Ink

 

The lie flies, while truth limps after it. 

Jonathan Swift 

There is a moment in Ink when journalism seems to lose sight of a fundamental question: why? Not because it has become useless, but because why slows down the consumption of news. It shifts the gaze from surface to depth, from the event to its cause, from curiosity to understanding. And so another apparently more innocent and infinitely more powerful question emerges: what happens next? 

This is where Danny Boyle identifies, with an almost philosophical precision, the point of origin of a mutation destined to become the paradigm of contemporary information. Ink tells the story of the birth of the modern Sun and its challenge to the Daily Mirror, but beneath the surface of the editorial war it tells something far more disturbing: the transformation of reality into raw material for the market. 

Rupert Murdoch — played by an extraordinarily ambiguous Guy Pearce, more seductive than demonic — understands before anyone else that a newspaper does not necessarily have to tell people what they ought to know. It can tell them what they want to know. And above all, what they want to keep knowing. 

Larry Lamb, played by a feverish Jack O’Connell, instinctive, almost animal-like in his energy, becomes the man tasked with translating this intuition into an editorial machine. He asks the newsroom what readers are really interested in: sport, sex, violence, television, love, young people, horoscopes, weather. It is not yet the world of social media, algorithms and clickbait, but their logic is already contained within it: news is valuable to the extent that it succeeds in capturing attention. 

And this is precisely what makes Ink a surprisingly contemporary film. What Boyle stages in 1969 is the moment when information begins to discover its most perverse power: not merely to report reality, but to shape it according to what is profitable to sell. The reader is no longer simply a citizen to be informed; they become a consumer to be won over. 

The transition is subtle. 

The editor of the Mirror still defends an almost ethical conception of journalism: informing people so that they may become the best possible version of themselves. It is a conception of information as an exercise in responsibility, almost as a secular form of emancipation. But the market introduces another morality, infinitely simpler: if it sells, it works. 

And when success becomes the criterion of truth, the medium ends up being absolved by the result. 

This is what we might call the psychopathology of the end: profit justifies the means, circulation justifies excess, audience justifies manipulation, consensus justifies the distortion of reality. It no longer matters whether a story informs, as long as it produces a reaction. It no longer matters whether it hurts someone, as long as it sells. It no longer matters whether it confuses truth with falsehood, as long as it succeeds in occupying the reader’s mental space. 

The great insight of Ink is therefore to show that the manipulation of information does not necessarily arise from an explicit desire to lie. It can arise from something far more ordinary: the desire to please. 

The genealogy of a model of information that we recognize perfectly today: information transformed into a commodity, attention transformed into value, and reality manipulated according to what produces desire, consensus and profit. 

And what pleases inevitably tends to become what matters. 

The film does not, however, reduce this revolution to a moral condemnation of the new journalism. Boyle also allows its vital energy to emerge, its capacity to break apart a rigid system, to give a voice to people and subjects that traditional journalism had ignored. Particularly significant in this respect is the figure of the female journalist who accepts the new Sun’s proposal in order to obtain a page devoted to women and finally bring into the public discourse issues such as female masturbation, desire, and female needs that had been repressed or hypocritically ignored. 

Here too, however, Ink introduces a fundamental contradiction: can information liberate through the same tools with which it seduces and manipulates? 

The film’s answer is anything but reassuring. 

The freedom won through attention constantly risks becoming a commodity. The female body can become a voice finally heard or an object to be sold; transgression can be emancipation or simply commercial pornography; denunciation can become information or spectacle. The difference does not necessarily lie in the subject itself, but in the way it is used. 

And it is precisely when this distinction becomes impossible that the journalist chooses to leave. Her departure perhaps represents the film’s most radical gesture: refusing to confuse freedom with the ability to sell anything. 

From this point of view, Ink is not only about the past. It speaks about our present with an almost prophetic precision. 

Because what Murdoch understands in the Sun newsroom has now become a global system: politics has learned to use the same grammar as commercial information; propaganda has learned to dress itself up as news; the economy has learned that controlling the narrative often means controlling behaviour; algorithms have simply taken that original intuition to its extreme. 

The question is no longer merely what is true, but what succeeds in capturing our attention. 

And immediately afterwards: what will make us buy, vote, become outraged, hate, desire. 

In this sense, information manipulated for economic purposes and information manipulated for political purposes belong to the same genealogy. Both turn the citizen into an object to be directed. Both replace complexity with reaction. Both need the public not to dwell too long on the why, but to keep asking what will happen next. 

Boyle does not need to turn Ink into a political pamphlet. He merely has to show the birth of a machine and allow us to recognize the world that machine has helped construct. 

And he does so with his customary cinematic vertigo: nervous editing, driving music, dynamic cinematography, rhythmic screenwriting, images that seem constantly on the verge of exploding. Everything contributes to transforming a newsroom into a feverish organism, driven by the same adrenaline that fuels the reader’s desire. The very form of the film thus becomes a reflection of its subject: Ink does not merely tell the story of the birth of information’s speed; it makes us experience it. 

And, naturally, the toilets could not be missing. Those in Trainspotting belonged to the abyss of drugs; here they become places of sex, vomiting and alcohol during a night of celebration. It is another unmistakable Boyle signature: the body, even when the story is about power, money and information, continues to remind us that behind every great ideological construction there is human matter — dirty, desiring, vulnerable. 

The ink of the title is therefore also this: the substance with which reality is written and, at the same time, the stain that writing leaves upon people. 

If France told the story of the death of information within the image, Ink tells of its birth within the market. Where Bruno Dumont showed a journalist no longer capable of distinguishing reality from its representation, Danny Boyle goes back to the moment when that confusion begins to become an economic model. France is the mature product of what Ink sees being born: news no longer as a tool for understanding the world, but as a device for capturing the gaze. In the passage from newspapers to television, and from television to the internet, the medium changes but the logic does not: what matters is no longer what is true, but what succeeds in making itself watched, desired, shared. In France, the journalist ultimately becomes part of the news; in Ink, it is the news that begins to become a commodity. Two moments of the same mutation: information that first sells reality and then ends up producing it. 

Ink tells the story of the birth of a newspaper. But what it truly tells is the birth of an idea: that reality does not necessarily have to be understood in order to be sold. 

And perhaps this is its most disturbing insight. 

Because when information ceases to have understanding as its purpose and adopts attention as its purpose, the question is no longer who possesses the truth. 

The question becomes: whoever possesses attention, does that person also possess reality? 

We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. 

Marshall McLuhan