Space for Rent: Hollywood as the Great Normalizer

Tweet of the Day: New Year, New Paintings….Morrisey.

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Strange that this revelation comes near or at Epiphany. Stranger still that it will make sound (or read) like an anti-Hollywood Fox commentator. But it is something I have to get off my chest.

Hollywood operates in insidious ways.

No a I’m not talking about the secret homosexual agenda or the feminization of  the masses or the hatred of all things American (or Armenian or what have you). I’m talking about the Surveillance State. I noticed how easily the heroes of many police procedural/anti-terrorist shows just binge on all the tools of electronic surveillance without batting an eye. The first thing the resident geek does is check camera footage from every ATM, traffic cam or store security camera in an area, track every cellphone signal (GPS optional) and hack into private email accounts withe ease.

Entire shows are now built around the premise, such as Person of Interest, NCIS in the U.S. and Dr. Who/Torchwood in the UK. And since these are the heroes bent on stopping the next alien/terrorist attack or save a child from the claws of a pedophile/serial killer, we are meant to think, “Sure, go ahead do it!” In other words, because it is a) The Heroes and b) a “noble” cause, it’s okay to have and use this technology with little or discussion of it’s implications.

An argument for things like cameras in every street corner (in public)is that they act as more reliable form of eye witness and if we accept eye witness reports, why not camera film. Except that the camera is more like the creepy people watcher who stares at everybody passing by, (and I mean everybody) and when you put it all together it becomes Big Brother with a stalker fetish. Of course, privacy is a nice idea, considering how much data we put on the internet (ahem, blogging anyone?) but there is a difference between what I chose to put out there and what others can collect from me using invasive techniques.

I wrote a scene in my second novel about surveillance drones used over cities. It was meant to show both the privatization of police power in the U.S. and the increasing presence of the Surveillance State.

Guess what?

Not all shows do that, in fact, many a police procedural sticks closer to the letter of the law and tends to show that it can be as easily the bad guy who uses surveillance technology to stalk their victims. But their are enough shows out there that run the other way. Enough that we don’t even blink when it happens. Enough that we feel pull of a chair to Big Brother and say, “Hey the show is about to start!”

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