Surveillance, Ideology and Popular Cinema

A Familiar Villain Surveillance, Ideology and Popular Cinema A thesis submitted to the Auckland University of Technology In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Communication Studies) Felicity Adair Brown 2005 BOSOLA: It seems you would create me One of your familiars. FERDINAND: Familiar? What's that? BOSOLA: Why, a very quaint invisible devil in flesh; An intelligencer. FERDINAND: Such a kind of thriving thing I would wish thee; and ere long, thou may'st arrive At a higher place by't. The Duchess of Malfi By John Webster Act I, scene ii “What I apprehend immediately when I hear the branches cracking behind me is not that there is someone there; it is that I am vulnerable; that I have a body which can be hurt; that I occupy a place and I cannot in any case escape from this space in which I am without defence – in short, I am seen.” Jean Paul Sartre 1960. ii Contents Attestation of Authorship vi Acknowledgements vii Dedication viii Abstract ix Chapter One: Conceptualising Surveillance 1 1.1 Modern and Post-Modern Surveillance 3 1.2 Surveillance and Political Economy 13 1.3 Surveillance and Ideology 18 1.4 Surveillance and Popular Culture 24 1.5 Research Outline 33 Chapter Two: Surveillance and Capitalism 43 2.1 The Workplace 43 2.1.1 (After) Fordism and Worker Surveillance 44 2.1.2 Taylorism and Exploitation 50 2.1.3 New Technologies of Workplace Monitoring 53 2.2 Surveillance and Consumption 59 2.2.1 Consumerism and the Administered Society 60 2.2.2 Consumers and the Panoptic Sort 63 2.2.3 Shopping and Ordered Consumption 70 2.2.4 Surveilling Consumers in Cyberspace 72 2.3 Conclusion 76 iii Chapter Three: Surveillance, Democracy and the State 79 3.1 Surveillance of Urban Spaces 80 3.1.1 The Dual City 82 3.1.2 Cybercities and Surveillance 84 3.1.3 Urban Policing and Criminality 88 3.1.4 Public Spheres and the Cosmopolitan City 94 3.2 Intelligence, Security and Democracy 97 3.2.1 Nation-states, Surveillance and the Citizen 98 3.2.2 National (In)security and Surveillance 102 3.2.3 Global Networks and Policing 106 3.2.4 Post-September 11th 113 3.3 Conclusion 117 Chapter Four: Ideology and Surveillance 121 4.1 Surveillance Ideology in Reality Television 122 4.2 Surveillance Ideology in Popular Cinema 127 4.3 Conclusion 142 Chapter Five: Ideological Representations of Surveillance and Capitalism: Cinematic Case Studies 143 5.1 Antitrust 144 Synopsis 144 Analysis 146 iv 5.2 The Truman Show 156 Synopsis 158 Analysis 159 5.3 Conclusion 172 Chapter Six: Ideological Representations of Urban, National and International Surveillance: Cinematic Case Studies 173 6.1 Enemy of the State 173 Synopsis 174 Analysis 175 6.2 The Bourne Identity 187 Synopsis 188 Analysis 189 6.3 Conclusion 197 Conclusion 200 Review of Critical Perspective 200 Discussion of Findings 207 Future Directions 211 Bibliography 215 v Attestation of Authorship “I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of a university or other institution of higher learning, except where due acknowledgement is made in the acknowledgements.” Signed: vi Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to the following people for their time, energy and support. Without their help, this project would never have seen the light of day. The guidance of my primary supervisor, Dr. Wayne Hope, was integral to this thesis. Wayne’s supervision fostered intellectual rigour and critical thinking, teaching me to hone my argument and express myself with confidence. I am very grateful to Wayne for his patience and for sharing his knowledge with me. Special thanks to Dr. Ian Goodwin for reading several drafts of the thesis and for his support in the emotional aspects of the research process. Ian’s door was always open for debate and discussion, and his feedback challenging and useful. Thank you also to Rosser Johnson for his comments on early chapters and his encouragement throughout the process. I would also like to acknowledge the help of Dr. Alan Cocker and the Communication Studies department for their financial assistance and for giving me the opportunity to visit Beijing. To David Clark, for taping those endless episodes of Big Brother and for his support and patience in the early stages of the thesis. Thank you to Nicky Hager for supplying useful material, including work from his inspiring book, Secret Power. Special thanks to David Guerin for his proofreading and assiduous attention to the use of the comma, semi-colon and hyphen. Without the morning coffee meetings with my master-student partners on the journey, the experience would have been isolated rather than shared. Bridget, Nick, Grace and Hamish, thanks for the fellowship. In particular, thank you Chris for believing in me and for introducing me to Bob Dylan; you have both kept me going. To my wonderful friends Harry, Moz, Gab, Kirst, Kim, Sara, Nikki, Alex and Lucy, for putting up with my small-scale revolutions over the last ten years, and for becoming just a little bit worried about surveillance. To my little sisters Heather and Nicky for their love, admiration and for picking me up from university in the rain all those times. Thank you for being my best friends and for knowing when to stop asking about my progress. Above all I would like to thank my parents Anne and Nigel for their unfailing emotional and financial support. I couldn’t have done it without their love, encouragement and belief in me. vii For my grandparents viii Abstract This thesis examines the representations of surveillance in mainstream cinema. Using ideology critique it will show how filmic illustrations of monitoring depoliticize the relationship between surveillance and structural relations of power In order to provide a foundation for this inquiry, a political economy critique of surveillance will be undertaken in four areas. Focusing on the workplace, consumer surveillance, urban policing and intelligence gathering, this thesis will contextualise surveillance as historically relevant and intimately connected with modern constructs such as the nation-state, military power and capitalist economic organisation. In recent years, the role of surveillance has been intensified in response to the challenges posed by globalization, the restructuring of capitalism in the 1980’s and 90’s and the declining legitimacy of nation-state governments. These developments are both aided by, and in turn promote, pervasive networks of surveillance. Driven by risk management and other forms of economic reasoning as organisational logic, developments in information communication technologies accelerate surveillance capabilities rendering them more invasive and intense. In this way, surveillance can be conceived of as complicit with prevailing relations of power on a macro, sociological level. In order to show how mainstream cinematic representations of surveillance ideologically obscure this relationship, this thesis begins with an overview of 30 popular films. It then moves to a comparison of four recent Hollywood portrayals of surveillance with the four areas of political economy critique identified above. This analysis will reveal that these films have a tendency to focus on sentimental themes such as individual heroism, antagonist versus protagonist struggles and romantic subplots, in a way which deflects attention from collective experience with surveillance webs. More pertinently, the narrative structures of these films feature dichotomies between malevolent and benevolent monitoring, aligning legitimate and benign surveillance with the state. At the same time, the accompanying imagery of surveillance devices fetishizes monitoring, deterministically glorifying technology as a powerful and omniscient force. The overall effect is to depoliticize monitoring as a natural part of the fabric of everyday life. ix Conceptualising Surveillance Chapter One Conceptualising Surveillance Beginning with Foucault, this chapter discusses the nature of modern surveillance- based discipline and touches on aspects of contemporary surveillance which have been termed “post-modern” by theorists. In so doing, I will assess the extent to which Foucauldian panopticism is a viable framework for understanding surveillance. Next, I will discuss three theoretical perspectives that will inform my primary research focus; ideological representations of surveillance in popular cinema. These perspectives are critical political economy, ideology critique and popular culture analysis. The purpose of this discussion is to build a particular concept of surveillance which will inform my research in later chapters. Based on this platform, I will outline my own critical theoretical perspective and provide a chapter-by-chapter overview of the thesis. As a fully constituted word, “surveillance” first came into use in France circa 1802. Etymologically the word derives from the Latin terms “videre” (to see) and “vigilare” or “vigil” meaning “watchful” or to keep watch. The suffix “-ance” comes from the Latin “antia” meaning the state or quality of something or an action or process (Barnhart, 1988). In its most general form, “surveillance” means “oversight” or “supervision”, the watch kept over a person or thing (Hoad, 1996: xix). Originally “vigil” (meaning awake) was associated with religious devotions on the eve of a festival, but when “surveillance” came into French usage, it was associated with “guards” or the police apparatus.1 From 1800 – 1900, “surveillance” was used in a number of contexts with varying connotations. It could involve care through education, such as the supervision of a tutor, or to “keep an eye” on a sick child. 1 At this time, the noun “surveillant” was also employed to describe a person who exercises surveillance. Later, the verb “surveil” (alternative spelling “surveille”) was employed in American English (Simpson & Weiner, 1989: 308).

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