“I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.”
One of Woody Allen’s silliest films, Sleeper (1973), delivers 87 minutes of comical genius through slapstick humour and politicized romance.
Sleeper is set 200 years in the future: America has evolved to a hedonistically ignorant society where independent thought is effectively removed and everyone is a different variation of the same person. Amidst the slapstick humour and bizarre plot twists lies a sly political commentary on the effects of government surveillance on society.
Surveillance is not only a useful tool to the rulers in Woody Allen’s fictional dystopia, but has a long history as a government tool in social control.
On Feb. 10, the world lost one of the 20th century’s most brilliant academics. Stuart Hall was an eloquent left-wing theorist, and one of the founding fathers of modern cultural studies. His work rejects visions of fixed regional cultures in favour of a fluid cultural identity, ever changing and moving towards new possibilities, but incessantly reminiscing about a past that cannot be changed.
This era advanced free markets through privatization and deregulation, laying the structural framework for the radically commodified cultural industries that exist today.
Hall recorded the role of police presence as a government tool of social management. His work visits the scene of marginalized communities of Great Britain during the neoliberal Thatcher era in the 1970s, which inspired his take on the social construction of culture.
This era advanced free markets through privatization and deregulation, laying the structural framework for the radically commodified cultural industries that exist today.
Hall saw cultural industries as a critical site of social interaction where power relations are both established and unsettled. The media reaps lucrative benefits from sensationalizing lurid aspects of current events, and manipulates these events for economic and political purposes — this creates moral panic, fabricating public support to “police the crisis.” Therein lies the social constructs of marginalized communities.
Maria Wallstam and Nathan Crompton of The Mainlander bring Hall’s ideas to life in a recent illustration of Vancouver’s downtown eastside. An area now trivially characterized by poverty and crime, the city of Vancouver continues to increase funding for police presence in the downtown eastside, despite recent reduction in crime. The city uses police surveillance as a means of social control over the low-income residents of the DTES, marginalizing them in the eyes of Vancouverites.
Commodified cultural industries lay the historical context for racial, ethnic, and class conflict. In Sleeper, Woody Allen parallels Hall’s ideas on surveillance as a tool for social control — but what makes Hall stand out from Allen and other cultural theorists is that Hall was an optimist. He believed we will always carry a part of the past, but through our independent thought we have the opportunity to change the future.
Stuart Hall once wrote: “The way to go back is to go forward. That is going to take a lot of hard thought, not just sentimentality.”
