Surveillance Cinema

Catherine Zimmer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479858484
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Paris, a static video camera keeps watch on a bourgeois home. In Portland, a webcam documents the torture and murder of kidnap victims. And in clandestine intelligence offices around the world, satellite technologies relentlessly pursue the targets of global conspiracies. Such plots represent only a fraction of the surveillance narratives that have become commonplace in recent cinema. Catherine Zimmer examines how technology and ideology have come together in cinematic form to play a functional role in the politics of surveillance. Drawing on the growing field of surveillance studies and the politics of contemporary monitoring practices, she demonstrates that screen narrative has served to organize political, racial, affective, and even material formations around and through surveillance. She considers how popular culture forms are intertwined with the current political landscape in which the imagery of anxiety, suspicion, war, and torture has become part of daily life. From Enemy of the State and The Bourne Series to Saw, Caché and Zero Dark Thirty, Surveillance Cinema explores in detail the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that characterize contemporary films and television series about surveillance.

1

Video Surveillance, Torture Porn, and Zones of Indistinction

Since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom redefined cinematic terror in the 1960s, there has been a prevalence of surveillance narratives within the horror and “erotic thriller” arenas. The psychosexual slasher as offered up by those films became a central figure of monstrosity for years to come, and in these foundational texts as well as the films that followed, the violence and narrative structure are defined by voyeuristic stalking well before any knife is raised or blood spilled. From Norman Bates’s peephole in Psycho and Mark Lewis’s 16mm camera in Peeping Tom, on through the closed-circuit television systems of Sliver (Phillip Noyce, 1993) and Captivity (Roland Joffé, 2007), technologies of surveillance have served as a frequent narrative trope in slasher horror and have been almost invariably identified with the killer’s pathological murderousness. This is certainly one reason that voyeurism has so frequently been used as the explanatory model for cinematic surveillance narratives; the fact that the analytical framework so closely mirrors the narrative structure of these films may also serve to explain why voyeurism has repeatedly been used in critical accounts in a manner that I characterize in this book’s introduction as naturalizing and ahistorical.

Even as the extreme violence that characterized these slasher films has found a new, and significantly different, subgeneric home in the contemporary horror market, the use of surveillance technologies within the narratives has remained. My focus in this chapter is the postmillennial horror subgenre dubbed “torture porn” by critic David Edelstein in 2006, and its coincidence with the use of video surveillance in recent narrative cinema.1 Generic conventions, as evidenced even in the early years of cinema by the chase or “caught in the act” films I discuss in the introduction, are a significant element of the integration of surveillance and cinema, and thus an account of the generic or subgeneric formations that have privileged surveillance is one of the most direct points of access to an understanding of the specific ways that cinema and surveillance have become mutually structuring.2

Best represented by the Saw and Hostel series, each of which spanned years and earned box office glory alongside widespread critical disgust, torture porn has largely abandoned the psychosexual stalker model of horror extremity. Rather than relying on the pathology and perversity of the lone psycho, torture-porn films have instead turned to the more explicitly systematic violence of torture scenarios and often include narrative reference to the ideological, economic, or social elements that constitute that torture as itself functioning within the logic of a broader system. The frequent incorporation of surveillance into these films thus allows for a consideration of the function that surveillance has in a narrative formation of systematic (and systemic) violence. More significantly, these narrative formations also provide insight into the extracinematic connections between torture and surveillance that I would suggest are systemic intersections—intersections that are exemplary of the political, technological, and representational aspects of surveillance in current usage.

Most simply, it is worth noting that the rhetoric and tactics of the United States’ “war on terror” have since 2001 meant that both torture and surveillance have moved into a significant position in the world’s political reality, not to mention its imaginary. But rather than simply noting that the intersection of torture and surveillance is symptomatic of the postmillennial political zeitgeist, my concern is to explore the way video technologies function within these narratives, and how the resulting narrative formations demonstrate the relations between surveillance and torture with greater specificity. In turn, these films and the generic conventions they exemplify become integral to a view of how cinematic narrative works within a larger system of surveillance—here understood multiply as concept, as politics, and as technology.

What might seem to be the almost insistently apolitical torture narratives of the American horror films are both structurally and politically related to certain surveillance-themed films outside of what would initially seem to be the recognizable generic parameters of American torture porn, such as the multinational productions of Michael Haneke, or Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006). Haneke’s Caché (2005) and his much earlier Benny’s Video (1992), in particular, serve to refocus the willfully ahistorical morality discourses of some of the American torture films into an exploration of the relations between graphic cinematic violence and the production of racial subjects in western European postcolonial surveillance cultures. The contiguities between the American and European films, based upon both violence and surveillance, are instructive for an understanding of recent narrative formations, but also serve to demonstrate that the political formations around surveillance technologies and practices are both highly coded and historically specific. The relations between these otherwise very different films also highlight the relationships between violence and visibility that are essential to an understanding of the way surveillance functions both in contemporary horror cinema and in contemporary politics.

The connections between the various films, the relations between surveillance and torture, and the political function of surveillance in cinema are best understood through reference to the conceptual frameworks offered by political philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s work on biopolitics and “states of exception” has become increasingly important for surveillance theorists (among many others) seeking to describe how the extralegal overreach of surveillance, detention, and military intervention has become the defining characteristic of democratic state power in the United States and Europe. It is Agamben’s notion of “zones of indistinction,” perhaps most simply understood as spatial manifestations of the state of exception, that I believe best describes the way that cinematic torture narratives are both defined and destabilized by the incorporation of surveillance. Though this manifestation is defined as spatial, it also serves to describe the type of conceptual space created by and for a violent biopolitics. These films indicate a significant mode in which surveillance politicizes cinematic narrative space by using narrative as a space, a cinematic “zone of indistinction.”

* * *

The phenomenon of “torture porn” is frequently considered the lowest common denominator in the global reinvestment in horror in the new millennium. The ultra-graphic violence of these films, in combination with narratives that seem predominantly invested in providing the basis for incredibly drawn-out scenes of torture rather than the rhythmic suspense of a more traditional slasher film, situate them as somehow both the pinnacle and the gutter of contemporary horror. The overwhelming majority and the defining examples of torture-porn films are American productions, often connecting the threat of torture with foreign travel, as in Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005) and Turistas (John Stockwell, 2006), which present teenagers or young adults as victims of kidnap and torture during those first youthful escapades abroad that are now a tradition of upper-middle-class Americans.3 The emergence of these narratives of American youth, frequently men, going abroad and finding themselves immersed in what often amounts to an economy of torture must be read as a tremendously projective fantasy—a fantasy in which American youth are figured as the victims rather than as perpetrators of this kind of organized violence. Particularly since the events of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing American military actions that resulted in the establishment of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and the well-documented abuses at Abu Ghraib, it seems striking to posit Americans as the innocent objects of torture scenarios. At minimum, the contemporary appearance of so many films about the economies, bodily experiences, and technologies of torture should be viewed in conjunction with the politics of torture that has concurrently occupied the American and world stage. That several of these films situate torture as an international affair is also telling, despite the fact that with the exception of Turistas, which invokes Latin American economic resentment as a rationale for the harvesting of American organs, these films disavow any explicitly political structure to the torture.

The Saw franchise, which emerged in 2004 and continued until 2010 (with, remarkably, a sequel released annually to enormous box office success), is one that is little marked by political commentary, and, unlike the films mentioned above, situates torture as both domestic and, though not psychosexual, highly personalized and pathologized.4 And yet the stakes of this successful series are instructive in relation to the way torture is figured in the larger subgeneric arena, even before consideration of the way surveillance functions in relation to the torture. The Saw films are constituted by endless repetitions of the “games” carried out by serial killer “Jigsaw” (and, in later films, by various acolytes): each game involves the kidnapping of a victim or victims who are then placed in a scenario (frequently augmented with “homemade” torture gadgets designed to do devastating violence to the human body) requiring them to make torturous choices in order to survive and/or save those dear to them. All the victims are chosen by Jigsaw because he considers them to be squandering or abusing their own lives or those of others, and all the games are designed to teach Jigsaw’s chosen victim or victims the “real” value of life: the choice at the center of the first film is that of a doctor (selected because he has been unfaithful to his wife and uncaring toward his patients) who is told he must saw off his own foot to get out of a chained cuff and kill the stranger locked in the room with him, or allow his family to be murdered. As the films progress, the “games,” the torture devices, and the choices become more complex—even as the technologies of torture always maintain a sort of medieval crudeness, there is frequent attention paid to providing structural parallels or integration between the “crime” that the victims have committed to cause them to be targeted by Jigsaw, the choice they must make to survive, and the game/technology Jigsaw has constructed to physically brutalize them. The final film, Saw 3D, for instance, opens with a game and a device designed to mirror and punish a love triangle between two men and the woman who has been involved with both of them without their knowledge: unsurprisingly, she ends up sawed in half.

These moralizing contraptions, even in the most extreme moments of horror and violence, create constant reference back to the framing device of Jigsaw’s philosophy. Whether we view this philosophy as a nonsensical justification for elaborate scenes of violence or as an inventive narrative element that adds depth and nuance to contemporary horror film, it is clear that despite the visceral response such extreme representations might offer, the structure and purpose of the games in Saw refuse to let these scenes reside in the realm of pure disgust.5 Instead, the series introduces the cinematic narration of torture as a point of entry into moral and ethical dilemmas, and demands that each torture and death scene is framed by a consideration of fundamental values and a punishment that reflects the transgression. These dilemmas and considerations join with Jigsaw’s torture contraptions to create a structure through which torture, in its technologies, intentions, and effects on the body, comes to represent, in both form and purpose, a system—in this case, a value system organized around what constitutes a worthwhile life.

But the narratives do not always make these games straightforward, and the films are in large part organized by a search for the rules of the games, rather than a simple presentation of the games as they are played. Or put more exactly: playing the games is usually the same thing as figuring out the rules of the game, and the narrative twists and turns are representative of this type of game “play.” For both the characters and the films’ audiences, the narratives form around trying to determine precisely what the “game” is, what the choices are, and who is a victim and who is a perpetrator of these violences. The first Saw film hides the identity of Jigsaw until the surprise ending, and thus the central scenario is surrounded by a series of investigations into previous Jigsaw crimes, multiple flashbacks, and false leads for both the investigators and the audience. Ultimately, by layering the stories to show how the victims are selected, how the games unfold, and that multiple characters shift quickly between being posited as suspects and posited as victims, the Saw films tend to offer up every character as in some way both guilty and innocent.

This ambiguity is central to the moral-philosophical question that these films gesture toward repeatedly: is Jigsaw himself teaching something worthwhile, and are the torturous games he creates for his selected victims really “saving” them? The possibility of viewing Jigsaw as savior and moral compass is foregrounded early on in the series when one of his surviving victims from the first film, formerly a debilitated drug addict, pulls herself together after her ordeal, describes the experience as transformative, becomes his disciple in Saw II, and continues to figure centrally throughout the remainder of the series. This formula is repeated with other former victims; in fact Jigsaw himself dies not long into the series and his work is carried on by others who believe in his cause, further framing the torture as organized violence and part of a belief system. Thus the films, despite their over-the-top narrative contortions, still incorporate themes easily extrapolated to contemporary politics: the morality and/or efficacy of torture, definitions of life, fundamentalist belief systems, and bodily and psychological experiences of violence.

And despite the frequent critical treatment of these films as a disturbing symptom of the growing extremity of media violence, they could also be said to address some of the complexity of formations of violence (and the anger with current formulations of and responses to these violences) in a frankly less didactic way than the more explicitly political films that consider topics such as torture. At minimum it is notable that while the vast majority of films addressing the politics of torture in the United States “war on terror,” such as Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007) and Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, 2007), lost money at the box office, the Saw series has proven consistently marketable: Saw IV, the sequel released in 2007, grossed almost two times more than Lions for Lambs and Rendition did put together.6 It seems worthwhile then to examine some of the ways that Saw is speaking contemporary violences in a way that the more realistic and directly political films are not.

One aspect worth significant attention is the inclusion of multiple video surveillance apparatuses into the narratives of the Saw films, a repetitive narrative deployment that opens these films up to a consideration of the contemporary political relations between surveillant mediation and torture. The series incorporates surveillance as a recurrent feature of Jigsaw’s methodology, one that intermingles with the games of torture in various ways; with several critical essays on the emergence of torture porn focusing to varying degrees on the prominence of surveillance in the narratives, it is fair to say that surveillance has become a significant characteristic of the subgenre.7 The way that the Saw films formulate torture by introducing technological mediation and particularly surveillant formations into the rules and play of the life-and-death games insistently defines a structural relationship between narrative organization, methodologies of torture, and surveillance. This relationship is something that is of more than small consequence for a consideration of how surveillance is used politically to produce certain bodies as visible such that they may be subject to the violence of torture, and even further, of how torture, both cinematically and otherwise, produces these bodies as visible. Such production constitutes torture not just as politically consistent with surveillance or as the result of surveillance, but as a function of surveillance. However, as evidenced by the early films discussed in this book’s introduction, the visual/visible work of surveillance within cinematic narrative, as well as the power manifested by and through such work, is often ambiguous.

A video surveillance image provides the torture aesthetic of Saw (2004).

The first two Saw films best organize a discussion of how surveillance functions in the series, and demonstrate both the direct and indirect relations between surveillance and torture. The first film begins in media res, with two men awakening in a filthy and apparently abandoned large industrial bathroom, and another man dead on the floor in a pool of blood. They have no memory of how they got there, and via a series of clues, primarily audiocassettes that provide puzzling instructions in Jigsaw’s signature electronically altered voice, try to assess their situation and what they must do to escape with their lives. As the film progresses, it emerges for both the trapped characters and the film’s audience that the men are being watched on video surveillance, or what seems more precisely to be closed-circuit television (CCTV). The film cuts from the scene of entrapment to a low-resolution video image of the same scene; the unidentified watcher of these images, shot from behind, is clearly implicated as the one orchestrating the entire scenario by virtue of his operation of the surveillance. The as yet faceless surveillance operator and his seem...