The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

Andrea Arnold's Red Road and Adam Rifkin's Look

In the 2006 film Red Road, written and directed by Andrea Arnold, a uniformed woman in Glasgow watches a bank of video screens, scanning streets for trouble. “This is Jackie Morrison from City Eye,” she says at one point when she calls police to report—and if City Eye sounds like something out of Batman, by this time the viewer has absorbed enough tension from Kate Dickie’s Jackie to appreciate the lift, the sense of doing right, that the name might give her, the way it might ennoble, even glamorize a hard, tiring, low-paying, and maybe mostly boring job.

We’ve watched as she watches what the surveillance cameras placed all over the city show her; we wonder how she decides which screens to look at, what to zoom in on. We’ve relaxed as, over several nights, she follows the perambulations of a man walking his old, sick bulldog, a man and a dog she encounters on the street when she leaves work. We’ve tensed up at the realization that by taking pleasure from her work, letting the images before her take her away from it, she might be missing something she shouldn’t, that her sympathetic voyeurism might be leaving someone in jeopardy. We see nothing she doesn’t; there’s a whole world in front of her that neither she nor we can catch. Life is faster than the eye. Every crime stopped is another missed.

---

---

The same feeling of worry about what the surveillance cameras might be missing takes over the 2008 film Look, written and directed by Adam Rifkin. Unlike Red Road, it’s a comedy, until in its last twenty minutes disaster multiplies and the movie begins to play rough with both its viewers and its characters. Here there’s no single person trying to keep up with cameras placed throughout Los Angeles, on streets, in convenience stores, elevators, workplaces, department-store floors and dressing rooms, high-school corridors, police interrogation rooms, ATM booths, hotel lobbies, storerooms, parking lots—and most logically and shockingly on the dash of a police cruiser, recording what the officer would have seen if he had stayed in the vehicle instead of pulling over a car with a broken taillight and getting shot to death. Here everything we see is orchestrated by an all-seeing, all-knowing eye, able to assemble thousands or millions of hours generated by the surveillance cameras of a single large American city in the course of a few days—i.e., the director, whose conceit this is, who has thought up the various plot lines and imagined surveillance cameras following each one as it intersects with the others.

But even as we relax, again, here into the emerging contours of a half-dozen stories merging into one, we realize that there is no such eye, that all these things could be happening—two teenage girls trying on clothes leading to a teacher’s conviction for statutory rape, a woman putting her card in an ATM and ending up dead in the trunk of a car as each day the lot where the car was abandoned empties and fills, a Nanny-cam catching nothing untoward, and a food-court camera picking up the kidnapping of a child by a man who almost certainly tortures and kills her—and while all of them would be recorded, none might ever be seen.

Red Road offers no pious disclaimers about the loss of privacy in the modern world. It’s a quiet, slow, measured thriller in which surveillance cameras are a field of drama. Look opens with a warning that there are thirty million surveillance cameras in the United States, capturing four billion hours of footage every week, and that the average American is captured on tape two hundred times a day. With those announcements, the film allows the viewer to catch up with the likelihood that, against the omniscient narrative eye of the movie, most of the hours of tape are logged, packaged, stored, erased, recycled, and never watched by anyone, and so the movie takes the footage we might imagine tracking the secret routes of ordinary lives as a field for storytelling.

The viewer is surprised when the attorney we’ve met setting up the Nanny-cam in his house is seen again in a courthouse; we didn’t know we were going to be following people from one point to another. After the lawyer sits down with another man who appears to be a colleague or a friend, we might be surprised again to see them get in an elevator and embrace. But we’re not going to be prepared to enter his life as catastrophically as we do, or to see him enter those of others we are meeting as fully as he does. The viewer may forget the unlikelihood of every relevant encounter or conversation in a person’s life outside a private room being recorded on tape (assuming the owner hasn’t installed a camera in it), but the viewer is more likely reminded, with every turn of the screw, of the way that the human capacity to record images has altogether outstripped the human ability to read them.

While in Red Road the action, once Jackie Morrison’s eye is established, will involve her chance spotting of a man who wrecked her life, in a way that in the film emerges only very slowly—and then her following him on her screens, and finally her stalking and entrapping him on her own, on foot, outside, where her own screens would allow whoever takes her day shift to watch her, and inside the tower block where the man lives, where there are no cameras and it’s one person’s word against another’s—it is Look that is absolutely voyeuristic.

In Red Road, when Jackie is following her target through his neighborhood, which seems to be made up entirely of broken concrete, mud, weeds, foxes, and obscene graffiti, Arnold’s director’s eye follows her from behind, shooting with a hand-held camera, and the sense that the woman has become a character in the play she watches every night before her video screens is distantly present. But otherwise the momentum of the drama is toward what cameras can’t capture, toward acts that one must commit in order to make something happen, away from the transposition of the real event—a girl being stabbed on the street by classmates and left to die—onto a video screen on the other side of the city, where it might be seen and might not be. The most visually deep moment in the entire movie comes when Jackie, at her machine—shot as she is throughout the film in extreme close-up, where we might see only a small part of her face—is following a man on the screen, who she thinks might be about to commit a rape. He chases a woman through a lot to a wall, but it’s just a game; Morrison sees them having sex standing up. She’d already called in an alarm; now, realizing it’s a harmless event, she calls it off. She’s embarrassed by her own prurience. But just as she’s about to switch to another screen, the man turns his head. She recognizes him, the man she will now try to destroy—and in an internal transition within a single shot, a transition so stark and quick it seems like a cut from one frame to another, her eye pops open—like, in Wim Wenders’s words for movie moments that stick in the mind forever, “other things you’ve never seen in your whole life.” The most striking, shocking shot in the film takes place as a person is watching surveillance-camera footage, in real time, but not on that footage, and not in its time; rather, in the character’s time. Arnold frees her character from the movie’s device, and the movie can follow her on her own terms.

---

---

In Look there are repeated sequences of a floor manager inveigling nearly every saleswoman or female clerk in his department to have sex with him. We see episode after episode, a minute of footage here, ten seconds there, three minutes here, to the point that, as if the cameras have exhausted the available women, we see him masturbating at his desk. Those sequences bleed into the rest of the movie. Soon any encounter or transaction between its characters—a convenience-store manager, his noisy pal, and his girlfriend; the two girls from the department store and the teacher they meet with his wife outside the dressing room; the lawyer and his wife; his wife and their daughter; the office nerd who finds urine in his Coke can and sour cream in his drawer and the woman he tries to chat up in the break room; a guy in a coat and tie driving a car and the goony man next to him in the front seat—is vaguely pornographic in and of itself.

It’s the pornography of voyeurism as such—we are seeing what we have no business seeing, or we are seeing crimes being committed that no intelligence in the movie recognizes, and unlike Jackie Morrison across the cinematic street in Red Road, there’s nobody we can call. Just as she can insert herself into the action of what she sees, we can’t. When the teacher is caught on numerous cameras having sex in his car with a student; when the student claims rape in a performance so convincing that, even though you’ve already seen her call her best friend as soon the teacher drives off to announce “I just fucked Mr. Krebbs!” you can half believe her; when her lies are thrown back at her by the tapes and the teacher’s at him—when these things happen, there is resolution, satisfaction, there are happy endings: Someone was watching! Someone knew where to look! The whole surveillance-camera state isn’t just a memory hole! Someone got caught! But the queasy feeling remains, even if you can’t tell if it’s the camera that makes everyone look dirty, or if the people themselves have corrupted the camera.

Someday, if it has not happened already, there will be an exhibition of surveillance-camera footage in a distinguished space—the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, say, or in a Whitney Biennial, at the Paula Cooper Gallery—by someone who has learned the right lessons from Christian Marclay. People will discuss whether or not it’s art—and it will be, according to the argument that while the artist whose name is on the project did not produce the footage being exhibited, did not install the cameras and generate the footage (unless he or she did), he or she selected what to show, unless he or she didn’t, but simply ran whatever hundreds or thousands of hours to which the artist was given access consecutively over the course of a week or for that matter six months, which would be just as much an art statement, if not more of one, as any purposeful selection.

Whether or not surveillance-camera footage—presented as part of an austere, unnerving real-life drama, as in Red Road, or as an ugly comedy that the system of surveillance cameras in fact could never apprehend—is art is a trivial question. What is actually interesting is how, in both Red Road and Look, on the screen as you watch, there is a dissolution of any boundaries between art and everyday life.

Everyday life is what the surveillance camera is installed to record. As it is watched, by a professional like Jackie Morrison or by ourselves, in snippets selected for us by a director who has staged incidents to appear as they would had actual surveillance cameras recorded them, it may be boring—everyday life, in the main, consists of repeated, polite, distancing gestures, phrases, encounters, transactions, in other words an enactment of a certain separation from the world and from one’s own possible emotional involvement with it. But the footage, especially in the grainier, less immediately audible form in which it appears in Red Road, has a distinct and irreducible allure. It’s not the allure of the forbidden, or even the promise of seeing what we shouldn’t. It’s the allure of the realization, as you watch, that the most commonplace activities, even those performed almost without consciousness, can lead anywhere. It’s the realization that somewhere, countless of those activities have been recorded on tapes that will never be watched, that an art form, a new form of representation, has come into being that no one will ever see, and, for a moment, you are there.

—Aperture, Spring 2011

---

---