Film 3: Thursday

The suggestion is that this film depicts a tension between a natural world and a technological world. However, this does not seem to me to be the primary message. Rather I see in the first instance a question related to technological determinism and instrumentalism. Humankind invented the various devices in the movie and yet we see humankind defined by the devices. For example, the alarm clock wakes up the man. The main waits whilst the kettle boils. The characters are "slaves" to their cell phones. There is no choice but to use the computers at work. From my perspective the natural world runs parallel to this technological world and we are brought to think about life without technology. In this kind of life we have to learn and do for ourselves, just as the young birds learn to fly. Notice how the bird that crashes into the window picks itself up and flies again. When the computers are down due the bird taking the wire the humans simply give. There is a lack of agency in the humans in contrast to the agency in the natural world. Thus we have gained some advantages - communication, information processing etc - but we have lost our agency.