It is her job and she is meeting the demand for the images. But the protagonist of Alex Garland’s new dystopian film Civil War is afflicted with anhedonia. She can’t take joy from any activity, from eating and chatting, to her main vocation: photography. She has seen too much — and yet she can’t stop looking.

None of us can stop looking. And this is destroying our capacity for pleasure and stability. Our lives are dominated by the screen.

Many have interpreted Garland’s film — in which the United States is in a modern-day civil war — in the tradition of post-apocalyptic cinema: the breakdown of civil society, the desperate hunt for resources, the outbreak of brutal violence. But it is more than that. It dramatises our never-ending desire for seeing the grotesque.

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Amid all the carnage that surrounds her, Smith is always looking for the right shot. Civil War reminded me more of the 2014 film Nightcrawler, about a man who records videos of LA gang violence and sells them to a local TV station, than the post-apocalyptic 2002 film scripted by Garland: 28 Days Later.

The American critic Susan Sontag once wrote: “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” She added: “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

How quaint she now sounds. She was writing at a time when images meant magazines and television. Now we have images stored in our pockets and handbags. They are everywhere we go. And not just the odd disturbing photo or the singular obscene film.

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We have access to atrocities from war zones filmed on GoPro cameras; an inexhaustible supply of extreme pornography; and an endless stream of silliness and stupidity on social media platforms that we gobble up like pigs in a trough.

Over the past 15 years, with the emergence and swift proliferation of smartphones and tablets, what it means to consume the screen has dramatically changed. And not for the better. We are becoming desensitised to things that should shock us.

And this is bad for our capacity for fulfilment. Consider the biological phenomenon called the Coolidge effect. There is an old (possibly apocryphal) story about the US president Calvin Coolidge visiting a farm with his wife. On seeing a rooster that was passionately mating, Mrs Coolidge asked the attendant how many times this happened. “Dozens of times each day,” he responded.

To which Mrs Coolidge replied: “Tell that to the president when he comes by.” When Mr Coolidge was told this he asked: “Same hen every time?” and the attendant replied: “Oh, no, Mr President, a different hen every time.” To which President Coolidge said: “Tell that to Mrs Coolidge.”

The Coolidge effect, in a way, explains our unhealthy attitude to screens. The more we watch, the more we want to watch something even more extreme, because what we previously watched has stopped satisfying us.

This also explains the paradox of modern life. We can see so much more than our ancestors, but this is not making us happier. This is because to be satisfied means to accept limits. And if there is a limitless supply of things on our screen, we will never be satisfied by what we see.

It is bad not only because it nullifies pleasure. It is bad because it increases anxiety. Neuroticism is a consequence of overthinking, and who wouldn’t be neurotic when our thoughts are tied to the frenzy of screens. There is consuming the news, and then there is being consumed by it, and many of us are the latter — our devices pinging constantly throughout the day to remind us of the latest misfortune afflicting the world.

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It would be wrong to pretend I have not benefited from smartphones and tablets. I have loved many aspects of them. Would I trade my capacity to search any fascinating news item and see any distinguished artwork ever conceived? No. Such a world is impossible anyway; technology has thoroughly infiltrated so much of our lives.

But modernity is a double-edged sword. We have not evolved to see beyond what makes us content. And as long as that is the case, anhedonia and anxiety will be ever-present features of our age of visual abundance.

Still in Europe

The Champions League is back this week for the semi-finals but without an English team left in the competition. Despite this, in three out of the four teams competing for a place in the final an English player will almost certainly be starting: Harry Kane for Bayern Munich; Jude Bellingham for Real Madrid; and Jadon Sancho for Borussia Dortmund.

When I started following football in the mid-2000s, the only prominent English footballers who played abroad were David Beckham and Owen Hargreaves. In recent years, however, I have started to notice a growing number of players in other countries.

Along with the names I have already mentioned are Chris Smalling and Tammy Abraham (both at Roma), Fikayo Tomori and Ruben Loftus-Cheek (both at AC Milan), and Jordan Henderson at Ajax.

Most of these players are unlikely to start much for England but they are nevertheless part of a great tradition. Many gifted England players have played abroad (Glenn Hoddle at Monaco, Gary Lineker in Barcelona and Japan, Paul Gascoigne and Paul Ince in Italy, and many more). Long may this continue.

Bless me

Someone sneezed very loudly on the train the other day, and I immediately said “Bless you”. That same afternoon someone else coughed and I was close to saying “Bless you” again until I realised that would be a weird thing to say. But why?

Why is sneezing worthy of an established verbal gesture towards greater health but not coughing? Apparently “bless you” goes back to a time when people thought that those who sneezed possessed bad spirits and needed to be cleansed by a blessing. But I’ve always found coughing worthy of greater compassion than sneezing.

Sometimes when I’ve coughed someone will say to me something like “Are you OK?” But I want to be blessed too!