![]() ![]() Underappreciated within the New Orleans film scene is a subgenre I call Marigny Surveillance Theater, a species of short film that combines low budget and high dudgeon. The panopticon would be extremely efficient: few actual guards were needed in the tower, since those surveilled would internalize the fear of being observed and regulate themselves.īut why hire any guards at all? Why pay humans? In an era which has seen cashiers replaced by check-out computers, editors replaced by aggregation software and traffic cops replaced by red-light cameras, the watchtower of the panopticon has been replaced by the lidless, sleepless eye of the surveillance camera. This uncertainty would, Bentham believed, lead you to behave at all times as if you were being watched by guards. As an inmate of the panopticon, you’d have no way of knowing when or if the guards in the watchtower were observing you. ![]() While the cells would be lit day and night, the watchtower would be screened or opaque. The panopticon, a concept usually associated with the French thinker Foucault, was invented by a utilitarian named Jeremy Bentham in the late 1800s as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” In a nutshell, Bentham proposed a prison-or a factory, or a hospital, or a school-be built as a hollow circle, stacked rings of cells all facing inwards towards a central watchtower. Those who seek social control have relied on this for centuries. When we know or think we’re being watched, we behave differently. If, as a prominent post-K hagiographer has said, New Orleans is a city of moments, what happens when an apparatus of documentation sprouts around those moments? Video-recorded, the idealized, ephemeral moment becomes something permanent and concrete, a visual commodity that can be bought, sold, passed around, duplicated and used as evidence by anyone with access to it. ‘No phones! Give me that! No phones!’ The whole time we were getting it on, he had a full-time job just trying to guard us from being taped.” ![]() “I just remember hearing him barking ‘No phones!’ over and over again at people. She recalled how the party’s host, although thrilled at the happening, couldn’t join in the fun he was kept busy making sure other party-goers weren’t trying to surreptitiously record it with their phones. Rather than all being participants in a shared experience, we become either the person recording or the person being recorded.Ī friend participated in a spontaneous orgy at a party last year. Whether handheld or mounted, the camera creates a binary between viewer and viewed where none previously existed. What makes so many things fun-dance parties, street parades-is participation, the way we come together and create fun together. Spectator is a limiting role: where there is a spectator, there must be a performer. Once that morsel of sexual nutrition was gone, the crowd would ripple back into a lumpy carpet and mill aimlessly again, their slack, sweating faces uncertain, here and there listlessly waving their cameras above-head like antennae, waiting to be provided another thrill. ![]() They were waiting, waiting-they’d come here, they’d gotten drunk where was their fun? Suddenly, bellows and shouts would erupt, even louder than the ambient tumult, and a swath of the crowd would swivel into concentricity, ranks of phones and high-end cameras centered on some tiny scrap of exposed, be-nippled skin.įrom above, it was like watching a sea anemone pucker closed around a fish. It’s no business of mine how others choose to pass their Mardi Gras, but the crowd below didn’t look happy. Several years ago I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon of Mardi Gras on a Bourbon Street balcony. ![]()
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