The Red Room

Not being on Facebook, Twitter, or any of those other time-consuming innovations, I only get to see or hear about the latest "memes" and Twitter-storms at second-hand, and generally only when they've already gone from deliciously hot, through tepid, to stone-cold and inedible. So, forgive me if you've already heard this one, but (allegedly) someone, somewhere, at some time (a time which counts as the "ancient expired past" by social-media measures, but "quite recent" by conventional, old-money measures), posted this:

What is the purpose of this 'red room' in Stranger Things? We frequently see Jonathan go inside this to 'refine' his photos or something. I don't quite understand what happens here. He puts the photo in water, and somehow this makes it more clear? ... Is this an old film technique, and if so what is it called?

Stranger Things is a Netflix series, m'lud, one of an endless outpouring of such series that I generally have no interest in watching, but which is apparently very good, if  a Spielberg-ish mix of nostalgic Americana, horror, and sci-fi is your thing. So, at first glance, what at first I thought was maybe a reference to some Twin Peaks-style "Red Room" weirdness turned out, of course, to be something far stranger and far more other-worldly: the darkroom.

Which, on one level, is hilarious. And surely not just to those of us for whom the darkroom is still an active memory. That dim red light, the enlarger, those miraculous trays of "water", the line of pegged, drying prints... These are surely no more obscure in meaning to digital natives than any other obsolete phenomenon that is a staple of movie story-telling; things like the horse-drawn carriage, the flintlock pistol, or the pay-phone. Otherwise, a film like Blow-Up (which I happened to watch for the first time a few weeks ago) must be pretty much incomprehensible. Although, actually, to be fair, it is pretty much incomprehensible, but for quite different reasons. No, you have to suspect that we are dealing with a case of poker-faced feigned ignorance here; which is still hilarious, but intentionally so. And which also makes the condescending laughter of the irony-immune smart-alecks who mainly seem to populate the internet even funnier.

However, it did make me wonder about the ongoing decline of the idea of process. Pretty much since the advent of domestic electricity, I'd say, most of us have completely lost touch with any grasp of how things work. You flip the switch, and it just ... happens. For example, it occurred to me recently that I had no idea where the electricity that powers our landline telephone is coming from: after all, where's the plug, where's the battery? I had to look it up, and, apparently, British Telecom are kindly renting us some of theirs, sent down the line [1]. Similarly, I'm pretty vague about the nature of radio and "terrestrial" TV: I seem to remember from physics lessons it has something to do with the fuzzy image of a Maltese cross – maybe TV was invented in Malta, or even by the Knights Templar? – and some ubiquitous but invisible rays and waves of various shapes and sizes. And these are old technologies: add wi-fi and mobile phone signals into the rich mix of multi-format waviness swirling through the atmosphere, and the urge to start wearing a tinfoil hat becomes understandable. I mean, do they go through you, or around you? You could be forgiven for wondering whether we are all slowly being cooked in a gigantic, terrestrial microwave oven by the BBC, at varying speeds, depending on which end of the spectrum you happen to favour. The function of the red light in the red room, I believe, may also have been wavy in nature.

Something which is both a result and a cause of this disconnect from the how of the material world is the contemporary pursuit of seamlessness. Seamlessness is not quite the same thing as good design. Obviously, it is very old-fashioned to expect the user of a device or service to apply any measure of common sense, native wit, or thoughtfulness to its use or function – or to the limits on its uses or functions – and also simply to invite the attention of personal injury lawyers. If a thing can't be used by a drunken half-wit – or can be used by a drunken half-wit in some inappropriate and potentially fatal manner – then it's in urgent need of better design. Or at the very least a sticker saying, "FFS don't use this toaster in the bath, you idiot". No, seamlessness is life as experienced by the very wealthy, or the very beautiful. Clothes are laid out, doors open, cars arrive, tables are booked, all without any effort beyond a vaguely-expressed wish to eat out this evening. The apps on a smartphone are similar miracles of paths smoothed and obstacles overcome, gifting apparently effortless cleverness to the most witless app user. Honestly, do you have the foggiest idea of how, say, Google does what it does? Beyond, um, "indexing"? Trust me, it's miraculous. Or, as Arthur C. Clarke put it in his Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Nostalgic photographers talk of the "magic" of the darkroom, and (inevitably) how miraculous it seemed when the latent image began to form in the tray of water developer. And, indeed, there was something a little special about taking personal command of the whole process, all the way from getting the bloody film into the bloody reel of the developing tank in complete bloody darkness, to hanging your wet prints over the bath. This, despite the fact that most of us bought bottled chemicals, about which we knew nothing more than how to dilute them, in which order to use them, and how many elephants were required to make them work properly [2]. I expect growing your own vegetables from seed, or maintaining a vintage motorbike must bring the same satisfactions, a William Morris-ish glow of "unalienated labour". But I, for one, was more than happy to trade all of that rough magic for the seamless miracle of digital photography. It freed me from the Red Room, like a labourer freed from endless spadework. But how does a digital camera work? I have no idea. And if one breaks or stops working, could I – or anyone – fix it? No: it'll probably end up in landfill, an inert brick of fabulous technology, along with all the obsolete microwaves and flat-screen TVs.

Which is a dilemma that exists across nearly every aspect of modern Western life. Many of us worry that it can't go on like this, always choosing the miraculous convenience of hi-tech ignorance over hard-won knowledge and understanding. But it's hard to see a way forward which isn't either a step backward into the agrarian, homespun past, or an ever closer embrace of "trust me" technologies in some eco-techno paradise; in the words of Richard Brautigan's bizarre poem, "all watched over by machines of loving grace".

It's easy to be amused by ignorance, feigned or real, but it may well be that our future depends on the willingness of brave, naive individuals to expose themselves to scornful laughter, by speaking up and demanding to know, "How does this work? I don't understand. Do you understand? Is this real, or is it just a trick? Why would you want to keep us in the dark like this?"
[cue up The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"...]

National Portrait Gallery

1. This puts me in mind of a juvenile prank from Olden Tymes. You'd ring a random phone number, and say, "Hello, GPO here! Have you got much cable between the phone and the wall?" To which (if the answer was "yes") you would add, "Well, could you push a bit through, please? We're a bit short at this end. Thanks!"
2. That may be a genuinely mysterious "red room" trope for the uninitiated... In the absence of a timer, seconds were counted as "elephant one, elephant two ..."