PLANK DECEMBER 19, 2012
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There was a moment late in this season of “Homeland,” when Carrie Mathison's CIA colleagues were trying to track down the terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir. The analysts were looking at security camera footage of Nazir in a gas station, his SUV visible through the station's front window. With a few clicks of the mouse and keyboard, grey lines started to streak across the screen as the monitor zoomed in on the car's license plate. In a few seconds, the plate sharpened from a pixelated blur into a high-def, perfectly legible close up.
On a show that (at least until this season’s last few episodes) took pains to appear realistic, the images on that computer screen—the crazy zoom, the strangely elegant moving lines, the sudden sharpness of the image—were hilariously, irritatingly implausible. As anybody who's dealt with grainy footage, or, for that matter, used a computer, knows, this sequence of extreme sharpening is impossible: At a certain point, a blurry image is just a blurry image. Even if you could zoom in to such a dramatic degree, the process would involve staring at a clunky interface with lots of buttons and tools, and it would doubtless be long and entail a lot of spinning icons and the word "rendering."
This moment exemplifies a disorder that afflicts almost every single TV show or movie ever made about spies. From Mission Impossible to Enemy of the State to the Bourne movies, whenever analysts use computers, their screens are almost always filled with flashing dots, animated maps and 3D models. Unless Hollywood has access to secret, elaborately designed spy technologies that the rest of us can’t see (I'm looking at you Kathryn Bigelow), I think we can be fairly certain that these flourishes don’t exist in real life. But more worryingly, they also convey a troubling message about espionage itself.
Hollywood has always loved making things flashier than they are in real life. Hackers and Tron, for example, are about as accurate in their depiction of computing as Kung Fu Panda is in its depiction of pandas. But over the last several decades, with the rise of CGI and the shrinking of our collective attention spans, the level of flashiness and jumpiness on-screen has reached new heights. As Vivian Sobchack, a professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, puts it, it's a symptom of "the increasingly kinetic thrust of spectacle" in Hollywood movies.
That's how you get scenes like the ones in Mission Impossible III, where characters are introduced with shots of a flashy screen filled with animated bars and moving headshot photos, or the many scenes in Bourne where evildoers stare at fancy digital maps in secretive operations rooms. Or the sequence in the most recent Bond movie, Skyfall, where Q, played by Ben Wishaw, tries to prevent a hack attempt on MI6's computer system. Rounded shapes, numbers and letters flit across the screen, before transforming into a 3-dimensional shape that looks like a chromosome and changes color for no discernible reason.
This same tendency to overdramatize technology exists, albeit in a much more subdued way, throughout “Homeland,” especially in shots of the operations rooms during the first season, where the on-screen information was often presented using highly designed, animated, integrated interfaces. The second season has been more subtle, but still contains some conspicuously exaggerated uses of technology. Characters use suspiciously elegant facial recognition software; look at beautifully designed screens superimposing a suspect's headshot with a flashing location; and use a Matrix-like interface to stop the vice-president's pacemaker. In one of the season's later episodes, Brody video conferences with Abu Nazir using Skype on his Blackberry, a feature that, at the moment at least, does not exist on Blackberry phones. This latter complaint may seem petty, but it also points to the fact that, in many cases, movies have extensive product placement deals with technology manufacturers, and exaggerating their capabilities helps to sell smartphones and laptops.
Of course, in real life, technology is rarely exciting. For the most part, we use computers by ourselves, hunched over kitchen tables or our office desk. Things break, and take too long, and our screen freezes when all we're just trying to do is watch the trailer for The Hobbit. Over the past decade, our familiarity with technology has increased dramatically, to the point that computer interfaces are one of our primary ways of interacting with the world and each other. That's why these misrepresentations are especially jarring: They misrepresent something that is fundamental to our everyday lives. Imagine if every time someone drove a car in a movie it was a Ferrari that spewed flames and put on a laser light show.
More seriously, this depiction of spy technology as unrecognizably sophisticated and beautiful feeds the notion that government agencies are mystical and magical entities. This may scare off the potential terrorists, but it also makes it harder to see intelligence work as something that exists in the real world, with all of the drawbacks and moral ambiguities that come with it. In real life, satellites can't be automatically programmed to follow a specific person, cell phones can't be tapped at the click of a button, and people's computer interfaces look hideous and lame. Sometimes technology fails, and tedious on-the-ground research is required to find out what's actually going on.
"It's the same thing that happened with CSI and forensics," Rick "Ozzie" Nelson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former counter-terrorism official, tells me. "When the government can't find a bad guy or doesn't know when something bad is coming, people think the government let them down because they believe it has access to technology that doesn't exist." It also, conversely, encourages people to think of the government as Big Brother—see, for example, Enemy of the State, in which a government agency chases down Will Smith.
Even if you disregard the flashiness, many of the screens shown on TV shows and movies exaggerate the level of integration among different government databases, Nelson explains. On TV shows, including "Homeland," analysts will often pull up a screen showing facial recognition, fingerprinting, criminal histories and surveillance videos of suspects all from one central interface. "That level of integration is not possible on an operations floor," says Nelson. All of that information, he points out, would come from a variety of databases, and require separate, often laborious analysis.
As technology continues to become ever more tightly enmeshed in our lives, it's possible that we'll start demanding more accurate depictions of it in the movies. Or, perhaps, fictional technology will only continue to become more outlandish, as we come to expect more and more and more. As Sobchack puts it, at this point, "new technologies aren't even novel anymore"—they get old before they've even hit the stores. But for Carrie Mathison and other on-screen spies, technology can already do everything they would ever want, and, like the fictional spies themselves, look extraordinarily, unrealistically attractive while it does it.
21 comments
Tell me what Hollywood does get right and I'll tell why it doesn't get technology right.
- arnon1
December 19, 2012 at 1:15am
Thanks, this article was an eye-opener.
- kras
December 19, 2012 at 8:25am
The answer to the question, "Why can't Hollywood . . . ?" is that it's telling a story, telling a story in a limited amount of time. When my wife & I are watching television and one yelps. "Wait a minute, that's impossible," the other rejoins, "It's a movie." Even fact-based films, e.g., Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, are fictionalized for dramatic, which is to say, story telling, purposes. The runway chase scene at the end of Argo? Never happened. Why did they do it? Dunno. I suppose it was a dramatic way to wrap up the movie. And by the way -- spoiler alert -- Ben Affleck was not actually the CIA agent hero of the tale. He's an actor. Dan
- dbuck1
December 19, 2012 at 9:25am
What Dan said. It's FICTION. They're telling a STORY. Facts are routinely checked at the door. The real question is why would anyone imagine it would be otherwise?
- IowaBeauty
December 19, 2012 at 9:32am
Does Kathryn Bigelow have an obligation to her viewers to create a film that doesn't distort reality if she claims it is "based on first-hand accounts of actual events." Jane Mayer states: "Perhaps it’s unfair to expect the entertainment industry to convey history accurately." What about the makers of propaganda films in 1930s Germany? And what distinguishes Ms. Bigelow from them?
- rayward
December 19, 2012 at 10:11am
You mean Jack Bauer did not really save LA from nuclear annihilation, within 24 hours, by torturing suspects? I - and, I gather, Antonin Scalia - am aghast. Shocked, even. And in Skyfall, Q's twirling code was all made up, eh ... that probably explains why I had difficulty finding an invisible Bmer and an Aston Martin that shoots missiles. Or, why stop at tech? Why not add to Law and Order's "The characters depicted are fictional" something along the lines that "more than half of all special-victims complaints are not solved; and close to 95% of all criminal charges result in a plea-bargain. The very idea of a dramatic break-down on the witness stand is risible, as is the notion that expensive lawyers routinely hand-deliver motions to the District Attorney while making smart-ass quips as they leave the office." ... The question is, is this post another demonstration of the dumbing down of American movie discourse?
- icarus-r
December 19, 2012 at 1:09pm
Yeah but thankfully there are shows that stick to technological realism when it comes to intelligence work, like Rubicon, which I'm going to watch just as soon as they uncancel it due to nobody wanting to watch it.
- Tristan
December 19, 2012 at 2:52pm
The Wire seemed to treat the technical challenges of police surveillance accurately.
- AaronW
December 19, 2012 at 3:15pm
I think the Argo thing with the airport runway chase can't simply be justified under the "it's a MOVIE!" rule. A movie is a complex narrative construct and it depends on plausibility in order to work Different audiences will react different ways but for me that final scene was nonsensical (NOT just because it never happened in reality) and therefore made me feel that the movie was underrating my intelligence, something that it had not done previously. A work of fiction doesn't not have to offer documentary truth but it does have to offer plausibility in terms of the inner assumptions it sets up for its audience.
- ironyroad
December 19, 2012 at 3:53pm
icarus -- Have you also noticed how *small* those hand-delivered motions always are? "The jury will never see it -- here's our motion to suppress." After that line, we see a tiny tri-folded document with a blue back. I can believe that they don't spend a lot of time writing big, fancy briefs in that office, but I would think a major motion would have to be more than a couple of pages. Also, I enjoy how big motions are not argued on the record in court, but rather in the hall while the judge, wearing a world-weary expression, goes to get coffee and a crumpet or something.
- JakeH
December 19, 2012 at 4:44pm
"I enjoy how big motions are not argued on the record in court, but rather in the hall while the judge, wearing a world-weary expression, goes to get coffee and a crumpet or something." Oh, I just assumed New York courts are different. I mean, there was the time a judge granted a motion over a urinal. He was standing over a urinal, not the motion. The motion was not over a urinal, but about suppression of evidence. But yeah. Last time we had a motion to intervene and it require three binders of authorities. I guess we're less efficient here in Colder Canadia.
- icarus-r
December 19, 2012 at 5:02pm
Ironyroad, I understand your angst -- and I have to admit that I was chagrined, peeved, etc., when I later learned that the runway chase never happened -- but it wasn't implausible, not that a director would be put off by implausible. We were given notice. The language used was "based on actual events," something along those lines, which tells the alert moviegoer that not everything about to be shown is literally true. This is nothing compared to the grousing that erupted on Western history sites in the wake of The Assassination of Jesse James, a fine movie by the way. The western Canada landscape didn't look like Missouri; one of the Jesse's cousins was not actually involved in a minor incident depicted; etc. I had to stage an intervention -- it's a movie, guys. And Brad Pitt is not actually Jesse James. Dan
- dbuck1
December 19, 2012 at 5:14pm
They did have plea bargains though. My entire Steven Hill (as Adam Schiff) impersonation consists of the phrase, uttered with aforementioned world-weariness, "Take a plea."
- JakeH
December 19, 2012 at 5:48pm
dbuck, I take your general point, but the thing is that a large commercial jet is taking off at a speed of about 170 mph, so that jeep with a max of say 90 mph in which the revolutionary guard types are traveling could not in any universe be keeping up with the Swissair 747. Also, there are other ways to keep a plane on the ground e.g. the tower doesn't give clearance to take off, and (as another poster JakeH noted here a few weeks ago) there were many options for constructing a more subtle drama at the end. This scene was just plain silly. So while almost everything else in the movie was plausible, the runway chase crossed the line into implausible going on impossible.
- ironyroad
December 19, 2012 at 6:01pm
dbuck, I take your general point, but the thing is that a large commercial jet is taking off at a speed of about 170 mph, so that jeep with a max of say 90 mph in which the revolutionary guard types are traveling could not in any universe be keeping up with the Swissair 747. Also, there are other ways to keep a plane on the ground e.g. the tower doesn't give clearance to take off, and (as JakeH noted here a few weeks ago) there were many options for constructing a more subtle drama at the end. This scene was just plain silly. So while almost everything else in the movie was plausible, the runway chase crossed the line into implausible going on impossible.
- ironyroad
December 19, 2012 at 6:02pm
Sorry for the double -- but I realized that JakeH actually posted above me, so I corrected that bit.
- ironyroad
December 19, 2012 at 6:03pm
I do wish that filmmakers and TV producers would make more of an effort. A realistic setting in which people dress and talk as people do makes the intrigue or suspense or whatever more potent, because one feels that it's happening in a world we recognize rather than in some comic-book fantasy land where silencers make guns go "pew, pew," female cops wear hair extensions, and people say things like "zoom and enhance!" One of the greatest suspense films of all time is All the President's Men, which was so creepily engaging because it felt so real, never mind that we knew the outcome. I wish movies and TV shows would do things that way more often. Instead, we get fantasy-land on the one hand, or tedious arthouse fare on the other, like those Romanian "New Wave" pictures that require that we watch, ad nauseum, I don't know, some guy walking down the hall, or up the street, or the sun rise or the paint dry. You don't have to be *that* real. But I would definitely appreciate greater authenticity across the board, whatever the plot or premise.
- JakeH
December 19, 2012 at 6:09pm
Hey irony, re Argo, here's one of my posts from that thread [plus added comments in brackets] that summarizes how I would have fixed that movie: p.s., a spoilerish suggestion for fixing some of the plot issues with the movie, including the climax: 1. Let's hear about that intelligence that says that they may not check the slips of paper, and then do it just as it actually happened. [Apparently, in real life, they frequently didn't bother to check the slips of paper at the airport, the good guys knew that, and, sure enough, the slips weren't checked when our people went through. In the movie, though, they *do* check the slips and inexplicably let them through anyway, and there had been no satisfactory explanation of how they hoped to get passed what seemed like a huge, gaping hole in the plan.] 2. Let's see someone in authority in Iran do something to verify that the movie is happening, so that the big, fancy fib pays off. [I was annoyed that all the business about making the fake movie seem real didn't seem to matter. They could have just faked a copy of Variety.] 3. Skip the phone call nail-biter. Just have them be at the office, maybe getting ready to leave, when the phone rings. 4. Skip the "will the airport van get into gear" nail-biter. 5. Skip the chasing the plane with police cars and army trucks. Even if it happened, it's ridiculous. What do they hope to do in their dinky cars vs. a 747? Get crushed? The worst they could do is shoot at the plane, but they don't do that. 6. Replace that silliness with a different nail-biter, suggested in the film but not followed through on: the bad guys, having figured out that the good guys are from the embassy and on the plane, break into the control tower (we see them do that), and, what we don't see, relay instructions to abort takeoff -- maybe they make the air traffic controller do it, maybe they got on the radio themselves -- but the Swiss pilot, thinking something doesn't sound right, suspecting political/diplomatic trouble rather than mechanical, and seeing no obstruction on the runway, decides to ignore those instructions and take off anyway, thus giving us an ordinary guy-hero, redeeming Switzerland for its neutrality, and making the lift-off moment a cathartic capper to the escape.
- JakeH
December 19, 2012 at 6:16pm
OK, here's a really dumb question. It takes a lot of technology to make a movie. A lot of electronics and a lot of screens. Shouldn't people who use such technology (I'm not talking about nuclear physics or microbiology, etc., but electronics/screens have a fair amount of sophistication in that area?
- skahn
December 19, 2012 at 11:14pm
For a movie that got technology right, check out The Conversation with Gene Hackman (1974). Hackman plays a paranoid surveillance expert, and his personality problems are explored to an extent that today's techno-movies or TV programs can only dream of doing (not that they would even care about exploring someone's personality). Scene by scene, the viewer is privy to the workings of the best technology of the day--a technology that's not made up. On top of that the movie is a thriller. One of my all-time favorites.
- magboy47.
December 20, 2012 at 1:31am
The Conversation is a great film, one of Coppola's best. The technology, though worked best as a kind of background ambiance.
- arnon1
December 20, 2012 at 10:27pm