Scrawled in Wax

This may be nothing at all, but I feel like I’m noticing a trend: Film is suddenly being infiltrated by text.

I saw this first in Zombieland, in which rules were written on the screen as the film proceeded. This you can see above.

Second, I saw this in the new BBC series Sherlock. In one of the opening scenes, when a group of people all receive the same text message, we see that text appear above each person’s phone.

And third, as half of Toronto knows, overlayed text forms part of the film itself in Scott Pilgrim, a movie that obviously draws from its ‘video game-inspired comic’ roots.

So, is the obvious conclusion too obvious? That screens, now the cultural home of both moving pictures and text, cannot help but show both at the same time?