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

Abstract

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, [End Page 93] 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.