stewart garrett surveillance cinema

SURVEILLANCE CINEMA

Garrett Stewart

Genres tend to be problem solvents; they wash away rather

than resolve. In making the intractable seem actionable,

their closures gravitate to fantasy. How so with low-boil

anxieties about paramilitary surveillance in the Homeland

Security mode under the reign of anti-Terror? One might

say that the detective genre has evolved into the surveil-

lance film (now even a DVD sales category on Amazon)

by recovering the original threat of spycraft. When Vladi-

mir Propps formalist analysis of the folktale listed recon-

naissance fourth among the thirty-one ingredients of

narrative, he was referring to the spying of villain upon

the precincts of the hero. In a Hollywood genre cycle more

than a decade old now, at least since the pre-9/11 Enemy

of the State (Tony Scott, 1998), and proliferating both as

POV technique and overt theme, the drama of recon,

surveillance, and remote targetingtranslated from desert

combat to paramilitary CIA complotsis what the new

protagonist must defeat, but only by beating it at its own

game. In the two latest examples, The Bourne Legacy and

Total Recall, detection is reserved mainly for the heros

efforts to find out not who-done-it, but who he himself

isand why so many people want him in their mediated

weapon sights.

The heroes of these two summer blockbusters can well

seem like twins separated at rebirth. Each figure must, as

hero and as screen character alike, endure the gauntlet of

a misplaced and recycled identity: one film being the re-

boot of a popular action series, the other the remake of

a minor sci fi classic. Who can blame their similar prota-

gonists for not knowing quite where, or who, they are, not

to mention what film theyre in? Right from the first of the

original trilogy, in The Bourne Identity (counterfactual pun

already in play), Jason Bourne cant remember who he is.

Because he isnt. Born David Webb instead, he has been

retooled as a CIA spy and hit man under the eponymous

alias. But psychogenic amnesia after gunshot wounds has

erased this false identityalmost as if the bullets had

killed him. Nor is it he (Matt Damon)merely played

by a different actor (James-Bond style)who comes back

in 2012s Bourne Legacy. Its another mind-warped and

interchangeable operative from a new iteration not just of

the same franchise but of the same covert initiative (Jeremy

Renner as Aaron Cross)as if born again with partial

recall.

Next door in the late-summer multiplex, Total Recall

(remake of the 1990 film by Paul Verhoeven), parades

another self-estranged hero. Douglas Quaid (formerly

Arnold Schwarzenegger, now Colin Farrell) doesnt rec-

ognize his dreams as his own actual memories. Because,

again, they arent, nor is he himself. He is in fact Eric

Hauser, another spy and hit man, suffering from an elec-

tronic rather than psychosomatic memory-wipe, his own

identity firewalled off by a computerized surveillance

regime of autocratic state control. This time an oppressive

omniscience is deliberately attempting to induce a tactical

nescience on the heros part, to keep his traitorous instincts

in check. A delayed recognition may well set in for the

viewer too. Our screen hero as someone he isnt: what

could be in fact more cinematic? Every actor is in role

rather than in earnest. Spy plots have always tapped into

the theatricality of human performance, where all is

scripted, programmed, now even digitally modified. But

even when the hero, in both films, hasnt quite grown back

into his role yet, there he is on the remote screens of those

who actually recognize himas their target.

Closed Circuits

This counterpointthis level-shifting parallel montage

between the action plot and its mediated reaction is

endemic to an ongoing surveillance cycle by which a sci

fi thriller like Total Recall is subsumed. The cycles logic

is often pivoted around the heros shot/countershot ex-

change with some variant of spy cam. In the first Bourne

film, the inaugural moment of digital surveillance is

entirely routine: a lone security installation in Zurichs

American Consulate, from which the still clueless hero

FILM QUARTERLY 5

Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 2, pps 515, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.

2013 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Pleasedirect all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content

through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://

www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2012.66.2.5

tries naively averting his face (sent immediately into mass

dissemination as forensic image, an electronic wanted-man

poster). From there out, the trilogy ramps up its surveil-

lance tech across a frenetic gamut of electronic spyware

and computerized mapping, including automatic digital

cameras in power-drive sequence, magnetic remote track-

ers, security-cam footage, high-speed passport crosschecks

from international customs sites, and weather-satellite

images combed for clues. As the chief CIA over-seer

in the latest Bourne film commands: Give me every cam-

era youve got. This finally includesin the ultimate

remote mode for mandatory car chase climaxesthe com-

puter upload of all urban toll and traffic cams.

Ever since the implicitly punning surveillance bugs

(call them spyders) scurrying for information across

floors and walls in 2002s Minority Report, the ingenuities

of optic data gathering know no limit. Hence another link

between the genealogy of The Bourne Legacy and the par-

tial rebirth of Total Recall. In the third and most tech-

heavy of the trilogy (The Bourne Ultimatum), a transmitted

image, splintered with digital breakups on the CIA screen,

is being sent from a viewfinder attached to an automatic

handgun targeting Bourne. The sci fi license of Total Recall,

during a similar attack on the cornered hero, takes this

optical tooling of weaponry several steps farther in one wild

leap. Get eyes in there is the command, and one of the

The Bourne Legacy (2012)

Total Recall (2012)

6 WINTER 2012

robot police fires off, from a presumed machine gun, a whole

rotary cartridge of mini webcams that puncture the walls

and thus rim the rooms perimeter with tiny oculi designed

to triangulate the kill. If only the criminal mastermind in

Fritz Langs The 1,000 Eyes of Doctor Mabuse (1960) had this

device at hand, he wouldnt have needed all that closed-

circuit TV for his Cold War espionage. In the conflation of

optics and ballistics at the heart of the surveillance plot,

vision is a weapon.

Visionand its associated wireless channels. As if

extrapolated from a current unease about data mining and

identity theft, Quaid realizes at one point in Total Recall

that he must remove the cell-phone filaments surgically

embedded in his hand in order to prevent remote track-

ing by its signala palm pilot turned from handy

tool to weapons-guidance system. Compared to the in-

strumentalities of the Bourne films, this particular inno-

vation is barely sci fi at all. Bourne has a laser implant

removed in the trilogys first segment. And in the new

sequel, an early montage episode cuts between a drone

control center in Virginia and the Alaskan wilderness

where Cross is being double crossed by his own Agency.

The attempt to take him out is foiled only when, in

a rather bravura conception, he transfers his cyborg status

onto another animal killer by removing the tracker chip

from his thigh and, with the predator drone closing in,


Total Recall (2012)

FILM QUARTERLY 7

feeds the miniature GPS to an attacking wolf as decoy

prey.

Then, too, the good spy will know how to track his

own spymasters. In Bourne Supremacy, speaking on a wir-

etapped line to an official at the CIA, the recorded hero

has her twice in his sights from a nearby office building,

first in the crosshairs of an assault rifle, later with the

naked eyeand stuns her both times by admitting as

much. In a mix of Rear Window and The Conversation,

old-fashioned surveillancehis eyes-on stakeout vs. the

CIA wiretappingis dropped like a still operable fossil

into the new ricochet of remote electronic transmits.

Thrown into relief in this way, the computerized video

saturation of these plots is part of their selling point in the

vague War on Terror aura they, like Total Recall in

a futurist variant, mean to evoke. Yet where surveillance

serves in this way to resuscitate the detective genre, it has

suffocated the actual Mideast war picture.1 What tends to

fail so miserably with audiences in the hypermediated desert

films of Mideast intelligence gathering and counter-

insurgency, with all its helmet cam imagery and laptop

video intercut with drone scans, has a better chance of

paying off (if only in ticket sales) when the technology is

hyped into rogue threat rather than the verite treatment

of a military morass. Threat, plus the fantasy of its over-

coming in kind.



8 WINTER 2012

Phobia Clearinghouse: Global Warming,Offshore Labor, Political Torture, Genomics

A vague War on Terror aura? It is seldom more: either

foisted off on the all-purpose notion of saving American

lives in the Bourne series or geographically displaced to

Australia in the new Total Recall. But that last gesture is

actually closer to home than before. Schwarzenegger went

to Mars in the Verhoeven version, and saved its human

colony by the release of clean air from a secret generator.

Smog was the cause of the moment, even before he became

Californias governor. Now its greenhouse gases, global

terrorism, and the geopolitics of laborsubmitting, of

course, to their usual genre displacements. Planetary devas-

tation is not caused by industrial emission here, but by

chemical warfare, leaving only two insular realms habit-

ablethe British isles (United British Federation, no longer

Kingdom, but still imperial) and its once and future colony

Australia, portrayed as an Asian-dense emblem of overpop-

ulation. Labor is outsourced there, but via warp-speed

transport rather than networked transmission (as in the

normal course of an offshore service force). This involves

a further dodge of global warming fearswhen the antip-

odal labor squads make their daily commute through the

earths burning core: an endurance test thousands of degrees


Total Recall (2012)

FILM QUARTERLY 9

more intolerable, even though heat-shielded, than the worst

vulnerabilities of an atmospherically depleted terrestrial

surface. Everything urgent is fictionalized into a haze of

defused planetary premonition, including an imputed ter-

rorism which is really revolutionand which succeeds in

the end, thanks to our hero, only when the most dramatic

political threat, panoptic coercion, is reversed.

A point of comparison, and potential influence, in this

global workforce and insurgency plot is found in Alex

Riveras Sleep Dealer (2008), a sci fi parable of immigration

versus outsourced productivity in which Mexican nationals

are exploited in the radically alienated labor of an electronic

assembly line. This low-wage pool of e-migrants is drawn

on to operatefrom virtual control stations in a Mexican

planta robot-implemented skyscraper construction site

in San Diego. In the original Total Recall, under the

weight of similar but unmediated drudgery, the hard-

hat industrial worker is tempted by the promise of a com-

puterized surrogate existence, paying good money to

a dream factory called Rekall to implant it. In the remake,

the self-outmoding work is in fact the construction of syn-

thetics (now security cops, soon robot factory workers as

well). And when the new Quaid seeks out the Rekall option,

by injection this time rather than digital implant, there is no

mention of money changing hands. It just seems part of the

psychic economy of a state-implemented virtuality. The

people, as long as people are needed at all, need their welfare

opiate, their untruth serum (though still delivered in what

looks like an electronic virtual reality cockpit).

Even without the dystopian inventions of sci fi, compa-

rable political topicalities in the Bourne films are similarly

offloaded onto the broad phobic specter of electronic search

and weaponized seizure. The trilogy was concerned with

real rather than electronically induced amnesia and its

flashes of recovery, a pattern continued in Legacy through

a series of repressed memories and their flashbacks, trau-

matic returns of supposedly patriotic violence. Enemies of

the state are never specified, but Abu Ghraib and Guanta-

namo hang heavily in the air. In The Bourne Ultimatum,

weve seen the hero hooded and water-boarded by CIA

operatives. In the last and definitive flashback to this

ambiguous scene, we learn that he has been finally broken

down and remade. Amnesia, his original and instigating

affliction, turns out, in the rounding off of the trilogy, to

have been a self-protective resource: blocking memories he

cant bear. For only in the end is he goaded into recalling

that he once proved his willingness to give himself to the

program by reluctantly executing, at point-blank range,

a hooded double for himself. This is a man who looks,

when his blindfold is removed, like one of the American

citizens whom Bourne has later discovered, to his horror,

are among the assassinated victims of the programas if

this were worse than the foreign nationals or the African

head of state also targeted by armed espionage.

That was the trilogy. The Legacy plugs indirectly into

a new topical anxiety: not just the erosion of private will by

surveillance and brutality but of organic autonomy by bio-

genetic tampering. Yet, in the process, this latest films slowly

disclosed backstory may seem to exonerate a sustained

improbability in the preceding series. Bourne, when

impersonated by the mild-mannered Matt Damon, was all

along a rather unlikely superherotoo implausibly fast,

Total Recall (2012)

10 WINTER 2012

tough, and adept, altogether too quick on his feet. As

character as well as actor, his prowess seemed fabricated.

It was. He had been, as he ultimately learns, refashioned

by torture, brain-washing, and homicidal calisthenics.

Even so, the results remain unconvincing. The Legacy

named for the inherited ruthlessness of this human

engineeringgoes one clarifying step farther. Bournes

successors in the Outcome program are in another

way too good to be true, like doped Olympians. Revers-

ing the biochemical threat of gas warfare in the new

Total Recall, here it is the aggression itself that is chem-

ically supplemented (like the pharmaceutically-induced

primal violence of the experimental Viet Nam squad

in Jacobs Ladder [1990]). But also in its own right

aggressive: first with the enforced regimen of body- and

mind-altering pills, then with the toxic virus used to kill

off the agents when the program goes sour.

Even when meant to be enabling rather than lethal, the

approach is a kind of biological warfare in its own right.

This we learn in an unusually telegraphic exposition from

a female neurologist whose metaphors, like so much else in

these films, shunt between communications technology and

ballistic assault. A virus, when not fatal, is the best delivery

system, she explains, in reprogramming human genetics,

but one has to know where to strike in this campaign of

genomic targeting. With the opening sequence of failed

aerial takeout behind us, its hard not to think that drone

sighting through computer technology is being replicated

in its logic at the level of neurobiology and its secret inter-

ventions. Hearing all this, Cross gets her to accompany

him to the Philippine lab where, with an injection of a live

culture, he can viral off the drugs for good by a perma-

nent genetic boost.

After a last grinding motorcycle chase through con-

gested Manila streets, they escape with their lives into the

South China Sea on a friendly junk. Biologically doctored

hero and virologist heroine, having obviously consum-

mated below deck their so far merely expedient pairing

(in this typically sex-starved franchise), emerge topside in

a laconic postcoital haze, their borrowed fishing boat float-

ing out past the atolls as the hero begins charting their

uncertain course on a weathered map. The films last line

is hers, with a sly smile: I was sort of hoping we were

lost. Not so, just freed for a moment and left floating,

their vehicle as if well-stocked with sequel bait. Yet their

receding image within a panoramic wide-angle shot is tied

back to the films whole contrapuntal aesthetic. Cinema-

tography has alternated between the hyperlong-shot and

the gargantuan closeup, the latter involving at times an

intimacy, in car or rented room, that seems a kind of

dramatic respite, suggesting no threat from the off-frame

space of surveillance. But not alwaysand never for long.

In extreme closeup in the neurology lab for his earlier

checkup, pressing the doctor for answers about behavioral

design, Cross is rebuffed with Enough information

. . . dont you know were on camera? No mere cinematic

in-joke here. The remark has done what the films in this

surveillance genre always do: deflect any twinge of voy-

eurism onto the diegetic paranoia of invaded privacy. All

Cross does is glance upward knowingly. No reverse shot

locates the hidden camera. Its as ubiquitous as narrative

omniscience itself. And as flexible.

Total Recall (2012)

FILM QUARTERLY 11

Tactical E-Spionage, Strategic Montage

Certainly the energy of Legacy and Recall comes mainly

across one dilated and flamboyant chase sequence after

anotherfrom the rub not just of past against present but

of event against its mediation. Both films of selective amne-

sia manipulate a porous border between flashback and

digital playback. The hologram-like videos by which

Quaid is briefed on the mission by his past self as Hauser

are comparable, in their existential disjunction, to Cross

looking on at a superseded former self in a laptop upload

of his army enlistment photograph. He does so by way of

explaining to the neurologist why he is so attached to his

cognitive enhancement pills. When the blank stare of this

photo was first recorded, his IQ had to be faked by the

recruiter in order to make the army minimum. Better a kill-

ing machine, Cross implies, than a dysfunctional reject.

This retrospect falls into place within a franchise-

familiar series of flashbacks that pace the film by inserted

memory flasheswithout the fuller justification of clinical

amnesia and its breakthroughs from the trilogy. The pres-

ent time frame of the Legacy plot is soon interrupted by

a closeup of Cross, under interrogation and his former

name, battered and addled, in what amounts to his second

(this time CIA) recruitment. That flashback, linked to

another in which his handler talks him out of moral

qualms after a killing, then becomes an electronic playback

on the latters own monitor during the internet manhunt.

In its third and final recurrence (and functional exorcism),

this grilling humiliation is next replayed as Crosss own

feverish nightmare after his viral injection in Manila, from

which he does in fact actually awakeonce and for all, his

juiced-up powers now permanent. The verbalized ques-

tion each time from this past image of the befuddled

recruit, an image recovered either traumatically or elec-

tronically: Is this a test? . . . If I pass, can I stay? One cant

help hearing Renner auditioning for the Damon part, fur-

ther installments in view. But thats only an incidental

irony. There is a structural one underneath. So wall-to-

wall is the surveillance regime to which his character sub-

mits, indeed commits, that both abject memory and uncon-

scious nightmare have their inevitable equivalents in the

covert screen test of a top-secret video archive. Privacy is

long gone; trapped within this new technopticon, all one

can ever really hope to do is block access.

Beyond the counterpoint of such recursive scenes,

remembered or recorded, there is a yet more dominant

pattern in each of these new films, synchronic rather than

diachronicplaying not between present and past,

through memory or upload, but across parallel streams

of time present. In the vehicular mayhem that peaks at

the end of each narrative, everything on the ground,

burnt rubber and all, is contrasted with the high-tech

monitoring of the intended escape route. This happens via

futurist handsets in Recall, whereas in Legacy were con-

stantly cutting away to the desktop and full-screen surveil-

lance panels at command central. (Says the CIA special

unit director as the escape plot thickens and he uproots

to higher-tech quarters: I need a crisis suite with fully

integrated grids.) The underlit and cinema-like space to

which we remove, a kind of off-site theater of opera-

tions, is complete with so many viewing screens that it

Total Recall (2012)

12 WINTER 2012

looks like an overloaded editing room out of which sepa-

rate fixed camera shots might conceivably be pieced

together into an action sequence. But not quite, and only

in grainy black and white at best.

Unlike its classic prototypes, alternating montage oper-

ates here as a whiplash exchange between two entirely

different image protocols, one the manhunts own hyper-

kinetic montage chase, the other a mutating rectilinear

collage at the receiving end of simultaneous transmission

in the command hub. Yet more is at stake than just making

us grateful, even in the face of the latter sites zingy video

banks, for old-fashioned movie action when we are released

back to it. This is partly because the action sequences

themselves are shotand digitally editedso much in the

hand-held, multi-cam mode of fractured continuity that

they, in full color, might almost have been hi-def surveil-

lance composites from multiple tracking angles. And,

more importantly, because the heroes have so fiercely

refused to keep to their vulnerable place in the space

under surveillanceand have consistently fought back,

co-opted rather than just defied the network that would

snare them, refused passivity under its gaze. The viability

of this defiance we are expected to find credible.

Despite the magic virus immunizing the hero in Legacy

against normal human limits, the deepest genre fantasy ends

up feeling more technological than biomedical. One laconic



FILM QUARTERLY 13

turn of dialogue serves indirectly to flag this. Admitting his

fears of cognitive degrading from hunk genius back to

lunkheadas hinted in a couple of dead-eyed regressive

closeups as the meds wear offCross admits: It would

be real hard to go back. Who are we to doubt it, by analogy

with our own kinds of prosthetic enablements and affor-

danceseach a putative mode of cognitive enhancement?

Never Off-Grid

Here, then, the motif of doping fades into a larger tech

horizon of cyborgian prosthetics. Equipmental nostalgia

has no place in current filmsor filminglike this, any

more than in the routine planned obsolescence of each new

digital upgrade to hit the market. Every artificial increase

in behavioral design and sensory function (in the

vocabulary of Bourne neurology), every time-saving gizmo

or big-screen dazzlement they throw at us, addicts us fur-

ther. This is our digital fix. The fantasy in play isnt that

theres somewhere in Pacific waters where one can float at

peace and off gridas the inevitable next installment in

this tireless franchise is bound to disprove. Nor, more

broadly, that private space may still somehow be made safe

from invasion. The fantasy, rather, is simply that you cant

lose by winning; that the very system that remakes you,

and in the process makes you electronically deft and

surveillance-savvy, thus gives you the wherewithal to hold

your own, even when such prowess is pitted, in a given

dystopian narrative, against a full-bore paramilitary assault.

In film after film, Legacy and Recall most recently, the

cornered hero hacks back into the technopolitical structure

that has nurtured, trained, and victimized him. The local-

ized revenge fantasy at the end of Total Recall is, more

specifically, that a double agent killer, converted to true

revolutionary, could escape federated surveillancein one

grid-tracked chase after anotherand bring down the

entire system. No accident that this imagined defiance

involves a flashy weapon of counter-surveillance: a digital

face mask almost good enough to fool airport security.

Though such genre-derived subterfuge is neutralized

almost as soon as contrived, it harbors something more

ingrained. These narratives are a far cry from the down-

beat post-Watergate paranoia films about illicit govern-

ment surveillanceand not least because their freakish

technological sophistication, verging at times into sci fi,

can seem nonetheless to be playing into the digital hands

of an audience still bothering to dam up their web streams

long enough for an occasional night at the movies.

The real structuring fantasy of a film like Total Recall

certainly isnt workplace equity or political revolution.

Nor, in the closing throwaway vista of The Bourne Legacy,

that there might be a way to securitize some removed

realm of our own on which no oversight can intrude. It is,

rather, that with ever-improved skills, manual and cogni-

tive both, there could be such a thing as feasibly pushing

back: that the digital fix (as quandary) were inincluding

the fix that they may have on us (as target, even if only

commercial)has some potential fix of its own, some

inbuilt protective mastery waiting to be implemented. Or

at the very least, an ingenuity sufficient to buck the system,

as when remote surveillance, finally tracking in on the

Manila room from which Cross has absconded, finds his


14 WINTER 2012

messageinstead of his imageon the mirror, descriptive

and imperative both: No More. It is easy for him to say,

this intrepid re-Bourne as genetically rewired superman.

As the videogame ad tucked in as supplement on the DVD

release of the second Bourne film promises: with controls

in hand You become Bournewhich is to say, as at the

movies too, you forget yourself in the image of the dare-

devil. It is an image all the more recognizable these days

when replete with prosthetic apps and biometric down-

loads, memory-extensions, laser and cellular implants, and

the rest, including the pharmacology of multitasking when

carried to such preternatural heights of stamina and

tenacity.

Indeed, with computer games and feature films increas-

ingly indistinguishable in their first-person vectors of

hyperkinetic identification, that tag-line formula might

have been borrowed as pitch for Total Recall redux: You

become Hauser. Together with The Bourne Legacy, the

timely remake of that transference fantasy installs yet an-

other genre myth of audiovisual enhancement as empow-

erment. With regard to the only audience demographic

that finally counts, it would seem that the commercial loop,

like the surveillance feed, has become a closed circuit mech-

anism in its own right. The expertise you practice at home

is what you go to the multiplex to celebrate. And in the

beleaguered body of the hero as odd man out, the price

suffered is what you forget in the adrenal rush of closure,

where the system is implausibly bested from within the

electronic tentacles of its global stranglehold.

Note

1. See my Digital Fatique: Imaging War in Recent American

Film, Film Quarterly Vol. 62, No. 4 (Summer 2009), 4555.

Total Recall (2012)

FILM QUARTERLY 15

stewart garrett surveillance cinema

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