When I was a child in the 1980s, my relationship with split screens began and ended with the opening credits of glamorous prime-time TV dramas. Even now, my breath catches at the thought of those introductory Dallas triptychs. Patrick Duffy! Linda Gray! These were people so momentous that you got three of them at once. Dynasty had its own classy variation, whereby a panel containing the actor overlaid a background scene. Think of a brunet soap hunk smouldering in a vertical stripe, which partially covers a bottle of frothing champagne.
My younger self’s association of split screens with campy decadence was, of course, a limited perspective. The technique is nearly as old as video technology itself. The director Edwin S. Porter, for example, deployed it in 1903, in his short silent film Life of an American Fireman. In the opening scene, a drowsy fire chief sits in his office chair, and in a hazy circle above him we see, as through a porthole, into another place, where a woman is tucking a child into bed. The double image is ambiguous: Is this the fireman’s dream of his actual home, or a home life he wishes he had, or a memory, or is it meant simply to represent something happening at the same time, whether related to him or not?
Porter soon connects these collided scenes: When the fire bell sounds, the firemen go to the house of the woman and child, which is now filled with smoke. Their relationship to the fire chief, however, remains mysterious, and this mystery springs from the strangeness of the split screen itself: Does it bind two events together or diametrically oppose them? Are both things happening, or only one of them, or neither of them? The split signals a fork in the road, the twist being that both paths—taken and not—exist in parallel. More than a century after Porter’s film, in 500 Days of Summer, the drama bifurcates into “Expectations” on one side and “Reality” on the other.
How resonant the split screen is now, as we inevitably set our expectations for the autumn and winter of 2020 against the reality. The shock of lockdown makes it tempting to imagine that the real you is inhabiting a parallel stream of events, cavorting unmasked in one Dionysian gathering after the next, while this other you scrubs down your mail. But even before pandemic struck, the prevalence of split screens was encouraging us to shape and articulate our experiences in this partitioned way. The more of them we encounter, the more we begin to interpret the world according to their logic.
For many years, a major function of the split screen in unscripted TV has been to set up a gladiatorial relationship between the speakers. They may be geographically and ethically removed, yet the split screen hinges them together. One of the most infamous split screens in 21st-century American television involved two people sitting a table-length from each other. It is catalogued in the glossary of Ladies Who Punch, Ramin Setoodeh’s book about the morning talk show The View, as the “split-screen incident” of 2007.
During cohosts Rosie O’Donnell and Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s increasingly heated argument about the Iraq War, the audience at home got a view of both women at once. This technique had never before been used during the show’s “Hot Topics” segment. When O’Donnell noticed what was happening on a monitor, Setoodeh reports, she became even angrier. The aggression of the format was arguably more upsetting to her than the content of the fight. “When I saw the split screen,” O’Donnell said later in a video on her website, “I knew it was over.”
Since then, split screens have become relatively simple to produce outside the professional studio. On social media, “reaction videos,” in which people film themselves responding to a piece of embedded video, are a popular variation on the genre. Users might react to a makeup tutorial, a news clip, or their first time listening to a vintage hit. These videos imply that all the world really is a stage. Both a performance and the experience of that performance are performed, side by side. Reaction videos dramatize the intense self-consciousness of our digital age, which continually invites us to place ourselves inside an event, to individualize mass, pop-cultural moments with our comments, our emojis, our tweets, and our blissed-out grimaces to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
While reaction videos cleave an artwork into its substance and its effects, the split screen is also being used on social media for the purposes of political activism. One recent viral video by Momentum, an organization affiliated with the UK’s Labour Party, sets footage of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Arden’s various announcements about her successful pandemic strategy alongside those of the UK government, which currently presides over the worst death toll in Europe. On the topic of herd immunity, Arden says: “That would have meant tens of thousands of New Zealanders dying, and I simply would not tolerate that.” Cut to the right-hand side of the screen-cum-boxing ring, where British prime minister Boris Johnson “replies” with the idea that “perhaps we could sort of take it on the chin, take it all in one go, and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population.”
This kind of split screen, where one side is paused while the other side rolls, is a powerful rhetorical device. It’s adversarial, of course, engineered to allow one side all the wisdom and the other all the folly, but a similar use of the split screen places people in combat with themselves. The Washington Post produced a devastating set of split screens in a video called “How Fox’s Coronavirus Rhetoric Has Shifted.” The compilation compared various anchors’ commentary early in the second week of March (“worst-case scenario it could be the flu”) with what they said less than 10 days later (“we are facing an incredibly contagious virus”).
In this way, the split screen has become a significant tool in exposing hypocrisy, especially when it manifests as political cynicism and expediency. How easy it is now, with the great database of tweets at our disposal, to set a politician’s former condemnations of a rival against their present-day fawning (or vice versa). In an age of political denial and the brazen rewriting of recent history, the split screen is a vital tool of resistance. Just as it brings people together across geographical distance, it also tethers the past to the present, creating a timeless space in which they coexist.
“Hypocrisy” is one word for the shifting of a person’s opinions over time to suit the circumstances, but “duplicity” is another. While the word has come to be synonymous with deception, it literally means “two-folded.” The split screen’s double-sidedness is clearly influencing how we visualize the world. It has become a common journalistic metaphor, a good illustration of how technology shapes our language.
While reporting from this year’s CES electronics trade show, The Washington Post’s Cat Zakrzewski described the “technology split-screen,” by which she meant the immense tech optimism in Las Vegas versus the skeptical lawmakers in Washington “grilling” Facebook executives. Last December, the announcement of President Trump’s impeachment came while he was giving an upbeat speech at a Michigan rally, a contrast that USA Today described as a “historic split-screen moment.”
In 2018, on the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, CNN described the simultaneous scenes of government shutdown and nationwide women’s marches as a “split-screen weekend.” And more recently, at the start of the George Floyd protests, a Politico editorial commented on the imminent clash between Joe Biden’s address from his home and Trump’s statement from the Rose Garden. The authors of the piece wrote that it was Biden’s chance to “sear a split-screen image into the minds of Americans.”
With the collapse of the center ground in many Western democracies, the dominant word used to describe these political landscapes is “polarized,” and the split screen is the ideal format of polarity. It dramatizes difference, emphasizes contrast. It holds disparate, unruly images together in a stable if highly explosive form, which is our ongoing challenge every time we turn on the news or open our laptops.
In his 1991 book Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the theorist Fredric Jameson describes the demands on an individual living in a highly mediated society. He argues that the multiscreen artworks of Nam June Paik enact the particular kind of looking that is necessary to navigate contemporary life. Standing in front of one of Paik’s video installations, Jameson suggests that the postmodernist viewer “is called upon to do the impossible, namely, to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference.” Contemporary life, Jameson argues, is too complex to be resolved into a set of clear relationships. To grasp the world’s complexity, we must face the inevitable failure of fitting life within a single frame.
There is morality in this stubborn incoherence, which admits that the world cannot be reconciled into one perspective, one master narrative. The provocations of the split screen remind us of this. And, of course, we’re reminded of this, too, as we live our lives over Zoom, the most prominent split screen of this moment. There is little coherence in our Zoom self, which sits in the same seat being radically different people—a family member, an employee, an interviewer, a lover, a friend, a patient. More or less overnight, in a kind of double exposure, our locked-down homes have become both public and private places.
Recently on Zoom, my partner and I were playing a board game with another household. As I left the table-stage to get a beer, I saw my partner rise as well. In the hectoring tone that often emerges during games, I told him to wait until I was back, as it would be rude to leave our “guests.” Straight away the word hit an odd note. Weren’t we also their guests? (The French understand better the dual nature of hospitality; their word hôte means both “host” and “guest.”) On the laptop we were rowed side-by-side, the pandemic corralling us into this new kind of relationship. In that moment, I felt the vertigo that split screens can often trigger, full as they are of subversive, fantastic power, with potential to spatchcock the old hierarchies and help flatten playing fields.
If this is really a golden age of the split screen, we should welcome it. In these unhinged times, they’re part of how the light gets in.
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