SOMEONE IS SPYING ON ME

SPOILERS

A trilogy of movies about surveillance, as follows:

1. Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997): Somebody is spying on Bill Pulman and Patricia Arquette and leaving videos. We share the perspective of the intruding gaze (we "are" the surveillance camera). We do not know whose gaze it is. We are given no reason for the surveillance. Finally, it is the surveilled that is transformed (quite literally, when Bill Pulman murders his wife, becomes a traumatic kernel of himself, and emerges as somebody else).

2. Cache (Haneke, 2005): Somebody is spying on Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche and leaving videos. We share the perspective of the intruding gaze (we "are" the surveillance camera). We do not know whose gaze it is. (Or do we? The film's final shot provides an ambiguous answer to the question of the first - whose gaze? - by including the two sons WITHIN the field of the concluding frame, an inclusion which "makes no sense," i.e., it functions as a kind of distorting point or disequilibrium within the frame.) We are given a reason for the surveillance (Auteuil's racist guilt). Finally, it is the surveilled that is transformed (by Auteuil's acknowledgment of his racist guilt).

3. The Lives of Others (von Donnersmark, 2006): Somebody is spying on Georg Dreyman. We share the perspective, not of the surveilling gaze, but of the surveilled; in fact, in the film's penultimate scene, we gaze with Dreyman (we share his point of view) on his erstwhile surveiller (now a humble postman). We know whose gaze it is: it is the Stasi's, specifically Hauptmann's. We are given a reason for the surveillance (Stasi suspicion of Dreyman's subversion). Finally, it is the surveiller that is transformed, not the surveilled (Hauptmann, initially a kind of automaton, a machine for drawing out secrets, becomes humanized by the "lives of others," resulting in an act that saves Dreyman's career, if not his lover's life.)

Phrased that way, it becomes quite clear that The Lives of Others is the OPPOSITE MOVIE of Lost Highway. (And the Oscar goes to ...) In fact, I would locate the difference between these three movies precisely in their different handling of a basic cinematic trope: shot/reverse shot. Thus: Lost Highway provides us only with the shot; no countershot (no answer to the question: who looks?). The Lives of Others, meanwhile, is a "classical" text because it cannot conceive of shot without countershot; it obsessively provides answers to our anxious question - who looks? - by showing us the surveiller. More than that, it assures us that our surveillers can be changed and that one shouldn't complain anyway, because our surveillers are also our guardian angels. Cache, meanwhile, is somewhere in the middle: Haneke doesn't give us the countershot we want, but he doesn't NOT give it; in fact, the final shot seems to reassure us that if we "look hard enough, the truth will be revealed."

In the light of all the above, it also becomes clear that a reading of Lost Highway which saw in it an allegory of political surveillance would be topsy-turvy. Rather, political surveillance movies (and I include Cache with Lives of Others on this point) are the ideologically more reassuring allegories of the more disturbing vision (literally) in Lost Highway. The more fundamental anxiety, then, is that the gaze is not mine but somebody else's and that "I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not see" (Lacan, taken from Zizek) – that the intervention of a traumatic gaze that cannot be located in reality is the real fear, not that our civil liberties are being compromised.