There’s a frustrating solitariness to noticing temporal errors in movies, literature and art that elude most others. Just like the kid in The Sixth Sense who sees dead people, I – as, I imagine, are many others – am condemned to spot anachronisms. They’re usually not terribly harmful to the narrative but they burrow into your mind and stay there. And unlike with the lifeless baby cradled by Bradley Cooper in American Sniper, there is no broad community of sniggerers to join with you in your accursed attentiveness. I imagine I was not the only person to spot in Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air, set in the aftermath of May 1968, a bottle of Chimay with a present-day label or a coffee served in dainty black espresso cups that became a feature of French cafés only a decade ago, but if others did notice them, they too are suffering in silence.
Neither am I sure how many people noticed the following egregious anachronism in Lynne Ramsay’s debut film Ratcatcher (1999): set on a Glasgow scheme in the late 1970s, the film features at one point a snippet from BBC’s Final Score, where the legendary Tim Gudgin reads out a result from the Scottish Cup: “Stirling Albion 20 Selkirk 0” (Gudgin repeats the scoreline for any incredulous listeners). The problem is, I know that that match took place in December 1984, because I was watching Grandstand that afternoon, as I did every Saturday in that pre-Sky Sports age, when you had a finite number of opportunities to catch the results of the day. Admittedly, this is a particularly arcane example but less so would be the Portuguese film I saw recently set among Angolan immigrants in Lisbon in 1980, where CDs appear on a market stall – most people of my generation would instantly smell a rat, knowing that the compact disc did not come into the world until three years later. Other people, more observant still, have cried foul at the appearance of Rubik’s Cubes and Walkmans in suburban America in 1979 in the movie Super 8 (though, given these were marketed very shortly afterwards, I would be inclined to be more indulgent).
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