An Unintended Warning

The shift of focus this week to the idea of surveillance, as clearly registered in the choice of films at our screening, had already recalled in my mind Thomas Keenan's citation of the Panopticon, a sentiment corroborated by Levin in his article. While Levin prefers to focus on the concept of surveillance as it applies to the cinematic medium, I was struck by the inescapability of surveillance in our everyday lives. The train station, a convenience store, a museum; these often unrecognized intrusions of the technological watcher into our lives and actions comprise much of our time spent outside the home. In short, only the home is fully insulated from the hidden eye of the outside watcher (and our films would seem to suggest even this stronghold is not secure). Indeed, while it has so far shied from the recording of images in private residences, the U.S. government has already demonstrated through the tapping of phone lines a willingness to push the boundaries of this sort of remote witness of its citizens. Yet institutionalized surveillance is only one element of this structure. With the ubiquity of recording devices in private businesses has come an even greater jump in personal cameras and camcorders, allowing any human being to become a potential surveillant. And perhaps the most important question in all this is that of what is done with these recorded images, taken without our knowledge or consent: with little to no oversight over the private surveillance of businesses, what assurance is there that this footage is later destroyed or erased? It is more than a bit unsettling to imagine the various videos and images that, over the years of our public lives, could have been created and stored while we remained oblivious. Levin brings these uneases up as eye-catchers in his introduction, discussing the statistic of the 12-camera daily average for a person living in New York City, but to him, their significance is in the context of their relationship to the cinematic medium. Perhaps our fascination with surveillance of others in cinema is some sort of projection defense mechanism, allowing us to continue to disavow the reality of our frequent, if not near-constant, observance by forces alien to us by tying it to that of a fictional cinematic world. Yet on principle, I would look at this in a different light, expanding upon his offhand citation of the Panopticon. I think the analogy is frighteningly sound in modern society: except in places where a video camera is prohibitively visible, we cannot know precisely when or where we are being seen, or who is watching. Within this theoretical comparison, the only dramatic difference between our world and that of the Panopticon is that we succeed in a massive societal disavowal of the panoptic forces that could be watching at any time and place. Because of this disavowal, modern surveillance, unlike that of the Panopticon, does not always succeed in the prevention of crime, but rather seeks to enable the capture of the perpetrators after the fact. So, does the simple act of walking out our door plunge us from security and privacy to 1984? This would certainly be an exaggeration. Still, some of the most ridiculous aspects of a film like Enemy of the State have been vindicated by advances in military and government technology in the past few years. If a company like Google can publish an aerial picture in which my car is clearly visible, the resolution available to the government elite is clearly far superior, as implied by Levin. While our disavowal of surveillance in public frees us from the horror of life inside the Panopticon, it also cripples us from doing anything to ensure that this power is being used within reason and with legitimate oversight. The world of cinematic surveillance is not so far removed as we might like from our own.

P.S. Did anyone else notice that the NSA file picture of Brill was actually an image of Caul from The Conversation? I doubt I would have picked up on it if we hadn't watched the films one after the other. A little cinematic nod to the self-referentiality Doane ascribes to television.