Collapsing the Interior/Exterior Distinction: Surveillance, Spectacle, and Suspense in Popular Cinema

Since the end of the Second World War issues surrounding the exponential growth of surveillance have assumed a salient role in critical, cultural, and communication studies. These same issues have appeared with regularity as the substance of or as represented in numerous popular films. Much of this growth and its representation is attributable to the rise of powerful new surveillance technologies and practices, previously unavailable, which now portend the reconfiguration of political, economic, social, and cultural relations. In the areas of government administration, policing and security, the capitalist work site, and the consumer marketplace, electronic surveillance techniques and strategies influence the entire social order. Our computerized, information-saturated society has created a new geography of power relations that have become increasingly dependent on surveillance in order to sustain or move these power bases forward. Indeed all forms of surveillance, but particularly massive or magnified surveillance practices, or panopticism, are employed throughout Western bureaucratic and capitalist institutions to enhance predictability, risk assessment, security, identification, efficiency, and control. These proliferating technologies of mass surveillance include sophisticated census tools and practices, radars, lasers, sensors, satellites, polygraphs, sonograms, night vision, genetic tests, global positioning systems, space-based telescopes, biometric identification devices, home arrest systems, and numerous other monitoring devices "jacked-in" to real time communications. Perhaps most emblematic of these apparatuses and practices is the ever-present surveillance camera.

A growing number of Americans have been voicing concerns over widespread invasions of their personal lives for several decades now, but these anxieties have been met with few guarantees and precious little legislation. Frequently, such intrusions occur without the permission of and contrary to the desires of those under surveillance. In contemporary society personal information about others is purchased and exchanged in a far-reaching information economy in which data collected in one context can be used and reused in entirely different, unanticipated and even hostile ways without the knowledge or even consent of the individuals involved. Yet this collapse of what have heretofore been the distinctions of the public and the private, the interior and the exterior, has been treated with curiously uncritical reception in popular culture in general and in popular cinema in particular. Indeed, as will be argued here, many of the films that address the practice of surveillance or use surveillance technologies in their narratives do so as an opportunity to celebrate the spectacle elements invested in surveillance or to integrate the use of surveillance as a narratival device to promote suspense and, subsequently, violence.

Surveillance as a narratival and structural device in popular cinema is indeed ubiquitous. The very medium of cinema itself can be understood as hyper- surveillant. The uninterrupted scopic drive of the motion picture camera as a recording instrument collapses all public/private distinctions, peering into the interior lives and spaces of its subjects. In this respect film functions like a microscope magnifying everything. Spectators become subservient to a gaze that controls (most reception theory identifies the viewer as the giver of the gaze, and the screen as the bearer of the viewer's look). The representation of the "exteriority" of the world is interiorized on the screen. Such a reading of cinema suggests a system of technology that has expanded to dominate the regulation of the external world but which also contracts and increasingly penetrates the interior world.

Spectacle

The critical currency of the term spectacle emerged from Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life and Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. ¹ While its original designation served as a critique of the politics of everyday life and an analysis of capitalism, spectacle has evolved as an umbrella term suggesting "a single seamless global system of relations," the "mystification of the functioning of power," a "new opiate-of-the-masses," or the "figuration of a radical shift in the way power functions noncoercively within twentieth-century modernity." ² Jean Baudrillard seems to...