If the 1960s brought the frontiers of the state from its political borders to the interior of our cities, then john carpenters’ 1996 film ‘Escape from LA’ presented us with a new kind of frontier: the city as a state, devoid from all sense of justice, common behaviour and moral laws. Besides a 100-minute orgy of violence, explosions and other Hollywood-generated fireworks, the movie offered viewers an interesting concept of control and interface in a not too distant future.
The ‘Big One’ has seperated Los Angeles from the rest of the United States and gave the fictional, fascistoid government the opportunity to create a new prison state on the LA island. Criminals are shipped in, much like the United Kingdom used Australia as a prison island in the 1800s. The main protagonists in the film are equipped with tracking devices that precisely tell the command center on the other side of the San Fernando Sea where they are and where they are moving to. Human being has been reduced to being nothing more but a bleep on a computer screen. Geographical scale and position have been terminated in a reductionist matter that leaves nothing but vectors and data. No interaction or visual information is transmitted to the operators; in this world of digits, it is not necessary.
Just like the military movements of Escape from L.A. have been rid of their aggressive impact, bullets and fleshwounds in order to make the order of battle comprehensible in the headquarters of the US Army – or United States Police Force – the ways of airtraffic are greatly being reduced and schematized before their instanteneous appearance on the air traffic controller’s preferably monochromatic screens. What we perceive as ‘the control tower’ is nothing more than a cinematic, impressive farce, designed to give the airtraveller the soothing feeling of safety they so much crave for before entering those flying tubes of potential death and destruction. The ‘windows’ of the control tower control and show nothing but taxiing aircraft, excreting their passengers onto the ground planes or absorbing other ones for another act of geographic displacement.
The windows are not the action. The action is one floor below or above, in an ironically windowless room. We are not to be distracted by real windows when we are watching our screens where a dramatic pseudo-three dimensional play of vectors in space is taking place, yesterday, today, tomorrow. This disconnection from the real and physical world, imposed upon us by technology and translated to us through the screen, or third window as Virilio calls it, both gives us a farstretching power and at the same time a strange distance from real-life events.
We are entering the world of the ‘participatory and pro-active panopticon’. There are already maps of Amsterdam and Manhattan that index the locations of surveillance cameras. It is not about being seen anymore, it is about avoiding being seen. We no longer just cast our vote for a presidential election or a environmental proposition, we now also vote for American Idols, the next personal assistant of Donald Trump or who has to leave Big Brother’s House. This dangerous intrusion in real life will take a new turn when the physical borders of this country will be replaced by virtual ones. A website showing us realtime video footage of the US-Mexican border will allow everybody to play his or her own private minuteman, securing America’s borders from behind the screen.
The original Windows of the World came down on September 11, 2001. Their intent however had long before been taken over by the screen. The destruction of the World Trade Center’s restaurant was more than anything else a symbolic act. It represented the demise of the physical window as a transmitter of images and content. In this world of the omni-present panopticon all is reduced to the screen. Whether its illegal immigrants crossing the border, airplanes in the sky or guerilleros in Los Angeles, all is represented on the screen. Virilio’s analogy of the three windows has proven true. It has overdone itself. We are no longer being commanded by the first window of the door, or the second window of the hole in the wall. They are no longer necessary for a world where geography and distance have already disappeared. We can live and let live, by the act of watching Virilio’s third window alone.
inspired by subtopia.
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