Surveillance Nation: From REAR WINDOW To DISTURBIA
Think you're being watched?
From DISTURBIA, the teen-noir remake of Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW, to RED ROAD, Andrea Arnold's international festival hit about a CCTV-obsessed Scotswoman, to this weekend's paranoid thriller CIVIC DUTY, with Peter Krause as an Arab-bashing Yank, movie characters are peering through their Venetian blinds into the lives of others. And seeing enemies everywhere.
Peter Keough of the Boston Phoenix notices that these post 9/11 surveillance films, unlike the McCarthy-era REAR WINDOW, arrive at a time when "we've grown used to the idea that not only should we suspect everyone of evildoing, but that we should also welcome the intrusion of government surveillance into our private lives."
Though Keough mentions only these three films now in theaters, he might have added one of the week's top rental DVD's: the action thrillers like DEJA VU, which had hero Denzel Washington -- and the government -- seeing everywhere, even into the past.