On Surveillance and the Movies

"Obedience to authority is implicitly deemed the natural state." - Glen Greenwald (2015, p.228)

In science fiction films the threat of government surveillance looms large. On of the better known of them is probably V for Vendetta (2005), not only due to it's origin but also due to the adoption of its iconography by the hacktivist group Anonymous. However, there is a definite inconsistency in the way surveillance is portrayed and how it is actually carried out in modern times. For this we can compare documentaries like CitizenFour (2014) to movies like Equilibrium (2002) and many, many others.

The dystopian view of V for Vendetta and Equilibrium shows us how the public can be controlled through several different means. In Vendetta control is exerted through constant monitoring and oppression of any opinions against the establishment. This includes having cameras placed everywhere and a police force and politicians who work together to remain in control of the British population. In the 1980s while Vendetta was written, England had a conservative government with Tatcher as Prime Minister. Alan Moore used his fears and the political climate as an inspiration. It can be said he was warning us. In the introduction to the graphic novel for V for Vendetta (1990) he states:

"It is now 1988... The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality... I'm thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It's cold and it's mean-spirited and I don't like it anymore."

The similarity with the way the media is portrayed in this comic and the way it is written about in Glen Greenwald's No Place to Hide is glaring. The media, especially in America, shakes hands with politicians and corporations on a daily basis. They even have a party to celebrate, the White House Correspondents Dinner. This in itself is not bad, but the lack of any kind of opposition the main media has to these people is harmful. The point is, Greenwald argues, that the media "is only effective if journalists act adversarially to those who wield political power" (p.210). The reality of being a journalist opposed to those in power can clearly be seen in treatment of Laura Poitras, the director of CitizenFour as well as several other politically charged documentaries. As a supposed adversary to the state, she has been stopped at the American border every time she leaves or enters the country. This has been done without any clear reasons other than her making politically charged films that criticise the establishment.

All of this does not even go into the actual surveillance of regular people. In the articles written by Greenwald, as well as the interviews and revelations in CitizenFour it becomes clear that the use of the internet has intrinsically changed surveillance both due to access but also due to the quantity of data available. The internet is how we get things done, it's how we communicate and it's how we share ourselves with the world. Now there are very few movies that deal with the internet as a surveillance tool, mostly due to the sudden increase of use and the abstract way the internet works in its current form. The way surveillance is depicted in film is mostly through tracking of mobile phones or though microphones and cameras placed around the home. Movies that use this as a premises are for instance The Truman Show (1998), The Lives of Others (2006) and the Bourne franchise (2002-2016). In all of these movies the dissident, the person who goes agains the surveillance, is the hero, but as discussed earlier this is not the case within the real world.

Equilibrium adds another layer to the control exerted on the people. In it people are controlled by making the way the world is with restrictions seem normal. Within the movie, emotions have been eradicated by the government as the source of human suffering. Anyone who continues to be emotional get taken by the police and eradicated. While Greenwald talks about politics, his premiss stays true to this point: 

"There are, broadly speaking, two choices: obedience to institutional authority or radical dissent from it. The first is a sane and valid choice only if the second is crazy and illegitimate. For defenders of the status quo, mere correlation between mental illness and radical opposition to prevailing orthodoxy is insufficient. Radical dissent is evidence, even proof, of a severe personality disorder." (p.227)

Those who do not obey or follow along with the crowd are seen as 'insane' in both movies and the real world. However, in film, the person who turns out the victor is usually this 'insane' dissident of the state. V in Vendetta, Bourne in his movies and Preston in Equilibrium are all a cog in the system before rebelling and being prosecuted for their disobedience. They overthrow the system they were a part of and change the political climate through their actions. The break with those who are surveilling them allows for their power. This can also be said of those who rebel against surveillance in the real world like Snowden. By leaving the country and getting political asylum, he has gained more power (even if this was not his original intent) that he would have if he had stayed. His message became clearer with the threat to his life/freedom that he exposed by being prosecuted by the USA.

The way people deal with surveillance in cinema is radically different from how we deal with it in reality, as the type of surveillance is also not the same. The use of the internet has changed what we are willing to expose about ourselves online and thus what the government and companies have free access to. This however does not take away that films can highlight our compliance with the status quo and can have an impact on how people perceive the surveillance of their personal information. Films like V for Vendetta have inspired and allowed for a movement against the real world surveillance by highlighting it in a fictional narrative. In the same way, CitizenFour has focussed our attention on the real world consequences of speak out against the government's surveillance and what kind of impact this surveillance has on normal people. Being tracked is the norm, being a hero isn't.

(It should be stated that I am of the internet generation. I've used the internet throughout my life and thus have a different view of privacy than people from my father's generation. (In this I can also state that I've had many discussions with my father about the definition and implementation of privacy.) I'm aware that everything I post (including this blog) is public to a certain extend and that anyone with malicious intent can access all my accounts if they wanted to. This is why my point on privacy is that it is extremely limited, namely, privacy is something that you will only have inside your head. Thoughts, as long as they are not spoken, are private; nothing else is. This is not to say that I want everyone to have access to everything I do on the internet or anywhere else, but I am aware that is how the internet works.)

On the Oscars and where they go wrong

To say the Academy award (commonly know as the Oscars) are important in the US film industry is an understatement. This is what the whole film season seems to be about. Almost ever serious drama film gets pegged as 'potential Oscar nominee' and there even seems to be a 'genre' specifically made to be Oscar worthy. The main controversy of the most recent years has been the lack of diversity in the acting categories. It gets discussed in industry papers like Variety (Gray, 2016) and even on late night talk shows as can be seen in the video below.

The Daily Show - Another White Oscars (2016)

But just looking at who is nominated in the Acting categories would be short sighted. The other controversy with this year Oscars appears in it's exclusion of two of the five original song nominees form the broadcast, but the inclusion of Dave Grohl, who has nothing to do with any of the movies nominated this year (Hammond & Pedersen, 2016). This itself is not controversial per se, but that the two songs that were cut are made by people belonging to a minority seems to be strangely coincidental. Best song nominee Ahohni knows she "wasn't excluded from the performance directly because [she is] transgender...But if you trace the trail of breadcrumbs, the deeper truth of it is impossible to ignore...It is a system of social oppression and diminished opportunities for transpeople that has been employed by capitalism in the U.S. to crush our dreams and our collective spirit." (2016) The other song nominees who were excluded from the broadcast, composer David Lang and singer Sumi Jo, have not responded to their exclusion.

The real reason for writing this piece is, however, the revelation in a lecture about politics that the Palestinian film Divine Intervention (2002) was excluded from the foreign language category in 2002. It was thought this came about because Palestine is not recognised as a country by the United States and the Academy seemingly follows their guide when it comes to who to include. A film with a clear country of origin was now considered a creative refugee (Doherty & Abunimah, 2002). However, the film was included in the foreign language selection the following year. The Academy made the decision to treat Palestine the same way they treat Hong Kong, which is as a 'separate entity' (Joseph, 2014). The way this movie was treated demonstrates the Academy's need to put everything into a box from which it can not escape. What will they ever do with a non-binary person...

To actually get an idea of how rigid the Academy is one can look through their eligibility rule for the past year (Oscars, 2015). The specific standards they set for who is able to apply they are hampering young creative people who have the hope to ever win an Oscar. (I know I've given up on that hope, I'd rather win a BAFTA...) The use of certain standards is understandable and a way to ensure quality, however, that quality should not mean that only a small group of people will be able to compete. The rules they have posed have nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with how many people you know in the industry. If you know the right people, your film is going to get funding and going to get screened which is the only way to even be eligible to compete. This is of course not only the case with the Oscars, but with most awards which aren't voted for by the public.

The main concern when it comes to the Oscars is simply its elitist view of film. All nominees for best film/actor/actress/director/writer are drama films (Oscars, 2016). Even movies like the Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and The Martian (2015), which are not normally considered drama films (The Martian won the Best Comedy/Musical award at the Golden Globes (Golden Globes, 2016)) there is a strong element of tragedy and tension not normally found in movies that attract large audiences. Neither of the two is very likely to win the Oscar for best film, with serious contenders like Spotlight (2015) and The Revenant (2015). The common factor with all these movies is who made them. Every single movie nominated in the best film category is directed by a middle-aged man who has been working in the industry for a long time. This is not to say that the decision to nominate a movies should be based on the age and gender of a director, but it does seem like it is once again an issue of access to the industry.

The movies themselves carry a political message, however one sides. Due to very few non-white characters in the nominated movies, we are only show an all-white world view. This has been the case for most of Oscar history, but now it is damning, when considering the quality movies with a black or otherwise diverse cast that came out this year. The most talked about movie in this regard is Straight Outta Compton (2015), which got nominated for a script written by white people (Dickens, 2016). There have been people who argued that without any available roles it is not possible to be nominated, but now it has become clear that even with the roles and the movies, there are no nominations forthcoming.

The problem with the Oscars is not only the Oscars themselves, but the industry surrounding it. It's the lack of recognition and access for anyone who is deemed different, no matter how strange some of the people working inside the industry might already be.

On Archiving Interactive Materials (AKA what I write in the middle of the night)

There are many problems that occur when trying to archive materials that need to be played to remain. The vinyl record still exists, due to the new flair-up of hipsters (including me) who want the scratching of the needle on a record. However, what happens when the system that plays the archived material is no longer readily available? And what about materials that disintegrate over time?

For film, celluloid was the gold standard for most of it's lifetime. This meant long reals of clear plastic, sensitive to light. But storing celluloid has always been difficult. It's highly flammable, and falls apart over time. The only way to keep it from breaking apart is by keeping it in very specific circumstances. The British Film Institute (BFI) highlights this in their campaign Film is Fragile.

In the documentary Side by Side (2012), the use of film in Hollywood is explored, as well as how difficult it is to archive the materials to watch films. You can watch Side by Side below.

Side by Side, Chris Kenneally

Almost every creative medium has trouble keeping it's historic materials from being unplayable. In the case of film is physical degeneration, for videogames (a digital medium) it's the constant development of the gaming consoles and the systems they use. The constant development of these systems has lead to the creation of virtual systems online, often created by fans, to keep the game playable. Eric Kaltman gives a talk about this issue in the video below.

Knowledge Cafe - Games in Sound and Vision

The problem that currently exist across all mediums (Film, Games, Tv, Music) is that we have no idea what the future might bring when it comes to storing our shared past. The internet is a very useful tool to save digital files, but a hardcopy of some sort is a far more solid as a way of archiving than using only digital files. The world is no longer cut out to stay technologically the same for a long time. We've gone from the use of MP3's to streaming in a span of less than 10 years. The fact that celluloid and vinyl are still being used only helps preserve them, no matter how pretentious individuals who have these kinds of collections might seem. In the case of video games it's slightly different, as there are no new games being developed for the older consoles such as the Nintendo 64.

In the end archiving is an art, and something that will only continue to become more difficult as time passes and technologies advance. No way of keeping our files and materials is the right way. Every way of archiving has consequences. But the fact that we archive our past at all gives us more insight into who we are than any technological advance ever can.