Digital dystopia: Surveillance, Autonomy and Social Justice in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

This essay proposes Gary Shteyngart's dystopian satire, Super Sad True Love Story, as an appropriate heuristic model for understanding surveillance and society in the twenty-first century. While George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four remains influential, many of his observations now seem anachronistic. Shteyngart, it is argued, offers a more appropriate vision for our world of decentralized digital "surveillant assemblages" that maintain a "control society" with little need for a Big Brother–like state. Unlike Orwell, who predicted the "proles" would be relatively free from surveillance, Shteyngart also emphasizes the disproportionate impact of surveillance on different sections of society. Finally, this essay turns to the thorny question of personal liberty and autonomy as a justification for the right to privacy and as a central theme within the dystopian genre. Many critics argue that dystopian literature is inherently reactionary because of its anti-utopianism and individualism. This essay, however, argues that the kind of autonomy that privacy activists and dystopian novelists most often wish to defend should be understood not as a self-sufficiency but as personhood that is socially embedded and politically engaged, and, crucially, a necessary but insufficient precondition for the resistance and refusal of digital mass surveillance

Quiet Americans : the CIA and early Cold War Hollywood cinema

This article examines the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Hollywood film industry from 1947 to 1959. Surprisingly, the CIA was almost entirely absent from American cinema screens during this period, and their public profile in other popular media, including television and the press, was virtually nonexistent. This conspicuous lacuna of publicity coincided with what some scholars have termed the “Golden Age” of US covert action – an era of increasing CIA intervention in Italy, Iran and Guatemala, to name only the most prominent examples. How was it that the CIA managed to maintain such a low public profile and in the process evade popular scrutiny and questions of accountability during such an active period of its history? Utilizing extensive archival research in film production files and the records of the CIA themselves, this article suggests that Hollywood filmmakers adhered to the CIA's policy of blanket secrecy for three interrelated reasons. First, it suggests that the predominance of the so-called “semidocumentary” approach to the cinematic representation of US intelligence agencies during this period encouraged filmmakers to seek government endorsement and liaison in order to establish the authenticity of their portrayals. Thus the CIA's refusal to cooperate with Hollywood during this period thwarted a number of attempts by filmmakers to bring an authentic semidocumentary vision of their activities to the silver screen. Second, up until the liberalization of American defamation law in the mid-1960s, Hollywood studio legal departments advised producers to avoid unendorsed representations of US government departments and officials through fear of legal reprisal. Finally, this article suggests that the film-industry censor – the Production Code Administration – was instrumental in reinforcing Hollywood's reliance upon government endorsement and cooperation. This latter point is exemplified by Joseph Mankiewicz's controversial adaptation of Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Overturning existing scholarship, which argues that CIA officer Edward Lansdale played a decisive role in transforming the screenplay of Greene's novel, this article suggests that Mankiewicz's alterations were made primarily to appease the Production Code Administration

Falling out with history : Hollywood and the Central Intelligence Agency, 1945 - 1975

This thesis examines the representation of the Central Intelligence Agency and its predecessor the Office of Strategic Services in Hollywood cinema from 1945-1975. It argues that the development of these cinematic representations over time has articulated a growing scepticism towards "official" narratives of the past that regard the state as the arbiter of historical authenticity. This scepticism towards state-sourced history is a consequence of increasing US government secrecy. In other words, secrecy fundamentally problematizes state-sourced approaches to historical representation, which rely on the state as an authoritative, trustworthy and relatively transparent producer of the documentary record. The epistemological problem of representing secret institutions is referred to here as the "paradox of secrecy" for historical representation. It is argued that Hollywood’s shift away from state-sourced representations of the CIA is a consequence of this paradox. This thesis is influenced by Hayden White's notion that a given form of historical representation is inherently ideological and even specifically political in its ramifications. In this sense, it is argued that the political content of the films examined here are very much a product of their approach to historical representation itself. This thesis identifies four dominant forms of the American spy film during this period. The first, which was dominant from roughly 1945 up until 1959, was the "semi-documentary". This form of spy thriller celebrated the centrality of the state as the arbiter of historical authenticity and relied upon extensive liaison between filmmakers and government. In chapter 1-3, this thesis traces the rise and fall of the semi-documentary and its ultimately frustrated attempts to represent the CIA. Chapter 4 examines the second dominant form of the spy thriller: the romantic fable. This form, epitomized by James Bond, represents an ironic "camp" reaction to state-sourced approaches to historical representation. Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s trilogy of Cold War spy films. It argues that Hitchcock moved away from the camp fable towards the third dominant form: realism. This form, epitomized by the novels of John Le Carré, began a move away from the playful irony of the camp spy fables and offered a far more skeptical and politicized critique of the state and Cold War espionage as Machiavellian in nature. This scepticism towards the state paved the way for the fourth dominant form of the spy film: the conspiracy thriller, which is examined in chapter 6. The 1970s conspiracy thriller represents the precise opposite of the semi-documentary in that it regards the state and state secrecy as the primary obstacle to historical veracity and authenticity. By asserting the possibility of recovering "historical truth" from the miasma of state secrecy, however, the conspiracy narrative moves away from the irony of 1960s spy cinema and articulates the possibility of the redemption of the past. This diachronic transformation of the American spy thriller from the semi-documentary to the conspiracy thriller traces the broader cultural process of growing distrust in government narratives

Filming treachery : British cinema and television's fascination with the Cambridge Five

The article examines the cultural importance of the ‘Cambridge spies’, the infamous traitors who betrayed British secrets to the Soviets over a period of several decades. In particular, it looks at the various ‘screen fictions’ which have drew inspiration from the well-known tale of treachery, and argues the centrality of the Cambridge spies as a Cold War narrative in British culture in the second part of the twentieth century. Aspects of the story has figured in such screen dramas as Traitor (1971), Philby, Burgess and Maclean (1977), Another Country (1984), and The Cambridge Spies (2003), while this article pays particular attention to the classic BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), and the screen versions of Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad (1983) and A Question of Attribution (1991). The article argues the transformative effect of the narrative of the Cambridge spies on the spy genre and its centrality to a wider critical reassessment of nationalism, state power, individual identity and citizenship in the context of imperial decline in the postwar period