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Giovanni Tiso
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand The
spectacle of surveillance Images of the Panopticon in science-fiction cinema |
Our society is not of spectacle, but of surveillance [...]. We are
neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine,
invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part
of that mechanism.
(Michel
Focault, Discipline and Punish)
It’s not paranoia when they’re really after you.
(Tag line of the film Enemy of the
State)
Introduction
- Enemy of the State and the
technology of surveillance
‘The more technology you use, the easier it is
for them to keep tabs on you’. This is how Gene Hackman’s character in Enemy of the State (USA, 1998, Tony
Scott) a communications expert turned private investigator by the name of
Brill, explains modern surveillance at work. The line of argument is simple:
every time we use a phone, log onto a computer or make a purchase with a credit
card, we send bits of information concerning ourselves into a world of many
networks; and then all it takes is someone with enough resources and the
appropriate agenda to collect this information and turn it into an instrument
of control. Which is precisely what the American National Security Agency is
seen doing in this film, lurking in the shadow of political protection and
acting not as a line of defence against potential threats to the State but as a
very high-tech secret police.
The direct relationship between technology and
surveillance suggested by Brill has interesting implications. For one thing, it
is becoming increasingly difficult to accept the one without the other: as
socio-economic pressures drive more and more people to increase the levels of
technology in their lives, if only to keep their jobs, there is a corresponding
increase in the overall levels of surveillance. This mutual relationship does
not even require an explicit intent to monitor people on the part of the
manufacturing industry, for the devices which make the new brand of
surveillance possible - such as cellphones, credit cards and networked
computers - do not serve the primary function of keeping tabs on people; on the
contrary, they are consumer products bought on a voluntary basis as tools to
carry out certain tasks. And yet an important part of the way they function is
by leaving subtle but permanent marks which can ultimately be traced back to
their users. In time, these traces grow and start circulating between computer
systems, giving to unknown others the power to map our lives.
A scene from Enemy of the State illustrates the kind of inferences which can be
drawn out of such information: having obtained two names, those of lawyer Robert
Clayton Dean and freelance entrepreneur Rachel Banks, the analysts at NSA feed
them into a computer programmed to cross-reference all the data included in the
various commercial and institutional databases in the country; in this way they
are able to ascertain more or less instantly that the pair went to college
together, shared a one bedroom flat and its bills for a few months (a
connection that suggests a romantic involvement), and that although currently
living apart they have some kind of business relationship – as can be deducted
from a coincidence of withdrawals and deposits into and from their respective
bank accounts.
Older, less technological ways of collecting
data about the individual, namely those of centralised bureaucracies, would not
have been able to produce such updated and relevant data. The registration of
births, deaths and marriages (to establish identity) and the assessment of
income (for tax purposes) have been the main instruments of control of the
State over its citizens for the last few centuries; but in comparison to the
kind of information circulating in modern databases, they tell little about the
individual. Just as importantly, modern communication systems make it much
easier to cross-reference whatever information is at hand, enabling the
watchmen to establish connections without which, as in the example above, the
data themselves would be largely worthless.
The panorama of modern surveillance would not
be complete without the oldest means of all, the one investing the very
etymology of the term (literally to ‘watch over’). Accordingly, the instruments
employed by the NSA in Enemy of the State
could not but include the latest in the field of optical surveillance. All
manners of cameras, including futuristic ones mounted on satellites and keeping
constant watch over the American territory in astonishing detail, help to
ensure this primary form of surveillance by striving to keep a literal eye on
the subject at all times, while the accompanying soundtrack is provided by small
and unobtrusive microphones which can be easily concealed on and around the
target.
The powerful mix of informational, bureaucratic
and optical/aural surveillance portrayed in this film is not that far-fetched:
the technology is there and the intent has been demonstrated in several
quarters[1],
leading the media to show a great deal of interest in the issues involved. The
explosion of the theme of surveillance in contemporary films - and particularly
in the science fiction genre that Enemy
of the State borders upon - should not come therefore as a surprise. Of
more interest is the technophobic bias shown by many of these films which, as
in the case of the one touched upon in this introduction, seem solely concerned
with amplifying the feelings of fear and disquiet which surround this issue
rather than with exploring the ways in which it reflects on social structures
or indeed cinema’s own involvement - as a technology-intensive industry - in
the surveillance process.
Foucault,
Orwell and the one-way gaze
The Panopticon has become the key metaphor for
the power of surveillance in contemporary society. Originally conceived by
English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, the Panopticon is a
prison structured as a circular building divided into cells which are all
simultaneously visible from a central tower. The inspector who inhabits the
tower is rendered invisible to the cells by Venetian blinds and by a complex
system of architectural tricks, so that the prisoners have no way of knowing
whether or not they are being watched at any given moment. In this way,
although the inspector cannot possibly look everywhere at the same time, the
illusion of incessant observation is created by removing the source of the gaze
from view. Without the need of coercion, postulated Bentham, the prisoners
would follow the rules of the prisons for the simple fear of being caught in
the act of breaking them; and in time their behaviour would become automatic,
as if they had voluntarily grown to abide by those rules. The Panopticon, in
other words, was at the same time an instrument of containment and of moral
reformation. For this reason, although his primary example was the penitentiary
house, Bentham saw applications of the design to schools, hospitals, asylums,
factories; in other words, to every situation in which a large number of
individuals had to be controlled and indoctrinated at the same time.
Despite the fact that no such building was ever
actually built, the Panopticon survived as an organisational principle with a
powerful imaginary appeal, and was taken up by Michel Foucault as the model for
the development of contemporary disciplinary societies. In the disciplinary
society, argues Foucault, power is no longer exercised through coercion but
through surveillance, by virtue of the panoptic principle:
Hence
the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of
power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects,
even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should
tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural
apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation
independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should
be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. [2]
It is society as a whole which induces the
illusion of “conscious and permanent visibility” in its members, while power is
disindividualised and rendered automatic. The most well-known representation of
this mechanism is undoubtedly that of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the figure of Big Brother could be
seen as the equivalent of the inspector in the central tower of the Panopticon:
he cannot be seen, and may not even exist for all the prisoners/citizens know;
all that counts is the possibility that he may be watching, a possibility which
becomes certainty - by virtue of a paranoid short-circuit - precisely because
he cannot be seen[3]. His power
is that of a social self-regulating principle which works through a gaze which
is at once literal and metaphorical.
In Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (UK, 1984), the gaze of Big Brother is channelled
through ubiquitous television screens which depict the still image of his
imposing face and unblinking eyes. In this respect the film is at a distinct
advantage compared to its literary source, for it can show this haunting image,
give shape and colour to it without the need to resort to a verbal description.
At the same time, the film presents a significant structural ambiguity in terms
of point of view: while Orwell’s narrator could modulate with words his
relationship with Winston and Julia, the two main characters/victims in the
story, Radford’s camera can do little more than choose from which position to
shoot them; and no matter how sympathetic the angle, the cold fact remains that
the characters are being constantly framed, looked at, exposed in a way that
presents many similarities with the structure of the Panopticon: a single gaze,
that of the spectator through the camera, is able to watch many characters
while remaining unseen.
This unavoidable, structural effect is
heightened in Nineteen Eighty-Four by
an almost clinical mise-en-scene which portrays Winston and Julia with very
little sympathy; the depiction of nudity in the sex scenes, for instance, is
unromanticised and focuses on the flaws of their malnourished bodies, so that
it becomes difficult to regard them as objects of desire. No matter how
significant a point is being made in this respect (sex is being rediscovered by
people who have suffered from systematic emotional desensitising) it is
difficult to chase away the sensation that the viewer is being asked to partake
in the same kind of surveillance carried out by Big Brother, a practice which
is especially careful to leave no room for intimacy. In fact, until the couple
is captured and it transpires that their meetings had been monitored all along,
the spectators may well regard their own powers of observation as being greater
than those of Big Brother himself. But the blind spot was an illusion, and it
later becomes clear than the same clandestine scenes observed by the audience
had been - coldly and clinically, no doubt - surveyed by the authorities.
Does this suggest that the spectators are made
to feel like accomplices of the rulers of Oceania? My contention is that to a
certain degree this is so, and that it could not be otherwise due to the nature
of the medium. The cameras and microphones which provide a film with its
narrative perspective are also instruments of monitoring and surveillance, and
every cinematic work could be said in this respect to contain a voyeuristic
dimension. Whenever this structural aspect intersects a thematic aspect of the
story, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four,
this inherent ambiguity in the position of the viewer is amplified and demands
to be reckoned with. Radford’s way of dealing with this aspect of filmmaking is
to make conscious use of it in order to heighten the isolation of the
characters within their society; hence Winston and Julia’s dream to be able to
lead a secret life in a secret place could be said to be doomed, even before
the police breaks into their upstairs room, by the fact that we can still see them. There is secret
police, sitting in theatres or in front of television screens, that these two
individuals will not be able to get away from, so long as their story is being
told cinematically.
Limits
of the Panopticon
The relationship between cinema and
surveillance comes to the fore in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (USA, 1972). The title refers to a brief
conversation between a man and a woman recorded in the midst of a crowded
square by Harry Caul, a private investigator specialised in video and audio
surveillance hired for this particular assignment by the woman’s husband.
During the many sequences devoted to the rehashing of these few lines of dialogue,
the film proper turns into the one shot by the investigator, and its images and
soundtrack wholly occupy the narrative space. That this effect can be reached
with little effort - merely by using a
different film stock, distorting the soundtrack and making the appropriate
deviations from the conventions of classical mise-en-scene - makes again the
point of the contiguity between filmmaking and surveillance. What is more
interesting in this film, however, is the way that this contiguity is used to
reflect on the issues of representation and point of view, as well as to
highlight certain contradictions of the panoptic society.
As he spends long sessions in front of his
editing equipment, trying to produce the best possible footage to hand to his
client, Caul gradually develops an obsessive interest in the content of the
film he has surreptitiously shot. Of the man and the woman in the film he knows
nothing, except what he can glimpse from the fragments of their conversation:
from these he deduces that that they are lovers, and that they are afraid that
the woman’s husband may be on to them; their wandering around in the crowded
square is in fact a deliberate attempt to escape surveillance, and it
transpires that was only thanks to his extraordinary expertise that Caul was
able to overcome the technical difficulties involved in recording their
dialogue. Yet somehow this crowning professional achievement is also the job
which irrevocably undermines Caul’s ability to distance himself from his work.
The man and the woman seem afraid that something terrible will happen, and
there is no ignoring the fact that the by passing the film on Caul will be
instrumental in precipitating the events; this realisation causes a shift in
his interest from the act of surveillance seen in complete isolation (as the
art of finding solutions to a series of technical problems), to its actual
consequences. Caul’s obsession brings him to follow the two lovers until
finally, in a hotel room where he thinks a trap has been set for them, they
actually carry out the premeditated murder of the woman’s husband.
As the victims turn out to be murderers, Caul
suffers ultimate defeat: no longer can he hope to claim professional
detachment, to be as guiltless and impartial as one of his cameras; nor can he
confide in the direct correspondence between his recordings and the real. At
the same time, the role of his film in the story remains ambiguous: it gives
the husband proof of the adultery, and perhaps causes him to draw the same
erroneous conclusions reached by Caul - that the two lovers are afraid for
their safety, when they are in fact planning a murder. Ultimately, this false
knowledge may or may not have accelerated the death of Caul’s client. In any
case, however, the scenario undermines the notion of impartial observation: the
act of watching is fraught with consequences both for the subject and for the
object of the observation; and that these consequences are difficult if not
impossible to predict, as in this story, helps to uncover the underlying
contradictions of a model of society based on surveillance.
The prisoners of the Panopticon may be under
the illusion that they are constantly being watched, but we know that this is
not the case: there is only one inspector in the central tower, only one gaze
to be aimed to a given cell at any one time. From the point of view of the
central authority, surveillance is therefore partial, and the data it produces
will be necessarily as fragmentary as the conversation recorded by Caul. The
illusion that from these fragments it is possible to reconstruct a true and
comprehensive picture is a fallacy, for vital pieces of information may well
have fallen into one the many gaps in the device. This consideration harks back
to Foucault’s observation that surveillance in the Panopticon is “permanent in
its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action”. In other words, the
success of the Panopticon is based on an error of perception: if the prisoners
realised that surveillance is far from constant, and that the information it
manages to gather is far from comprehensive, the prison around them would
collapse.
Informational
surveillance and the Superpanopticon
The flaws as well as the oppressive might of
the model of society imagined by Bentham and Orwell are the subject of Terry
Gilliam’s Brazil (UK, 1985). This
film plays down the aspects of direct, visual/aural surveillance in favour of
the informational/bureaucratic means, and yet represents a dystopia which has
still many points in common with the world described by George Orwell: both are
based on the depiction of a strong, centralised State which claims control over
every aspects of social life and has expanded in such a way that there is no
“other place” for the citizens to aspire to flee to; here too there is a strong
emphasis on propaganda and on the invention of unseen, powerful enemies in
order to justify a permanent state of national emergency; and, crucially, the
same efforts are made by the authorities to keep the citizens under constant,
obsessive monitoring. This is achieved no longer through the gaze of a Big
Brother-like figure, but through an endless circulation of paperwork
documenting every aspect of an individual’s life. Hence the most prominent
branch of the Government becomes the seemingly all-powerful Ministry of
Information.
As in The
Conversation, however, here too surveillance is very much an imperfect art.
This point is made at the outset in the form of a rather tragic joke: a
cockroach falling into a typewriter mechanism causes the name Tuttle to be
changed into Buttle in a document being issued to the Police, and this results
in the arrest and eventual death under torture of the wrong man. The point
being that where absolute faith is placed in the direct relationship between
documented reality and the real, such mistakes are inconceivable and cannot
therefore be remedied; and indeed all that the attempts by the protagonist to
correct the blunder achieve is to set off another series of bureaucratic
misunderstandings, eventually resulting in his own capture and torture by the
secret police.
On this backdrop, the film follows a different
cinematic approach to the representation of the Panopticon. Free from the
burden of having to share its point of view with that of the instruments of
surveillance - for the gaze of the prison guard here takes the form of a flow
of documents - Gilliam enjoys a somewhat greater narrative freedom, and employs
it to represent the inner workings of informational surveillance in a highly imaginative
and often surreal setting. The Ministry of Information is represented as a
monster which is at once frightening and grotesquely ridiculous, an oversized
and hopelessly inefficient system of power whose mistakes, as in the case of
poor Buttle, can have deadly consequences. It is interesting to note that the
people responsible for running this system are animated by the same constant
state of paranoia that the Panopticon strives to produce in its victims. They
work on the assumption that there is no such thing as a coincidence, and that
every minute link in the information they possess must necessarily point to a
plot, a hidden design of some kind. As one of the chief bureaucrats at the
Ministry puts it, “our job is to trace the connections and reveal them”. Hence
the obsessive craving for information by the authorities in Brazil is motivated by their need to
continuously find (or manufacture) such connections, in order to justify their
role as protectors of society.[4]
Which brings us back to the role of the
National Security Agency in Enemy of the
State. The present day capabilities of communications technology are such
that the visible structure of the Panopticon disappears altogether, for the
information can be gathered and processed incessantly without the individuals
involved being any more than vaguely aware of it. Thus the NSA does not need to
rely on a totalitarian regime around it in order to carry out its function of
secret police, and becomes a far more subtle, advanced and efficient equivalent
of the oppressive structures of power Nineteen
Eighty-Four and Brazil. At the
same time, the fact that a limited, almost subliminal level of awareness of the
workings of the Panopticon still exists, guarantees that the mechanism of
self-surveillance described by Foucault remains in place.
The mix of informational, bureaucratic and
optical surveillance portrayed in Enemy
of the State is perhaps the most straightforward cinematic attempt to date
of representing what Mark Poster calls the Superpanopticon, “a system of
surveillance without walls, windows, towers or guards”[5].
According to this model, Bentham’s complex architectural design is replaced by
the incessant flow of information which characterises the most technologically
advanced societies; in other words, it becomes a truly automated mechanism from
which the individual cannot escape except by withdrawing from society
altogether. As more and more people become aware of being caught in this flow
of information and realise that they have no control over the circulation of
their personal data around the network, the Superpanopticon is growing into a
sort of collective nightmare which the cinema is not alone in trying to
articulate. The remainder of this paper
will be devoted to the close analysis of two recent science fiction films which
explore these issues.
The
Truman Show and surveillance as a spectacle
If Enemy
of the State proves that the Panopticon can be made into a spectacle, The Truman Show (USA, 1998, Peter Weir) goes
a step further by turning surveillance into its key narrative device.
The foundation of the film is another truly
paranoid vision: the world inhabited by Truman Burbank is a simulation, nothing
but an oversized television set, and everyone he has ever known are actors and
extras acting from a script. From the moment he was born, Truman has been the
unknowing protagonist of a show on air twenty-four hours a day for almost
thirty years. His whole life is nothing but a spectacle made possible by a
sophisticated form of surveillance akin to what Manuel De Landa calls “the
panspectrum”. The chief characteristic of the panspectrum is the deployment of
a multiplicity of sensors around several bodies instead of several bodies
around a central sensor[6].
This is how Bentham’s vision is achieved in the world outside the prison, by
multiplying the perspectives of the guards in order to cover a much greater
ground - ideally as vast as the world itself. Truman’s Seahaven Island is the
perfect panspectrum for it is filled by hidden cameras and microphones down to
its remotest corner, and nothing can escape the gaze of its all-seeing masters.
The instruments of surveillance provide the
show with its narrative apparatus, for the same sensors that enable the television
producers to track Truman’s position on the island are also the ones which
capture the video and audio signals to be broadcast (with the addition of a few
transition effects and some music) to the television audience. What is more
interesting, however, is that during the first hour of The Truman Show these instruments are also the narrative devices of
the film itself: outside of occasional cuts to various audiences watching the
show at home or in public places, the scenes from the end of the opening
credits to the first appearance of Christof in the film proper are seen and
heard through the same cameras and microphones which make a prisoner of Truman.
We are constantly reminded of this by the fact that most shots are framed in
round or elliptic shapes which reflect the hiding places of the various
cameras, by the range of different lenses employed and by the unusual angles
which suggest that the mise-en-scene is not totally free but constrained by the
necessity to maintain secrecy (good examples of this are the camera placed
behind the transparent front panel of the stereo in Truman’s car and the one
behind his bathroom mirror).
Such self-conscious mise en scene begs the
question of what kind of spectacle the film audience is watching. Is this meant
to be a typical episode of the television show? We know it cannot be, for there
are considerable time lapses and the editing is much too precise and
content-sensitive to mimic a live programme: while a television director could
to some extent time his cuts in the presence of a fixed script, the spontaneous
acting of Truman makes it impossible to plan in advance the editing (especially
of conversations) as neatly as that.
Another possibility is that the film is meant
to be read as the narration of Truman’s story by a film director using the
material provided by the television show. This would explain why, when Truman
is sitting on the beach and starts remembering about his father’s death at sea,
the flashback is narrated by the usual array of hidden cameras - still
recognisable for the peculiar angles and the way the shots are framed. We may
therefore conclude that the filmmaker, in order to preserve the fiction that
the Truman show is an actual television show, is suggesting that this material
was drawn from the archives of the series, and that it was used to retell the
story according to the conventions of a feature film rather than a television
documentary.
Yet another possibility is that what we are
watching is a condensed show assembled by the producers from the most
significant material recorded during the previous few days. Such a show would
be closer to a feature film than to live reality TV both in editing and in the
narrative liberties taken by the authors - as it is in fact the case. Truman’s flashback
on the death of his father, for instance, is the result of pure speculation,
for the surveillance technology adopted in the film does not go as far as mind
reading. This last interpretation is not made explicit in the film, but it is
supported by a key piece of internal evidence: after the cut to a bar in which
two waitresses are discussing the show, the (film) camera shows the television
screen as a second flashback comes on, this time narrating the story of
Truman’s first meeting with Lauren/Sylvia. Hence we can conclude that the
assemblage is part of the actual show.
With the exception of the occasional scenes of
television viewing, then, the first hour of the film is meant to portray the
show in an unmediated fashion. This puts the film audience in a very ambiguous
position, for we are asked to identify with the extreme voyeurism of the show’s
fans, at the same time as the system of values that we brought into the movie
theatre moves us (presumably) to dismiss this as a monstrous experiment. All
the while, we are watching Truman through the cameras which capture his every
movement, and listen to him through dozens of hidden microphones. We are meant
to sympathise with his status of prisoner, and yet we partake in his constant
surveillance. Thus his first, futile attempt to escape the panspectrum with
Lauren resembles the chases of Robert Dean by the NSA in Enemy of the State,
for in both cases the audience assumes the point of view of the pursuer, not
the one of the pursued. In terms of narrative perspective, we are effectively
siding with the prison guards.
Espionage is an important element of the film.
Prominent characters such as Truman’s wife Meryl, his mother and his best
friend Marlon are akin to spies who have forfeited their private lives in order
to pursue their career. But the spy film genre is also directly taken as a
referent, notably in the sequence in which Truman unwittingly tunes his radio
on the frequency used by the people who track his movements around town. “He’s
turning left on Lancaster square” the radio announces as he drives the car to
work, and “Oh, no, he’s almost hit a lady!” when he swerves to avoid a
passer-by in his amazement at what he is hearing. Made suddenly paranoid (and
not without reason) he then decides to abandon his routine and to wander around
the square, as if trying to catch glimpses of his followers, in a scene
strongly reminiscent of the famous one in The
Conversation. Here too the problem is one of surveillance: how to record
pictures and sounds of a person walking around a crowded square along a
non-predetermined trajectory. The solutions, albeit made easier by
technological advances, are indeed worthy of the resourcefulness of Harry Caul,
and include the rear-view mirror of a parked car which changes angle in real
time in order to enable a camera to follow Truman’s movements from its
concealed position.
The panspectrum that is Seahaven Island works
because it is small enough in relation to the resources of the show’s
producers. In this sense we can see that there are two reasons why they will
not allow Truman to leave the studio and go into the real world: one, perhaps
the most obvious, is that the real world is the place where Truman’s life is a
television show - and the moment Truman saw that show, or were approached by
one of his fans, the foundations of the project would fall apart. But, just as
importantly, in the real world it would also be impossible to follow Truman
closely enough for the show to be technically feasible. Even if it were
possible to confine Truman to his country, not even the NSA has disseminated
enough instruments of surveillance to achieve the total annihilation of
someone’s privacy on such a vast scale.
In the absence of reasons of national security,
this particular act of surveillance must be financed independently of the huge
resources of state agencies. In other words, the espionage war against one that
is the Truman Show requires the panspectrum to be financially viable, and in
fact it literally pays for itself by shoving a variety of consumer products in
front of the orifices of its surveillance apparatus.
Truman’s world, then, differs from ours in that
it needs constant funding in order to exist. High ratings are necessary for the
show to remain on air and for the simulation around him not to fall apart. And
yet the show’s storyline appears deliberately dull. Aside from the staging of
his father’s death, in itself a device to generate a fear of water in Truman
and ensure that he will never leave the island, his life has been manufactured
to be as boring and uneventful as possible. And when the father is
reintroduced, in a typical soap opera twist, it is not to boost the ratings but
to remedy a previous attempt of the actor playing the part to contact his
“son”.
Once again, the reason for this perpetual
dullness is partly practical: if Truman’s freedom of choice had not been
systematically restrained, it would be much harder to ensure his permanence on
the island; moreover, the predictable routine guaranteed by a stable, middle-class
marriage and an office job makes round-the-clock surveillance a much easier
task. But the implications work on several levels. On one hand, the great
popularity of the show notwithstanding its lack of a captivating story
encourages us even more to picture the television audience as a collective
monster which takes pleasure solely in the elaborate torture that Truman is
subjected to. It is not his successes or failures that the viewers of the show
respond to, for he has been deprived of both - and in the absence of a real
plot all that is left if the interest in the experiment itself, with Truman as
the guinea pig. But on another level, this situation contributes to shatter the
illusion that surveillance can be carried out in a detached and objective
manner, without affecting the subject as long as he or she is unaware of what
is happening. The whole show becomes a demonstration of the panoptic principle
at work: in order for us to be able to observe Truman we have first of all to
turn him into a model prisoner, one who has interiorised the moral code
required by the extreme example of disciplinary society that he inhabits.
The contradictions which underlie this
experiment are akin to those of many contemporary television shows which aim to
portray the everyday life of ordinary people in a more or less unmediated
fashion. Of particular interest for the discussion of this film, since they
seem to have been partly inspired by The
Truman Show, are those which have recently been produced in several countries
under the title of Big Brother. In
these particular example of reality TV, based on an original concept launched
in 1999 by Dutch producer John de Mol[7],
a group of people is made to reside for a set number of weeks in a
purpose-built house disseminated with hidden microphones and cameras. Every
week one of the participants is evicted after a secret ballot within the group,
until the last remaining participant is left to collect the cash prize at the
end of the series.
Despite the lack of a script and of
professional actors may support the claim that these shows achieve a more
truthful level of representation than mere fiction, the final product could not
be farther from any meaningful definition of the real. The mini-worlds where
the participants are made to live - enclosed television studios which are
smaller scale equivalents of Truman’s Seahaven Island - have never been
anything like real places inhabited by real people. They are wholly permeated
and defined by the presence of cameras, literally built on the principle of
surveillance. And, in a sense, so are the participants. For the duration of the
show their ‘real’ lives are put on hold as they forfeit jobs, families and
friends to play an elaborate game of survival; a game whose rules require them
to change their behaviour in order to always place themselves on the winning
side and escape exile from the artificial world for as long as possible. Under
these conditions, it seems difficult to argue that there is anything real going
on inside these fake homes. What is being portrayed is not life as seen through
television, but life inside television.
The fact that Truman is unaware of the deal
does not add a dimension of reality to his show; it merely makes the unreality
of it even more unbearable. There is a sense in which The Truman Show is a horror film, and a rather gory one at that.
Far from providing an innocent window on a man’s life, the cameras and
microphones that enable us to keep constant track of Truman’s actions are
brutal instruments of violation. In this film, to watch means quite literally
to harm, and television viewing becomes an act of mass violence; for Truman’s
captivity is at once a consequence of the constraints imposed by surveillance
technology, and a commercial transaction in which the viewers prolong the
torture by purchasing the products advertised in the show. The levity of the
film’s style does little to tone down the abject victimisation of its
protagonist.
One is reminded again of Nineteen Eighty-Four, except here the conditioning is far more
subtle. Truman needs not be reminded that Big Brother is watching him - in fact
the mortification of his will works much better if he has no idea that he is
being watched at all. For how can the individual rebel against a system which
does not exist? The fabrication of news, the distortion of the world beyond the
borders are at work here like in Oceania, for instance when a colleague of
Truman triumphantly shows him the headline of a newspaper boasting that
Seahaven is the “Best place on earth!”, while
the advertising posters in a travel agency peculiarly suggest that visiting
other countries is dangerous as well as futile. Furthermore, like in Nineteen Eighty-Four the rulers of this
little world do not stop at prohibiting certain behaviours, but strive to
engineer society in order to blank them out altogether.
Ultimately, of course, the simulation falls
apart, and the free spirit of the white male hero triumphs. Yet we have to
question whether the satire of the entertainment machine achieved by conflating
spectacle and surveillance would have been more effective if the ending had
been different. A much more biting - and perhaps, in a Nineteen Eighty-Four-like fashion, quite unbearable - finale, would
have had Truman resign himself to live in his fake world and carry on with his
fake life, despite knowing at heart that all time he is being watched, and
looked after, by his captors. In fact all that his liberation achieves is to
suddenly exculpate the television viewers, whom we see celebrate the end of the
show as if they had been opposed to its experiment all along. Thus the ending
restores a reassuring status quo ante in which events like the Truman
Show are a one-off exception, not the disturbing norm, and society outside of Seahaven
Island can carry on as usual.
While on the one hand it exculpates the
television audience and lays the blame for the excesses of the experiment on a
faceless corporate network and on a handful of producers - as if they alone
were morally responsible for the success of the show among its viewers - the
film is even more unduly magnanimous with its own audience. While television is
demonised as the source of demeaning reality shows which violate the most basic
of human rights, cinema is implicitly set up as a medium capable of a more
in-depth analysis of the issues and of encouraging debate. All this despite the
singular conflation of filmmaking and surveillance realised during the first
half of the film, and the points made repeatedly with regard to the role of
simulation in securing a disciplined society. If Christof is right when he
states that “we accept the truth of the world we live in”, then it would be
possible to suggest that cinema plays an important role in constructing this
truth via its very appealing simulations, and a case could be made for its
direct involvement in the panoptic society.
The
Matrix and the ultimate simulation
Whether or not we should accept the truth of
the world we live in, and choose to trust our perceptions, is an issue that
recurs throughout the history of philosophy. Descartes gave it a famous
formulation when he hypothesised that the world as we know it may be the
product of a malignant god, a demon playing with our senses[8].
This notion could be used to justify to the most paranoid of assumptions, for
if we cannot even be sure of the existence of the physical world that surrounds
us, if all experiences and memories of a lifetime may have been manufactured by
a superior entity, then not only the existence of individuals like Truman, but
indeed of the whole of humanity could very well be questioned.
This is the premise of The Matrix (USA, 1999, Andy and Larry Wachowski) - the world as we
know is in fact a carefully constructed illusion. The year is around 2199 and
machines have taken over the world, using people as a source of bioeletrical
power while their brains are suspended in the virtual reality called the
Matrix, a simulation which looks and feels like a the year 1999 as it is
recorded in the collective memory of its human inhabitants
There are, predictably, a handful of rebels,
who lead dreary, clandestine lives in the world dominated by machines. They
have learnt to travel into the Matrix and even bend its laws to a certain
degree in order to transcend their physical limitations and achieve superhuman
strength and speed. But being immune from the illusion does not make their
lives easier. If anything, just the opposite, for they are in constant danger
of being found out and destroyed both in the machinic world, where robot
scanners seek out the humans who are not plugged into the system, and inside
the Matrix, which is scoured by a handful of extremely powerful and relentless agents, trained to recognise and kill
the enlightened few. These agents, whose name recalls the software applications
which scour the Internet in search of information, represent the embodiment of
electronic surveillance and of the Superpanopticon; seemingly ubiquitous and
capable of travelling within the confines of the simulated world at the speed
of light (much like packets of information circulating through a computer
network), they exercise constant and relentless surveillance inside the Matrix.
In this rather bleak scenario the rebels can
find some solace in the prophecy that some day they will find The One, an
individual capable of penetrating the secrets of the Matrix and of beating the
agents, and the machines that have created them, at their own game. He will
lead humanity out of captivity and shatter the illusion, so that the real world
can be reclaimed and turned again into a place fit for human life.
As in The
Truman Show, here too a quintessentially paranoid vision is made possible
by communications technology and by its capacity to fool the senses and mimic
the real. The key difference is that in The
Truman Show humans were still in control of technology, even as they
employed it in manipulative and distorting ways; in The Matrix, on the other hand, the real enemy is AI, Artificial
Intelligence, perpetuating the science fiction cliché that as soon as machines
are endowed with human-like brains they will use them to turn against their
creators. The cliché is taken a step further here since the machines, instead
of merely setting out to wipe humans off the face of the planet (like in, say, The Terminator), figure out a way of
turning them into a convenient source of renewable power.
From this premise, the film sets out to narrate
the journey towards self-consciousness of a male hero, a rather geeky computer
programmer by day/hacker by night known on either side of his double life as
Thomas Anderson and Neo. At first a common, unaware inhabitant of the Matrix
(but with the nagging feeling that the world may not be as it seems),
Anderson/Neo is recruited by the rebels and made to see the reality of the
world around him, or rather the unreality of what he has always accepted as the
real. Much like Truman’s solitary journey on a boat outside of Seahaven and
into the world, the trials faced by Neo throughout the rest of the film have
more to do with the realisation of his full potential (and the shedding of the
old identity of Mr Anderson, cog in the machine) than with the danger of being
destroyed along the way. They are mystical trials on the path of spiritual
enlightenment.
Or at least this is what the authors would like
us to think. In spite of the temptation one may feel to dismiss the storyline
as a mere vehicle for a series of extremely well constructed action scenes, the
Wachowski brothers worked three years on the script for The Matrix, and they appear serious when they talk of the film’s
deeper significance. They speak openly of references to Greek myths, the Bible
and the path towards the re-incarnation of the Buddha[9].
In the words of Larry Wachowski, “mythology, theology and higher-level
mathematics [...] are all ways human beings try to answer bigger questions, as
well as The Big Question. If you're going to do epic stories, you should
concern yourself with those issues. People might not understand all the
allusions in the movie, but they understand the important ideas. We wanted to
make people think, engage their minds a bit.”[10]
Such claims authorise us to explore these ‘important ideas’ and the way they
are constructed in the film.
The theme of the quest of spiritual self-discovery,
and of the liberation from the tyranny of machines, appears to be the central
point. Immediately it transpires that in this respect things are not as
clear-cut as they seem, for the mechanisation suffered by humans as a
consequence of their defeat has some positive repercussions along with the more
obvious, horrifying ones: thus, no sooner has Neo been unplugged from the tubes
that enabled the machines to feed off him, that he is plugged into another one
in order to get a full training in the martial arts by having the appropriate
software uploaded into his brain.
Such juxtapositions illustrate how technology
operates both as a friendly tool and as the
enemy in this film. The irony is all the more obvious if we pause to
consider that it is cutting-edge digital technology that makes the film what it
is, and that the production crew must have included a significant numbers of
computer and special effects enthusiasts. Line producer Paul Taglianetti’s
boast that there are as many as 480 effect shots in the film[11]
betrays the love of simulations of the very people who created this parable
against computer-mediated experience. Indeed, what appears as the Matrix in the
film, and that one would assume is the physical world in which the audience
lives, is in fact mostly simulated through a software called Virtual
Cinematography, which enabled the studio to “turn a live-action location or set
into a photo-realistic virtual set for generating any camera move”[12].
In other words, instead of setting digital effects on a real, photographed
background, the filmmakers produced digital backgrounds that looked realistic
and at the same time could be manipulated more easily than real ones.
The result is a remarkable blurring of the
boundaries: if after viewing The Truman
Show we may be surprised to discover that the film was shot on location in
Seaside, Florida, a place that looks so phoney as to pass admirably for a
television studio, in The Matrix the
metropolitan setting of Sydney, Australia, is turned into a digital set which
is in turn supposed to pass as a real place which is in fact a simulation. But
the audience is meant to think that it is real, that it is their reality, much like the audience of The Truman Show was meant to think of Seahaven as a television
studio. There is a manipulation at work here that is not too dissimilar from
the one perpetrated on Truman and Neo, and it throws their journeys of
self-discovery into an ambiguous light. For the filmmakers are using the same
illusions, the same simulations which they portray as dehumanising.
The contradictions in the anti-technological
stance of The Matrix abound. Readers of William Gibson, and indeed
of every cyberpunk writer since, will immediately identify the Matrix with
cyberspace and the Internet; how can a film, then, warn us against the dangers
of shifting our lives onto the computer networks and at the same time advertise
massively through a website[13]?
How can Neo’s spiritual self benefit from learning the martial arts not through
painful and rigorous training but in a matter of seconds through a piece of
computer software? And why is it that, when it comes to rescuing Morpheus from
the headquarters of the enemy, Neo turns his back on the spiritual teachings of
his master and asks for “Guns. Lots of guns”?
The issue seems to be one of control:
technology is regarded positively as long as it can be harnessed and it
responds to straightforward commands. Guns are a prime example: you press the
trigger, they fire the shot. Simple enough. Other tools prove to be less
predictable, for they carry out more complex functions. The cameras and
microphones used by Harry Caul, for instance, are not just instruments of
surveillance; they could be used to shoot the film of a family birthday, or
monitor safety in a power plant. But one day they could be developed to such an
extent as to be able to map the movements of an individual on a 24-hour basis,
and broadcast them live around the world. At such a point we could say that, in
spite of the fact they are still being operated by humans, these tools have
escaped our control, because they have evolved towards new, unpredicted tasks.
Accordingly, the original sin in The Matrix is that we have finally
created Artificial Intelligence, and have thus lost all control over our tools.
Contextualised in the year the film was made, it is a parable that reflects the
widespread fear of being left behind by the advances of information technology;
a fear boosted by the unforeseeable, chaotic, uncontrollable spread of the
Internet. Even if the network has no intelligence of its own, and each one of
its cells is ultimately controlled by a human being, the overall behaviour of
the sum of the cells is largely outside the control not only of individuals but
also of governments and international organisations. The Internet grows, much
like an organism, and at a rate that would have been unimaginable at the
beginning of the 1990’s. That the reaction to this phenomenon should be one of
exhilaration mixed with disquiet is perhaps not surprising. More singular is
the way that films like The Matrix polarise
the attraction for technology and the outright fear of the same in such extreme
tones, leading to an overall stance that seems unhealthy as well as
contradictory.
That there are other ways to painting our
technological future than the strictly utopian or dystopian is proven by
cyberpunk literature, a sub-genre of science-fiction inaugurated by William
Gibson in 1984 with Neuromancer. As
well as foreseeing the Internet with remarkable clarity, Neuromancer engages in the exploration of a world characterised by the overlapping of the human and the
technological domains, where people can enhance their abilities through cyber-implants
and even achieve immortality by uploading their memories and thought-processes
onto the computer network, here too known as the Matrix. The similarities with
the film by the Wachowski brothers are numerous, and include the pairing of
male hacker and female warrior, the mention of AIs and of a human city called
Zion, the nature of the Matrix as a “consensual hallucination”, the possibility
of uploading computer software into the human brain, the extensive role of
martial arts in the story. And yet in more significant ways The Matrix and Neuromancer could not be more different. Despite borrowing many of
the themes, some of the jargon and a lot of the mystique of cyberpunk
literature, the film does not come even close to replicating the richness of
the cyberpunk viewpoint on the social impact of the new technologies.
The differences can be observed by looking at Johnny Mnemonic (Canada/Usa, 1995,
Robert Longo), a film which, regardless of its actual merits, is much more
deserving the cyberpunk label, and not merely due to the fact of having been
written by Gibson himself. Also starring Keanu Reeves in the title role, Johnny Mnemonic is set in a near-future
dominated by corporates in which a data courier, who is capable of uploading
data into his brain and smuggle to its destination without the danger of
electronic interceptions, is caught in a mission that goes horribly wrong.
Overloaded with data from a pharmaceutical company, Johnny finds himself
haunted by both the mafia and the corporate police, who are desperate to cut
off his head in order to recover the information (which turns out to be the
cure for NAS, a future planetary plague). What is worse, he is going to die in
a matter of hours if he does not get rid of the data, and part of the download
code was conveniently destroyed in a skirmish with the mafia at the beginning
of the film.
Enter the LoTek, a group of destitute rebels
whose main activity is to hack into the global television networks and pollute
them with the kind of information that those in power are trying to keep the
lid on - the cure for NAS being of course the prime example of such
information. Eventually, with the help of a super-intelligent cetacean hacker
named Jones, the LoTeks manage to download the cure and broadcast it to the
world, saving Johnny’s life and that of million of others in the process.
The key difference in the dystopian premises of
the two films is that the future of Johnny
Mnemonic is explicitly portrayed as a direct result not of technological
advances, but of a strict free market logic. With the corporates in charge and
the disappearance of nation states and elected governments, the gap between the
rich and the poor has grown exponentially. It is a jungle out there, and to
make it into the higher classes requires enormous sacrifices - Johnny in fact
forfeits most of his long-term memory (and therefore a significant part of his
identity) in order to be able to carry more data in his brain and increase his
earning potential. In this context, the Internet has been turned from the open,
largely user-directed network of today into the place where corporates vie for
information, trying to penetrate each other’s defences. This is why the LoTeks’
strategy to overthrow the system mainly consists in attempts to achieve a more
democratic sharing of information via computer-piracy. Their actions are not
aimed, like those of the rebels of The
Matrix, at restoring a society of the past by rejecting the technology of
the present one; rather, they endeavour to found a new and fairer one, based on
something akin to Jean-François Lyotard’s motto – “give the public free access
to the memory and data banks”[14].
In this perspective, Johnny’s triumph - unlike
Neo’s - does not consist in saving the world (the credit should rather go to
the LoTeks and especially to the dolphin), but in achieving a higher level of
social and political awareness. Thus, before joining the rebels as a last
resort to avoid death by data overload, he breaks into a speech that exorcises
the set of values he has to get rid of in order to be saved:
You see that city over there? That’s where I’m supposed to be. Not here with the dogs and the garbage and the fucking last month’s newspapers blowing back and forth. I’ve had it with them, I’ve had with you, I’ve had with all this... I WANT ROOM SERVICE! I want a club sandwich, I want a cold Mexican beer, I want a ten-thousand-dollar-a-night hooker. I want my shirts laundered like they do at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo...
The mention of clothing points to a recurring
visual theme of the film. Johnny wears the same expensive suit throughout - it
starts off well-ironed and spotless, perfectly worn by cover-boy Reeves, and it
gradually gets splattered and torn until in the final scenes it ends up
resembling the casual, no-frills, utility clothing worn by the LoTeks. In other
words, the downgrading of Johnny’s clothing mirrors his conversion to a
different, less money-driven way of life.
The rebels in The Matrix, on the other hand, never stop loving fancy clothes. In
their real lives, they are restricted to the same kind of clothing worn by the
LoTeks - grey, loose, ill-fitting uniforms. But as soon as they enter the
Matrix, where they can pick from an endless wardrobe of simulated garments,
they go for the super-expensive look: long leather trench-coats, cutting edge
magazine-like fashion statements. It is a love of clothes that sometimes defies
logic, for even as they prepare to break into a military complex they choose to
go for leather outfits with tail-coats that trail to the floor - perhaps not
the kind of comfortable garments that the situation would have called for.
The ensuing massacre is in fact chillingly
glamorised, to the point of attracting some criticism in the debate on cinema’s
portrayal of the use of firearms[15].
It can hardly be disputed that the scene offers an example not of violence as a
last resort, but of cool, utterly enjoyable violence; and that, even in the
context of the film’s story, it appears to rest on very thin moral
justifications. Briefly: Morpheus had previously told Neo that the inhabitants
of the Matrix, i.e. the humans plugged into the machines, have to be regarded
as enemies, for they will do anything to protect the illusion of the world they
live in. In spite of this, they are not beyond hope of salvation, and Neo is
living proof of this; they too could eventually be converted to the truth. As
he sets out on his mission to save Morpheus, Neo could choose to listen to his
master’s teachings, and rest on the knowledge that he can bend the rules of the
simulation to an extent that not even the machines are capable of. In other
words, if he truly believed in himself he could be invincible, and carry out
the mission without the need to hurt anyone. Instead, he opts to go in with
‘lots of guns’, and mows down dozens of fellow prisoners of the Matrix without
a hint of remorse, almost as if they too were part of the software construct,
like enemies in a videogame.
This is not conclusive evidence that The Matrix carries a reactionary message,
but one has to question the individualistic, ultra-violent ethos of this film,
in which the world is saved once again by a white male with perfect features,
and machines are rejected as threats to the purity of the human race even as
the filmmakers embark on a technological orgy in order to narrate their story.
By choosing not to address this glaring contradiction, The Matrix can do little else than glide on the surface of the many
issues its storyline touches upon.
Conclusion
If cinema has a role in the society of
surveillance is precisely that of creating powerful, well-crafted illusions
which play with collective fears instead of probing their deeper roots; films
that reinforce the dominant ideology by giving a false sense of resolution, as
in the finales of both the Truman Show and
The Matrix, whereas in fact all that
they are suggesting is that things should go back to how they were in a
mythical time in the past, before technology started changing our lives.
In their essay on technophobia in science
fiction cinema, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner propose that most
anti-technological stances are inherently conservative. “[T]echnology”, they
argue, “is usually a crucial ideological figure. [It] represents everything that
threatens the grounding of conservative social authority and everything that
ideology is designed to neutralize. It should not be surprising, then, that
this era should witness the development of a strain of films that portray
technology negatively, usually from a conservative perspective.”[16]
While this analysis is perhaps a little too clear-cut, for claiming that
technology is in itself an engine of positive social change is as questionable
as claiming the opposite, the authors suggest how we could account for the
contradictions incurred by films like the ones we have just analysed :
The increasingly technical sophistication of
the economic world and the shift away from industrialized manufacturing to
tertiary sector ‘information age’ production creates a hypermdernization that
is at odds with the traditionalist impulse in conservatism, the desire that old
forms and institutions be preserved. Yet the new technologies make possible
alternative institutions and lifestyles, as well as the reconstruction of the
social world. Perhaps this accounts for the desire for a more literal, natural
world in conservative films. It is a reaction to the world they themselves help
create through an ideal of efficient economic development.[17]
Both The
Truman Show and The Matrix end up
conveying an odd sort of nostalgia for the present which betrays the effects of
the antinomy described above, and which prevents them from exploring future
avenues of change. Not having come to terms with the full impact of
communications technology on society and, crucially, on their own structures of
discourse, these science-fiction spectacles cannot speak meaningfully about the
future nor about the present; instead, they are confined to dwell on paranoid
visions - such as those of oppressive Panopticons - which expose their
contradictory stance towards the very technology which enables them to exist.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Dr. Russell Campbell of
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, under whose supervision I wrote
this research paper in 2000.
Filmography
Brazil (UK, 1985). Director: Terry Gilliam. Screenplay:
Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, Tom Stoppard.
The Conversation (USA,
1972). Director: Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola
Enemy of the State (USA,
1998). Director. Tony Scott. Screenplay: David Marconi.
Johnny Mnemonic (Canada/Usa,
1995. Director: Robert Longo. Screenplay: William Gibson.
The Matrix (USA,
1999). Directors: Andy and Larry Wachowski. Screenplay: Andy and Larry
Wachowski.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (UK,
1984). Director: Michael Radford. Screenplay: Jonathan Gems, Michael Radford.
The
Truman Show (USA, 1998). Director: Peter Weir. Screenplay:
Andrew Niccol
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