Facedown in a pool on Sunset Boulevard

My favorite movie is Sunset Boulevard, starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. It speaks to me. It speaks for me, and for every writer.

Holden is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who, while being chased by men trying to repossess his car, ducks into the estate of an aging silent film star (Swanson) who spends her days in a bitter funk, stewing that her career vaporized decades ago with the advent of talkies. While she had been perfectly able to communicate visually, the words she was expected to deliver once talkies came along simply weren’t her thing. Swanson convinces Holden to collaborate on a script that will be her vehicle for a triumphant comeback. He does. The studio doesn’t buy it. She shoots him dead.

The visual artist lives to see another day. The wordsmith winds up face down in a swimming pool. Sad but, as every writer knows, true.

I have always known that, given a choice between reading my words and looking at the photos or graphics that accompany them, most people will choose the visuals. This blog is an example. Google sends me statistics for every post, showing how many people clicked it on. The posts with the most provocative pictures get the most views. I have no way of knowing whether anyone actually reads the words underneath. Some of my best posts have had the fewest views because the visuals weren’t as entertaining.

I ran an ad agency for 30 years. Clients cared, for the most part, only about the pictures in any print ad the agency created. Words, other than those used in the headline, weren’t important. To prove my theory, I once wrote an ad for a car rental company and interspersed dirty words throughout the body copy. The client didn’t catch them until the final round of approvals. (And if she hadn’t, I would have removed them before it was sent out for publication.) Take a look at print ads these days (assuming, of course, you still subscribe to a newspaper or magazine). There are no words in many of them – just a picture and logo.

The Internet has evolved in a medium that’s primarily visual. Given a choice of pictures or words, most people will go for the pics and, if they read the words that go along with them, will only read the first sentence to get the gist. Because anyone and his dog (including yours truly and his dogs) can post anything on the Internet, many people are unable to discriminate between good writing and bad writing. So they have simply stopped reading.

A few months ago I visited the Newseum in Washington, D.C., a museum dedicated to news reporting. There is a room in which dozens of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos are displayed. They are powerful and emotional pieces of journalism but, unless one reads the captions underneath explaining the circumstances in which they were taken, they make very little sense. Most people, I noted, were skipping from photo to photo and weren’t taking the time to read about what they were seeing.

People these days seem unwilling or, more disturbingly, truly unable to process words. A few years ago on the TV show, The Amazing Race, a contestant, a recent college grad from an upscale Chicago ‘burb where, presumably, the schools are good, had to listen over the phone to a Confucian proverb approximately 15 seconds long, run a few hundred feet to a judge, and recite it perfectly in order to advance. She must have listened to that message 30 times before she got it right. Perhaps she has an auditory processing problem. More likely, she wasn’t accustomed to having to think about what words mean. Older contestants, I couldn't help but note, had no problem memorizing the proverb.

My mother, who will be 100 in April, can still recite, verbatim, poems by Poe, Longfellow and Whitman she was required to memorize in her one-room school more than 90 years ago. Of course, back then there was very little competing with words for students’ attention. They didn’t have access to the Internet, video games, TV, smart phones and the like. I would have to guess that most schoolchildren today have a hard time memorizing the Pledge of Allegiance.

Take Twitter. Please. Twitter limits users to a maximum of 140 characters. Millions of users worldwide are proof that words, in today’s society, aren’t important. It is difficult to express a coherent thought in 140 characters without butchering the language.

When I joined Facebook four years ago, I enjoyed reading posts from friends and acquaintances. But Facebook has, since then, become a visual medium -- words are few and far between. Most people, if they post at all these days, post a picture or video clip with no explanation of why they are doing so. I have 176 Facebook friends. A few years ago dozens of them would post news about themselves on any given day. A total of 17 posted to Facebook yesterday. Of those posts, 10 were photos or videos -- no words. A few days ago a friend posted tragic news about a family member. Lots of friends wrote underneath that they were praying, thinking about the family or were otherwise sorry. Others merely clicked the "Like" button. Perhaps they couldn't express in words what they were feeling – I have no doubt they, like those who wrote something, were distressed at my friend's news --but “like” wasn’t an appropriate response.

“I have cancer.”

Like.

“I am thinking about jumping in front of a train.”

Like.

This is my ninety-ninth post to tomdryden.com. If you have read any of my posts and, especially if you’ve read this one to the end, I thank you. If you’ve only looked at the pictures, I would say thank you if I were paid by clicks, but I’m not, so I won’t. I’m not paid anything.

I write it because, for some reason, I have always loved words, an art form that, like William Holden’s character in Sunset Boulevard, is dying a painful death.

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