Big Brother in the act

FEW things inspired more clammy dread in the average Western democracy-dweller during the last century than the idea of constant electronic surveillance. In fact, save maybe for the concurrent dread of being shipped to a gulag for some subsequent thought-rehab, nothing conjured the horror of totalitarian living quite like the thought of basking in the gaze of Big Brother 24/7.

But that was a long time ago, before the barrier between the public and the private collapsed like an over-whipped souffle, before camera phones and YouTube minted legions of amateur stalkerazzi, before the area surrounding George Orwell’s former London flat was outfitted with 32 CCTV cameras, the better to capture miscreants, brawlers and litterbugs in flagrante delicto.

The level of scrutiny to which we’re subjected today surpasses anything we could have imagined 10 years ago. We’re a nation of spies and the spied on, and a new crop of films plays out the uneasiness of an era in which we have lenses aimed at us on traffic lights and at 7-Elevens, on ATMs and in nanny-cams, and the Patriot Act grants law enforcement agencies relatively unfettered access to our telephone conversations, e-mails, personal records and -- why not? -- underwear drawers. Corporations monitor employees’ activities for objectionable behavior, including off-the-clock adultery (the New York Times recently reported that Wal-Mart “has assembled a team of former officials from the CIA, FBI and Justice Department” who conduct “elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations” of their staff). And tech-support nerd-verts spy on cute clients while trouble-shooting their computers (Best Buy is being sued by a family who discovered a Geek Squad technician videotaping their daughters in the shower with a hidden cellphone).

All of this is so much a part of the texture of our lives that the shock is largely gone. We alternately ignore it, participate in it, revel in it even -- but this doesn’t mean it sits well in the psyche. Clearly, something about the notion of being watched and judged is still profoundly upsetting to us -- despite how much we ask for it on “American Idol.” And lately our collective anxiety about it is seeping into the movies.

But the spying that’s bothering us in recent films seems to have more to do with the sort of ad hoc, vigilante monitoring we subject one another to than any kind of organized, institutional effort. What concerns them is not Big Brother but the ways in which we’ve internalized voyeurism, prurience, violence, schadenfreude and self-policing. The fear these new films are expressing is a fear of the spy we know, the person in the next room, at the desk beside us, in the same bed. The fear of the spies we are becoming. In Andrea Arnold’s Cannes Jury Prize-winning film, “Red Road,” for instance, Scottish actress Kate Dickie plays a Glasgow City Eye operator, whose job consists of monitoring the comings and goings of the people in a low-income neighborhood. One day, she spots a man to whom she has a mysterious link on one of her screens, and she begins to insinuate herself into his life without telling him how they are connected. The film opened April 13 in Los Angeles, the same week it was reported that surveillance cameras in 20 areas of Britain were being outfitted with loudspeakers to enable their real-life operators to publicly shame whatever thug or vandal they might happen to catch on camera.

A week after “Red Road” came “Disturbia,” a gadget-obsessed Hitchcock knockoff that our reviewer called “ ‘Rear Window’ as retrofitted by Circuit City,” and now there’s “Vacancy,” in which Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale check into a motel whose rooms are outfitted with hidden cameras, the better to produce home snuff with.

Meanwhile, “Alone With Her,” in which a pasty Colin Hanks plays a young stalker who bugs the apartment of his pretty neighbor to insinuate himself into her life, opened last month. And all of them follow on the heels of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s acclaimed “The Lives of Others,” which topped most critics’ lists last year, and Michael Haneke’s equally acclaimed “Cache,” which did the same the year before that.

CLEARLY, we have privacy on the brain. The last time the subject of surveillance was this ubiquitous in the movies, Watergate was a current event, and the prevailing mood was one of profound mistrust of authority coupled with paranoid self-doubt. Films like Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (which starred Gene Hackman as an expert in electronic surveillance who lives in fear of being bugged himself, even though there’s nothing to bug him about) and Brian de Palma’s “Blow Out” (in which John Travolta plays a movie sound engineer who accidentally records a Chappaquiddick-inspired political assassination and finds himself enmeshed in a major political conspiracy disguised as a sex-crimes spree) reflected a political moment characterized by clandestine operations and dirty tricks -- a moment, as it happens, that’s a lot like this one.

But the new surveillance films are more reflective of the tattletale present moment than of the political paranoia of three decades ago. In the last few weeks, video clips of director David O. Russell throwing an on-set tantrum at Lily Tomlin have been widely passed around and picked over. Not long ago, cellphone shots of Vince Vaughn enjoying a private rant at a restaurant in the Valley were posted on Gawker, where they were dutifully deconstructed. The reaction to Russell’s breakdown of civility seemed particularly disingenuous. This was no Russell Crowe-Naomi Campbell underling abuse incident, after all. It seemed more like a run-of-the-mill Hollywood power struggle.

Easy access to the means of production and distribution of media -- that is, camera phones and YouTube -- are leading to a glorious democratization of media, or so the thinking goes. So why does so much of what goes viral feel so repressive and hostile? One possibility is that the degree of monitoring we’ve gotten used to has colored our behavior. Our civil liberties may have weakened, but you’d hardly know that we cared by witnessing our enthusiastic embrace of electronic surveillance and public exposure as a national pastime, kind of like how a preadolescent playground bully might emulate an abusive parent.

OF the recent voyeur films, only “The Lives of Others,” which is set in 1985, in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, deals with government surveillance. It is also, surprisingly, the least creepy and the most hopeful of the bunch. The story concerns an East German Stasi colonel named Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), who gets assigned to bug the apartment of a prominent, party-loyalist playwright and his actress girlfriend and find something they can send the writer away for.

Wiesler soon becomes disillusioned with the party, realizing that the playwright is being monitored because a high-ranking party official would like to have the writer’s girlfriend for himself. At the same time, he is won over by the playwright and his friends’ moral principles and aesthetic ideals. Eventually, Wiesler decides to protect them at the expense of his career. The playwright, meanwhile, never suspects he’s being monitored, nor that his girlfriend eventually succumbs to pressure and rats him out, but all along he takes precautions nonetheless. He understands the country he lives in and harbors no illusions about the extent of his privacy or his rights.

That’s more than can be said for the characters in “Cache,” a middle-aged Parisian couple who begin receiving mysterious tapes in the mail letting them know that they are being watched. The husband is the host of a television show where writers and academics come to discuss books. His wife is an editor at a publishing company. Self-described bobos, they have seriously dirty consciences to go with their enlightened attitudes -- a fact that is not lost on their benignly neglected young son. Whoever is stalking them is doing so with the express purpose of getting them -- and possibly France in general -- to confront past sins.

What “Cache” recognizes is that guilt is usually present if you know where to look for it. In most people -- most well-off, well-educated, well-intended Western people, at least -- it’s a latent quality awaiting exposure, a seed to be coaxed into blooming. What’s being acted out in movies these days is not so much a fear of entrapment, though this is scary too, but a creeping fear of casual contact, or even intimacy, being held up for public dissection or worse. President Bush recently cited this as the main reason he doesn’t e-mail at all -- you never know what will land you in trouble. We’ve become accustomed to having our every move, customer service phone chat and financial transaction recorded for posterity -- that much is familiar and predictable. Much scarier is the constant threat of exposure and ridicule by an otherwise powerless peer who confuses vitriol with power, or an angry kid who’s got our number, or a special prosecutor.

carina.chocano@latimes.com