Melanie McGrath - Hard, Soft and Wet

Turning left at the end of the Oakland Bay Bridge I find myself in Emeryville, a strip of waterfront warehouses, malls, parking lots and golf driving ranges looking out over the black quays of Oakland to San Francisco. Mr Payback , billed as the world’s first interactive movie is playing at a specially converted theatre in the United Artists multiplex just round the corner.

A typical matinée crowd of truant teens, retired couples, students and lonely housewives beats about the ticket counter chewing popcorn and waiting for friends or for the start of their movies. Further inside the overactive air conditioning blows the smell of estery butter sauce out through a series of metal vents into the larger space of the foyer. TV screens show clipped versions of the new releases to a scattering of people sitting on the padded benches set around the walls. An atmosphere of quiet separation prevails, lending the building the genteel air of a public records office with all its dark secrets locked up in mysterious boxrooms off to the sides.

While my eyes are still adjusting to the shade in theatre five, six Chinese boys press past, heading towards the screen, murmuring, ‘Hey, cool,’ at their first sighting of the modified seats, each fitted with a joystick carrying three buttons in green, orange and yellow. I check my ticket, move down the steps to row L and settle myself into a seat behind the boys. The speakers begin to spew out soft rock numbers by Bread and Captain Beefheart. Within seconds of finding their places, the boys have already mastered their joysticks and are lost in a thick din of clicking thumb candy. Aside from myself and the boys, huddled together into two rows, the theatre is empty.

I sink into the velvet scoop of L14 with my coat about my legs to ward off the air conditioning, and position three of the fingers of my right hand on the green, orange and yellow buttons of the joystick in front to get the feel of it. Each button gives to pressure with a handsome poot and a wiggle of resistance.

‘Maybe it’s like the orange button is BLAM, and it offs the bad guy and the green just puts him in jail for life,’ speculates one of the boys, pounding his joystick.

‘Like, who, man?’

‘The bad guy , asshole.’

And the row of boys begins clicking as if their thumbs had evolved precisely for the purpose.

Voice-over and a red Testarossa on the screen: ‘The world is digital, fibre optic, cellular, but still there are assholes, jerks and scumbags around.’ Dissolves into the Title Sequence. The voice-over says ‘When you see the “VOTE NOW” message press the orange, yellow or green button on your joystick to make your selection. The film will then follow whichever selection wins the largest number of votes.’

Barely a minute in, before the stain left by the opening credits has fully faded from my eyes, the words ‘vote now’ appear in flashing dayglo, and an involuntary surge of adrenaline darts through my right hand speeding the fingers into a rise and fall. A multitude of clicks. I’m caught short by how much it matters to press down and win.

‘Vote orange, orange, orange.’ One of the Chinese boys in the row ahead is shouting. I can taste the concentration carried on his breath, the thrashing excitement, can feel the throb of clicks coming up through the fabric of the walls like some universal pulse.

The film slips seamlessly beyond the vote into the next act. A familiar smell of static rises from the seats. I’ve no idea exactly how I’ve voted, but it hardly matters, since it wasn’t so much a vote in any case as a series of miniature acts of incursion. Press, press, press, tap, tap, tap, click, click, click, the will of the flesh bearing down onto a lifeless ring of green and yellow buttons.

The high of the moment quickly passes and I’m left staring through the gloaming at the row of stiffened necks and knotted hands belonging to the boys in front. Whatever thin narrative is flickering across the screen is irrelevant. Only when the next ‘VOTE NOW’, the insistent call to arms, appears will our heads rock and our fingers bounce and the spells leak out from our bodies and animate for a few seconds the dead passage of the square of light ahead of us.

We don’t have long to wait, for within a matter of a few moments the words ‘VOTE NOW’ are flashing on the screen and my lungs begin to demand their breath in shallow shots, tapping out the rhythm of the next click, the next hammering vote, the clueless choice, the next small pulse of power that will electrify the web of nerves running along my arm and pull at the muscles of my right hand and finally set off the cushion of cells along my fingertips.

Thirty minutes after it first began, seven brain-dead people stagger out of theatre five into the foyer in a kind of ragged trance.

One of the boys says it was cool. Another says it was galactic.

Back at Nancy’s house I unpack the shopping in a daze, reminding myself to squirrel away a few of my more creative impulse purchases such as the slab of dried Greenland halibut and the packet of cream of tartar behind the tins in Nancy’s store cupboard. I’ll confess to my product promiscuity the next time I find her in a particularly good mood. Meanwhile, a few remaining extras will have to be consigned forever to a dark spot under the bed in the spare room. I’m not sure even Nancy would be able to forgive Japanese pickled strawberries and black finger fungus.

With an hour to kill before she’s due back I flip through Nancy’s manual of the Net, but soon find myself struggling for comprehension through the pile of abstract, dreary jargon: ftp, tcp, pop, ppp. I mean, what is all that? It sounds like radio interference.

As she’s leaving for work, Nancy invites me to a talk on education and technology being held this evening in the Valley.

‘You’re interested in the future, right?’ she says.

‘Well, yeah.’ I look up, uncertain of her tone, but the expression on her face has already moved on.

‘Sweetie, education and technology are the ways the future gets made,’ she says.

And with that she jumps up from the table, swings back that clot of brown hair and transforms immediately into Nancy the software marketer.

‘Why don’t you go browse my clippings box? Also there’s a big crate of articles and whatnot in the garage.’

In the garage it looks as though the San Andreas fault exploded over everything. Where the clippings crate might be among the heap of basketball nets, broken toasters, project files, back issues of Cosmopolitan and Wired , and beaten-up old software packages is anyone’s guess. Eventually, following a half-hour excavation I dig out the box from under a fortress of old Vanity Fairs and flipping through the disintegrating leaves of newsprint read the following:

28% of teenagers are screen addicts, 24% grey conformists. Annual US spend on entertainment and recreation reaches $34obn, only $27obn for elementary and secondary education. $800m spent every year in US on TV ads to children. Deyna Vesey, Kidvertisers’ Creative Director, says ‘the general rule of thumb is, once a kid is three, you can go after them on TV.’

American kids under twelve spend $8.6bn, 13–18 year olds spend $57bn.

And so it goes on, an avalanche of abstracted facts, public opinion surveys, vox pop statistics, flow charts, graphic predictions, trend tables.

The Sausalito Library’s catalogue of books lists a handful of titles under the category ‘adolescence’, including: