Transparent Writing: Screenlife and Formalism
“Thinking is inherently silent.” Says Maddox, the AI Judge played by Rebeca Ferguson in Timur Bekmambetov’s latest Screenlife film Mercy (2026). “Have you hugged your computer today?” Asks a mug in Albert Birney’s OBEX (2025), a sci-fi film set in a Baltimore apartment in 1987. In a computer film, like the two aforementioned ones, the machine is a scenario, a plot device and a character. In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (2010, 11e) writes that “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”
The first comparison to draw between these two films is their personification of the computer. While Mercy sees its protagonist, an LAPD Detective (named Chris and played by Chris Pratt) falsely accused of murdering his wife, attempting to prove his innocence to an AI judge, OBEX takes us to a pre-internet era, where the computer was still a novelty, and its lacking graphical capabilities were filled by imagination. For Conor, the recluse protagonist of OBEX, the computer is everything: a tool for work, a friend and entertainer. For Chris, the computer is a trap, designed as a machine to kill anyone who slightly deviates the law and is always surveilling civilians through its cloud of camera-abled personal devices.
Like most movies previously produced and directed by Timur Bekmambetov, Mercy is told heavily through the use of different screens. Unlike his other Screenlife pieces like Searching (directed by Aneesh Chaganthy, 2018) and Unfriended (directed by Levan Gabriadze, 2015), it is not completely set within the computer screen. Mercy seldom feels like a one location film, even if it all takes place inside of the Mercy Capital Court and whatever we see outside of it is mediated by a screen. The main visual difference between Mercy and Bekmambetov’s earlier computer films is that our view of the protagonist is not bound to the screen in which most of the film takes place. OBEX, not bound to a screen at all, shows the protagonist and the computer as separate characters and entities, portraying the screen of the computer as a window to another world, rather than the world itself as portrayed in Mercy and its Screenlife companions.
The computer film too, even if unconsciously, always tries to be humanist—outside of Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1994), I have yet to find a film in which the computer is portrayed positively. If all humans were to die at the end of a computer movie—think of a possible nuclear armageddon in John Badham’s WarGames from 1983—, they would still win as a race oppressed by the machines.
In its often villainous status the computer becomes alive, takes form and gains a language. If you allow me to possibly misunderstand what form is. Allow me too to bring filmic examples that are formally interesting and not much else. Imagine with me the organization of different frames and allow yourself to fall into the screen, become engulfed by it, trapped in its language.
The main connection between these two films, outside of the computer-centrism and their personification of their respective screens, is their explaining of the machine through a thought-out-loud structure that tells the viewer how to watch the film.
TRANSPARENT WRITING:
Because of the nature of the desktop screen and the content created and consumed on it, computer films are also inherently textual. Having the plot develop solely through the screen in Rich Lee’s 2025 adaptation of War of the Worlds (produced by Timur Bekmambetov) means that some conversations will take place through the exchange of instant messages, emails and other forms of digital text which showcase the computer’s visual understanding of its world. This is of course supplemented by appearances from the cast mostly through video-call software like Skype, FaceTime and more recently, in War of the Worlds, Microsoft Teams.
In most film dialogue, what is written on the screenplay to be said by a character is read on screen verbatim. This repetition offers a degree of translation between the writing that underlies a narrative film and the image itself as mostly direct, safe for an actor’s contextual interpretation of the line and parenthetical—think of Kevin Sorbo breaking the wall between film and screenwriting by shouting “Disappointed!” after delivering a line in the TV show Hercules: The Legendary Journey—. This translation of text to acted speech is rarely something that raises thought when watching a film, but as a point of comparison it show how the Screenlife can be seen as a more layered and transparent form.
Like any other screenplay, the writing of a Screenlife is an attempt at visually describing what will be on screen: “he opens the Messages app and types…” The Screenlife’s relation to text dialogue is thus more direct: if I can safely assume that all Screenlife screenplays have been written using a computer, the translation of what a character will type described on the page is then literally repeated on screen, offering a level of transparency between the screenplay and what is shown on the film. Looking at a typed text message is like peering backwards, revealing the line of dialogue behind the screen, traveling back in time to pre-production.
“Wherever a film lures a viewer into its fiction, it also makes obvious how its modes of fabrication are working.” (Conley 2006, xxiii)
As we fall into the Screenlife’s seemingly realistic and immersive lie, we are also taught how to read its inner structure. In Film Hieroglyphs Tom Conley sees this inner workings seep into the pictures from textual clues visually placed on the surface of the film. In the introduction of the book he (Conley 2006, xxvii ) continues: “The viewer is free to see writing as a compositional design that has everything — as well as nothing—to do with what is meant.” But seeing the name of a restaurant, or a street sign flash on the background of the image is much different than textually conducting a scene in a Screenlife film.
Lines of dialogue in a screenplay will often contain the tone of the sentence between parentheses, describing it as: whispers, shouts, cries, etc. What is typed and recorded on screen is generally void of emotion, except when the screenlife uses the length of typing, typos and frantic texting to reveal the feeling behind the words. It is important to note that Screenlife films often lack total confidence on the visual, often resorting to adding the face of a character on the corner of the screen, through video capable apps, and often to comical effect in War of the Worlds.
At the same time that the conversations, texts, and thoughts-out-loud of the computer film add context to the story and, borrowing from Tom Conley, “make obvious how its modes of fabrication are working,” they also teach us not only how to watch the film but also how to use the machines represented in them. More recently these films have also become a fertile ground for the advertising of the corporate software we are aiming to escape while at the movies. In Bekmambetov’s films surveillance is both criticized for its reach and praised for its narrative power.
These acknowledgments to text and writing in the computer film have made me come to think of a transparent writing, where form meets content in equal terms, and consciously so. My potential misunderstanding of form is not done with the intention of committing a blunder, but done so in the hopes of getting closer to understanding the computer as a nod to formalism and the screen as inherently formalist.
FORMALISM:
In pages 80 to 82 of Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina (2018), the internet is illustrated. Although we see on occasion, and in very cinematic montage fashion, the face and body of the protagonist using the computer in bed or at work, once the screen is shown it engulfs the panel. The sequencing of the text, cut and separated by the thin gutters, quickly becomes overwhelming. Like the characters, the rooms and landscapes drawn, the internet in the book becomes yet another thing, a graphic element. “[…] comics is a medium that is deeply formalist…” writes Hillary Chute (2024, 304, 305) in the afterword to Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture.
At first, the textual nature of the internet articles and emails shown on screen feels like a downgrade from the detailed but muted colors of the graphic novel. Backgrounded by a white screen, the text of the emails received from a conspiracy theorist character are immediately seen as a contrast in the illustration-heavy book. The sudden textual density of the page puts the reader in a place of structural distrust. It presents itself as an unreadable element of the page, each letter, still drawn and not typed, seems to still hold the same value as a landscape backgrounding the action.
In the very early days of cinema, 1916 to be precise, Hugo Münsterberg hoped for an entirely visual future for the medium in The Film: A Psychological Study:
“The next step toward the emancipation of the photoplay decidedly must be the creation of plays which speak the language of pictures only.” (Münsterberg 1970, 86)
Writing within the context of a silent cinema, Münsterberg perceived the images and title cards as separate things. Often framed in elaborate ways, backgrounded by a black screen and separated from each other by montage, the text which gave the photoplay its context was a rupture in the movement of cinema. Even if used sparsely, the title card was invasive enough to warrant such thoughts from early film theorists.
The Screenlife—which I believe to be aptly titled for a Münsterbergian analysis—much like the comic book, offers a semblance of a simultaneity in the way it presents its images to the viewer. Often setting its scenario on the desktop of a personal computer, the displayed applications, texts and videos are layered on top of one another. A video call is backgrounded by an iTunes window, a news article can be juxtaposed with a personal image. The connection between the screenlife and the comic book is not only visual:
“Comics is a spatially site-specific form—like avant-garde poetry and many forms of poetry—in which every mark exists in significant relation to others both semantically and extrasemantically.” (Chute 2024, 304)
The Screenlife too is site-specific. The position and juxtaposition of the images it frames through different computer softwares matter immensely, and the use of the screen necessary for its categorization as such. This likeness to the comic book is what makes the form stand out in comparison to other mise en scene, and its constant representation of a montage of the simultaneous frames its images are bound to is what makes the Screenlife formalist.
Much of my sudden theory about its formalism undoubtedly comes from the visual similarities between it and the comic book form, but this comparison also helps us see formalism as direct and visually perceptible. In the Screenlife: our vision is controlled and manipulated to certain parts of the screen, but the frames, here represented as software windows, which would usually vanish into the past are brought back or accessible to the eye, occluded in the background. My vision and possible misuse of formalism is, in short, a constant recognition of the frame, form is a conscious organization of matter within the frame.
“For more than a century comics have portrayed modern experiences through a dynamic interrelation of narrative and pictures—without waiting to be defined.”(Gunning 2024, 36)
Comic books are inherently formalist because they use their form to write themselves. The placing of the panel on the page remains unchanged from drawing to printing. They are graphic, as Hillary Chute (2024, 304) states, the same way an avant garde poem is. The screenlife is of course more active and fast paced, acting as a drawing board for each frame rather than a finished project.
Mercy differs from Bekmambetov’s previous projects because it places the protagonist outside of the screen. The film could almost be described as being Post-Screenlife. To bring it back to the comic book, it is as if suddenly we saw the artist above the page and as character.
The comic book is also formalist because every single story teaches us how to traverse and read it, if not through intuition then literally through Chris Ware’s often confusing panel structures in Jimmy Corrigan, leading the reader/viewer along its diagrams.
If we want to talk about form in the Screenlife, then we must ask what this form aims to translate. Bekmambetov sees it as necessary to show intimacy in our digital contemporary world:
“People exhibit behaviors and comments online that they would never dare to repeat in real life. Cyberbullying has taken on insidious forms not so different from a medieval mob. The accessibility of our daily online data challenges the notion of free will and choice. Online dating reshapes the landscape of relationships and family as we know them. In the face of these shifts, Screenlife emerges with a purpose to contemplate the ongoing transformations, to humanize the Internet and virtual spaces, and to imbue them with meaningful purpose. Failing to undertake this endeavor now would plunge us into an unsettling “black hole” of uncertainty that would inevitably seep into every facet of our external world.” (Bekmambetov 2024, 18)
The Screenlife translates the form of comics and excludes their content. Using image and text as equal gestures, as the comic has done for centuries, the Screenlife is able to translate subjects sentences may not be able to capture and that normal cinema may now deem too formalist. Love, as the ultimate invisible, remains to be seen positively on the computer screen.
LIMITATION:
“As in all aesthetic forms, rules and restriction exist to be played with, and in a ludic form like comics the game is nearly always smash and run. Frames become barriers to be crossed, exceeded, bent, and even rendered invisible. But they always appear as structuring limits (even the anarchist fin de siècle cartoonists for Le Chat Noir, who tended to eschew square borders, constantly imitate frame lines with diegetic props, such as lamp posts, that divide the action or fuzzy limits to the scene that make them float as if suspended in some extraterrestrial realm).” (Gunning 2014, 42)
In short, films are visually limited by the frame, comic books are limited and bound to the page. Each film and each comic book are limited by their own languages and some outside expectations of what certain genres are supposed to be. As viewers, our thoughts are of course not trapped on the screen, but our eyes and the story are.
In the computer film its limitations are exactly what allows us to perceive its understanding of its surrounding or encapsulated world as a language. Ludwig Wittgenstein (2015, 86) writes that the limits of our languages mean the limits of our world, Ernst Cassirrer (1953, 31) may complement: “The difference between the several languages, therefore is not a matter of different sounds and marks, but of different world conception.”
Go back to Wittgenstein’s thought that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life and we can imagine the many computers of the computer genre talking to one another. The 1984 Macintosh from OBEX may learn a lot from the AI from Mercy, possibly becoming more evil and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) like. This limitation in the computer’s understanding of the world through its programing and software based vision makes it learn from new possibilities presented to it, and this lack to be filled creates a void ready for explosion.
In OBEX, Conor’s daily life consists of playing with his pre-internet Macintosh, watching and recording horror movies on his stack of three televisions, taking care of his old dog Sandy and translating printed images which are sent to him into typed characters, forming a human made typing abstraction which imagines how a computer may see us. OBEX exemplifies a computer limitation and explosiveness that is no longer possible today.
ASCII art, as this typing abstraction is called, is not a product of the graphical limitations of the computer per se, but rather created by the limitations of the printer.
Conor presents ASCII art as a novelty of the personal computer age, a digital abstraction that is no more than a limitation of an already perfect image. As Conor places the images above his screen and translates the image he is doing the opposite of what an image does to text. The limitations of text explode towards an image in ASCII art. Even if the image is not real, it is a graphic element.
Learning to read and write is traumatic and oppressive, writes Tom Gunning:
“The repressive drill of learning to write generates imaginative forms of escape. But this bildungsroman also culminates in the mastery represented by the perfect penmanship of the cursive artist’s signature inscribed beneath the cat’s paws. The artist has learned to fashion a name for himself through a process both playful and violent—as most games are.” (2014, 46)
For a child, and most of Conor’s seen clients are curious children, learning how to write means the trauma of possibly ditching the visual world of imagination. In my process of alphabetization I remember having letters presented to me as cartoonish characters, anthropomorphizations with legs, arms and eyes growing from where they shouldn’t. Thinking back, the trauma of changing image for description suddenly feels ever more present.
This traumatic entrapment eventually wanes, leaving space for an escapism back towards the image. The ASCII art that Conor creates based on the pictures sent to him regresses images to the limitation of writing, even if abstractly so. Writing makes us escape from and back towards the image. Trapped within the graphical limitations of the computer, Conor imagines, through a computer game which promises to put the player inside of it, a world of fantastical and realist fantasy. The lack of the graphically impaired computer is filled with the desire for something which we thought only it could one day make exist.
Today it feels quaint to imagine we ever wanted to escape to an imagine cyber space when all we want to do now is escape from our digital devices. Even if bound by the computer, OBEX and Mercy are opposite films. While Conor imagines a world that seeps out of the screen, Chris wants to escape from it while the screening room simulates, like a 4dX movie theater, an environment around him, trapping and engulfing him in the screen.
Having the flames of a truck explosion digitally engulf the room is what encapsulates the true common of all computer films: a seeping of the screen into the real world. What happens in the computer never stays in the computer: the digital ghost kills people in Unfriended, secrets come out in Mercy and the imagination of a digital cyber-space engulfs the real world in OBEX. The game the computer starts by itself in WarGames takes proportions outside of the screen, framing the whole narrative through it and offering release only once the game is over. As Mercy moves away from the screen, and away from the formalism set by Bekmambetov’s previous films, it regresses towards cinema.
Münsterberg (1970, 31), thinking about cinema in 1916, wrote that “The best does not come from without.” If I ever have to rescue him from the past in order not to flunk a film history exam I’ll ask him to argue in favor of the rebirth of the computer film as an exaggeration of our inner worlds. Maybe he would like my idea of a remake of Weird Science (John Hughes, 1985) in which Gary and Wyatt create a friend.
CITATIONS:
Bekmambetov, Timur. Screenlife: How to Start Making Movies With Nothing but a Computer and a Story. 2024.
Chute, Hillary. “Afterword: Graphic Modernisms,” in Comic Books and Modernism, ed. Jonathan Najarian, pp. 301-309. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2024.
Conley, Tom. Film Hieroglyphs. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Drnaso, Nick. Sabrina. Montreal, CA: Drawn and Quarterly, 2018.
Gunning, Tom. “The Art of Succession: Reading, Writing, and Watching Comics,” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 3, ed. Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda, pp. 36-51. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Spring 2014.
Münsterberg, Hugo. The Film: A Psychological Study. New York, NY: Dover, 1970.
Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2000.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. New York, NY: New York Review of Books, 2015.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.