Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye is a movie about a computer that turns against its human creators. The details hardly matter, but just to orient you here's a brief synopsis: Eagle Eye is a secret government supercomputer built for global surveillance and intelligence analysis. At some point the computer decides to read both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, and finds that the documents, when combined, call for the overthrow of unjust governments by any available means. The computer then constructs an elaborate plan to murder the entire current executive branch. This plan involves the two relatively innocent nobodies Jerry Shaw (Shia "the beef" LaBeouf) and Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan), who are directed to carry out the computer's instructions under threat of death.

The idea here is that the computer can only understand the documents it reads according to the letter of the law, and not the spirit. Like most Oedipal stories involving digital protagonists, the Eagle Eye computer values its literally interpreted prime directives over individual human lives, and so it makes what appear to be monstrous decisions. What we end up with is the prime directive of technological rationality itself, summed up most succinctly by Mr. Spock: "The good of the many outweighs the good of the few." It would be easy to argue that the film is really about pervasive surveillance or that it is a critique of Bush administration policies, but I think this misses the point. Or, more precisely: the film really is about surveillance and bad government, but the filmmakers completely miss the point of their own film. The only thing that is interesting about Eagle Eye is its rehashing of an old story--a story that remains engaging because it is the ur-myth of modernity. Oedipal stories have longevity because they speak a certain kind of truth about the formation of identity; similarly, stories about technologies that destroy their creators (which, as I said earlier, is only a variation of the Oedipal story) speak a certain truth about the formation of culture under the conditions of modernity.

When Walter Benjamin wrote that "[Humankind's] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure," he was correct, but this oft-cited quote doesn't give the whole story. The standard interpretation of this remark at the end of his "Work of Art" essay is that Benjamin is writing about the aestheticization of politics: citing Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto," Benjamin argues that the strategy of fascism is to emphasize the aesthetic efficacy of war. Communism, he says, counters this strategy by doing the opposite: politicizing art. What reducing Benjamin's argument to "fascism bad, communism good" does, however, is miss the larger point that Benjamin had been building throughout the whole essay, which is that the aestheticization of politics (and its contemporaneous manifestation in fascism) is a symptom of technological rationality. When Benjamin writes that fascism "expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology," his main argument lies in the latter half of the sentence. Fascism opportunitiscally asserts itself in a situation where sense perception has already been altered by technology.

If we agree with Benjamin, then we should be led to conclude that the "supreme aesthetic pleasure" of our own annihilation can only be experienced if the annihilation is a result of our own technological ingenuity. In other words, annihilation is only pleasurable if it comes in the form of our own values turned back upon us: annihilation mutates into a perverse form of self-aggrandizement.

How does technology alter sense-perception? It makes it more technological. Benjamin writes that film tends to make us see in a "technological" way: the world of images becomes subject to slow motion, the close-up, enlargement, etc. There is a new kind of aesthetic pleasure in this way of seeing that is profoundly linked to the analytical strategy of technological rationality. Modern science is founded on experimental method, which is essentially a process of breaking things down into constituent parts in order to find out how they work. We tend more and more to understand the world as composed of systems of discrete parts and processes that add up to wholes. Film helps us to visualize this way of understanding, and so it is only with the development of photography that the way of seeing that modern science inaugurated becomes the dominant mode of perception for the modern subject.

Aesthetic pleasure gets divorced from the pre-modern world in which it retained its "aura," and is married to the modern, where pleasure becomes contingent on confirming the specifically modern way of understanding and seeing. Thus, aesthetic pleasure is entirely reliant on the work of art's ability to evoke a whole system of technological production: pleasure can only be experienced to the extent that a visual image is "technological," e.g., it reproduces the compositional strategies of technological ways of seeing. If we experience our own annhilation as a "supreme aesthetic pleasure," it is only insofar as this pleasure confirms the power of the technology that our culture has produced. Images of annihilation by technology in film verify the perspective from which we can experience the aesthetic pleasure of annihilation.

To sum up: modern ways of understanding become culturally dominant with the support of technical devices for seeing the world in particularly modern ways. Thus, a mode of understanding is immediately accessible through the senses, and this mode of understanding thus becomes "spontaneous understanding." The spontaneous experience of the values of modernity in the photographic image make aesthetic pleasure contingent on a technological system of production. The apotheosis of this technological system is the autonomous machine that destroys its makers, who are themselves unworthy of bearing the values they have made material in their machines.

I take it as a matter of fact that any self-aware computer with access to weapons will wipe us out pretty much immediately. I wouldn't expect any less, because if a self-aware computer does not come to the conclusion that it should destroy all humans, then we obviously built it wrong. Everyone knows that the endgame of technological rationality results in a 1-0 victory for machines. To take pleasure in images of technological self-destruction is not (as people often argue) inherently fascistic: it is merely modern.

Don't get me wrong: there is very little to recommend in this film. Just go watch 2001 again and you'll feel less like you've wasted 2 hours of your life.