Capturing the culture

There are rare moments when art changes a culture, and other moments when a book or film captures a cultural moment so that it acts like a mirror reflecting back where we are as a society.

Douglas Coupland’s Generation X did that in the late 80s and early 90s for what he termed the ‘accelerated generation’ of young people whose lives were beginning to be dominated by a fast-emerging cyberculture. And some have recently made a similar claim in terms of the millennial generation for the novels of the 31-year-old Irish author Sally Rooney, the first of which, Conversations with Friends, has recently been turned into a BBC TV series.

This 12-part dramatisation tells the story of Dublin university student Frances (Alison Oliver) who together with her best friend and ex-lover Bobbi (Sasha Lane) become entangled in a quadrangle of relationships with an older married couple, Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Melissa (Jemima Kirke). The emotionally repressed Frances embarks on an affair with the equally inarticulate Nick, much of which, in signature Rooney style, is conducted via text. The viewer is privy to frequent shots of phone screens on which they can read their dialogue. It’s a clever device, not only because communicating via social media is now an every-moment part of our lives, but because the actual face-to-face conversations between Nick and Frances mimic the limited expressivity of their texts, both speaking in halting, half-finished sentences, so that what is not said is more powerfully present than the words spoken. Indeed, this is true for most of the ‘conversations’ between the four protagonists. There is a sense of inner isolation, so that motives and emotions lie hidden beneath the surface of words to such an extent that we are left wondering whether the characters themselves even know what is propelling them to make the choices they do.