āYou are being watched.ā These ominous words, spoken by computer genius Harold Finch (played by Michael Emerson) in voiceover, introduce each episode of the 2011ā2016 CBS surveillance drama Person of Interest . I begin with this phrase because it represents an important trend in television narratives since 9/11: series that focus on the increased prevalence in state surveillance and techniques of social control, in response to fears of terrorism, since the deadly attack nearly two decades ago. The wealth of critical attention regarding the effect of 9/11 on U.S. and U.K. television and film affirms that British and American television series have increased their focus on surveillance and terror in the past two decades.1 Further, while these television and film studies do not include the related issue of surveillance per se, academic consideration of how surveillance is narrated and portrayed in film and television has nevertheless also grown since 9/11.2 These studies focus mainly on U.S. and U.K. film and programming and thus help support my claim that it is primarily, although not exclusively, in British and American television that viewers have seen an increase in themes of surveillance since 9/11.
It is my contention in this book that the two issues, 9/11 and surveillance, are interconnected in terms of the development of British and American television series since the attack on the Twin Towers. As Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget write, ā9/11 has become a cultural āmemeāā3 in television storytelling in the years since, offering what Paget terms ācritical and therapeutic unit[s] of understandingā to cope with āepoch-making events like 9/11.ā4 I would extend Pagetās use of āmemeā to include concerns about government surveillance as a safeguard against terrorism that have arisen since 2001. As Paget contends is the case with 9/11, I maintain that numerous British and American series incorporate the meme of government surveillance as a way of wrangling with and, to borrow John Ellisās term, āwitnessingā5 the significant rise in panopticism because of the subsequent (and ongoing) āwar on terrorā in both nations. Ellis emphasizes that television functions as a witness to historical events like 9/11, although this does not mean television prompts us as viewers to act on what we see. Rather, television offers āa particular form of representation that brings with it a sense of powerless knowledge and complicity with what we see.ā6 It is viewersā paradoxical sense of powerlessness and complicity regarding the growth of state surveillance post-9/11 that British and American programs attempt to imagine and work through narratively.
Important to this argument is that the U.S. and U.K. were the nations most affected by 9/11. After the U.S., the U.K. lost the most citizens in the attack. According to Stephen E. Atkins, āAlthough the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, targeted the United States, many other countries throughout the world were also affected. In addition to the 2,657 Americans killed, 316 foreign nationals from 84 different countries also died in the attacks, including 67 Britons, 28 South Koreans, 26 Japanese, and 25 Canadians. The shock and horror engendered by the attacks were truly international in scope.ā7 Because of 9/11, as well as because of the close alliance between the U.S. and U.K., Tony Blairās government chose to join the U.S. in its 2003 invasion of Iraq in the years following the attacks. As Lacey and Paget note, 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq āmarked a crucial moment in the relationship between the U.K. and its American allies, wedding the former even more firmly to the foreign policy objectives of the latter.ā8 Given the significant effect of 9/11 and the concomitant expansion of state surveillance on the U.S. and U.K. publics, it makes sense that American and British screens have seen a growth in television programming centered in and around the primary government surveillance apparatuses of the prison, the police, and the national intelligence agencyāall of which are designed to monitor, control, and protect a nationās population.
Using Ellisās concepts of āwitnessingā and āworking through,ā I argue that dramas like Person of Interest enable television writers, producers, and viewers alike to acknowledge and wrestle with how these state surveillance apparatuses operate, if they do so ethically and legally, and if their surveillance is worth the price in personal privacy and civil liberties. Ellis concurs that āwitnessingā allows us as viewers to āwork throughā difficult cultural concepts, questions, or situations.9 This book aims to connect this working through of institutions of surveillance and social control in transnational television since 9/11 with earlier narratives of panopticism and terror prior to the twenty-first century. In the following chapters, I will analyze primary sources, including seventeenth-century captivity narratives and nineteenth-century newspapers and police reports. I will then connect these sources to post-9/11 programs about prisons, policing, and espionage. My goal in doing so is to demonstrate that televisionās ability to witness and work through the problems of surveillance, terror, and control is not new, although, certainly, these issues have become acute as the result of the war on terror since 9/11. In addition, I consider the inclusion of these older sources and narratives an important means of rectifying the amnesia we have in Britain and America of the history of post-9/11 television narratives we tell about state surveillance apparatuses. The Anglo-American10 series I address in this book build, consciously or unconsciously, on these older fictional and non-fictional sources that were influential in establishing and priming how British and American television series responded to increased government surveillance and fears of terrorism in the years following 9/11.
My book, then, adopts an interdisciplinary and multivalent approach to this topic. It employs television studies as a critical lens, and it also incorporates textual analysis of the various series as well as literary analysis of the older surveillance narratives which I argue influence todayās Anglo-American programs. In addition, I apply critical theory, surveillance studies, and historical archival research in my understanding of the series I cover in these pages. Only this interdisciplinary methodology can allow us to consider what kind of surveillance narratives are being offered in British and American series and why. It is an important question, given, as Ellis argues, that ā[t]elevision imbues the present moment with meanings. [ā¦] [I]t enables viewers to work through the major public and private concerns of their society. Television has a key role in the social process of working through because it exists alongside us, holding our hands.ā11 In this way, television serves a crucial function in allowing audiences to collectively encounter and grapple with relevant current national issues such as surveillance and terrorism.
Therefore, it is important to link these television series with older narratives which affect them, particularly if those earlier understandings of when surveillance and control should happen and who should be surveilled and monitored carry with them prejudices that continue to harm and affect large segments of the U.S. and U.K. population. This volume seeks to remind the reader of the ...