Director Nick Hurran’s predilection for centering his films around “futuristic” concepts, from virtual reality in 1999’s Virtual Sexuality to “themed funerals” in 2002’s Plots With a View, perhaps reached its zenith in the mid-00s (the last time he made a movie). Allowing his technological penchant to hit its stride in 2004’s “tongue-in-cheekly” named Little Black Book, screenwriters Elisa Bell and Melissa Carter were alluding to the then endlessly modern apparatus that was a PalmPilot/Blackberry.
To make the PalmPilot the center of the narrative, we are brought into the world of the fledgling Maury Povich/Jerry Springer-inspired (or Sally Jessy Raphael, if you want a more “feministic” analogy) show, Kippie Kann Do! starring the aging Kippie Kann (Kathy Bates). Seeking to capitalize on sweeps season in order to keep the ratings afloat, recently hired Stacy Holt (Brittany Murphy), who has spent her entire lifetime, as she puts it, “preparing for a lifetime,” is somewhat lost at sea in this new environment. This often includes relying solely on the lyrical inspiration of Carly Simon for direction, a method she uses for all facets of her life.
Explaining at the beginning of her tale of woe that this unfortunate character quirk is a result of her mother, who “believed that all problems could be solved by listening to Carly Simon,” it’s clear that Stacy often makes poor decisions on the basis of “planning for her ultimate future.” But in the background of dumping perfectly good men like her college boyfriend, Bean (Dave Annable), Stacy also holds aspirations of being a TV journalist and one day working with her heroine Diane Sawyer (always Diane Sawyer with these wannabe journalists–she also made a cameo as a talisman in another Murphy movie, Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which Amber Atkins [Kirsten Dunst] looks to her for constant guidance for what she should do–maybe all of this somehow means that celebrity “guidance” has only led to our collective self-destruction).
It is this ambition that leads her to the Trenton-based Kippie Kann Do! show, where she quickly makes friends with associate producer Barb Campbell-Dunn (Holly Hunter, always killing it with her apathetic deliveries). As a key part of the largely female audience, Kippie seems only to notice Barb and Stacy (yes, they pioneered 80s name usage before Stranger Things), that is, when she notices anyone at all. And she certainly never remembers the names of her lower level male employees, like Ira (Kevin Sussman, once omnipresent in the early 00s), who ends up being the one to offer up the concept for the “Little Black Book” idea for a sweeps-worthy show. Because Ira bills it as “electronic footprints of where your man has been and with whom,” it is briefly considered, for Kippie Kann Do! thrives on the motif of men lying and cheating. But it’s brushed off initially for more overtly “salacious” ideas (“Penitentiary Porn,” that sort of thing) before Barb unwittingly starts to develop the concept by urging Stacy to look at her own boyfriend’s little black book, his model of choice being the then chic Palm Tungsten C. Ordinarily, Stacy wouldn’t be so curious about finding more information on Derek (Ron Livingston, prone to playing the beige boyfriend who still somehow acts like a dick despite his beigeness), but a recent revelation that he once dated self-admitted bulimic model Lulu Fritz (Josie Maran) makes Stacy question what else he’s been hiding. Like Barb says, “Omission is betrayal.” This is just one of the many poisonous seeds Barb, master puppeteer that she is, plants in Stacy’s head.
As something of one long anti-commercial for PalmPilots (after all, what man wants his business known or tracked when he’s your average shady fuckboy?), Little Black Book encapsulates such a frozen in time technological moment. Even Madonna would comment on the phenomenon during her filmed in ’04 documentary, I’m Going to Tell You A Secret, rolling her eyes at “Japanese businessmen playing with their Blackberries” at her Las Vegas show. That PalmPilots were a precursor to the “everything all rolled into one” smartphone makes them even more anomalous when looking back. Because there are few films of the mid-00s that so gleefully center their premise on a “new-fangled” technological device quite like Little Black Book, the very name of which attempts to mix the analog concept with the “future” one, it serves as a prime example of why it is so important for films to remain as outside of time as possible in order to remain timeless.
Criticized as he is now, Woody Allen is arguably the most adept writer-director when it comes to implementing this tactic (though, of late, he’s just become lazy in terms of always setting his narratives in the past). Unfortunately, as our society becomes evermore dependent upon technology not just for usage in “real life,” but also in filmic plot devices in order to reflect “real life” (a large part of the reason why it’s so difficult to create a movie with much in the way of over the top problems in Act Two, as it was once so effortless to do in movies like Adventures in Babysitting), it will be almost increasingly impossible to create something that doesn’t feel dated later on.
Taking out the premise of the PalmPilot in Little Black Book actually, in fact, might have saved it from such condemnation, as the narrative was essentially a movie version of the Sex and the City episode, “The Perfect Present,” (Livingston once again playing the boyfriend as Jack Berger) in which Carrie starts to unearth what she calls “the ex-file.” It’s a perpetually resonant concept for all women, after all, this fear of discovering too much about a new boyfriend’s romantic past. Had Little Black Book played that up from a more enduring angle, it might not have become just another throwaway film not only of Murphy’s career, but of the 00s at large, the only place where a PalmPilot could thrive, much like a pager in the 80s (or as an added source of ridicule for Dennis Duffy on 30 Rock).
