Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 3/4
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"Hello, Big Brother": Perception Disorders and the Scopic Regime of Reality TV in Homeland (Showtime, 2011-) / Sébastien Lefait
Introduction: Homeland’s multiple screens
<1> Homeland, whose broadcast started on the American cable channel Showtime in October 2011, is structured around a surveillance-aided investigation [1]. CIA agent Carrie Mathison, the female protagonist, plays the subject of the search, with Lieutenant Nicholas Brody, the male protagonist, as its object. The beginning of the first episode gives the motive for the suspicion that leads Carrie, who suffers from bipolar disorder, to keep an eye on Brody. The opening sequence shows Carrie, on an unauthorized mission in Iraq, extorting a supposed revelation from one of her assets, who is about to be executed. This information purports that Al Qaeda has "turned" a prisoner of war into an accomplice. Soon after, Brody unexpectedly resurfaces. His sudden return causes surprise among the characters in the show, first of all for his wife Jessica, who has become romantically involved with his best friend Mike. Convinced that Brody has embraced the ideas of the enemy and is preparing an attack on American ground, Carrie concludes that his unlikely reappearance has been carefully planned.
<2> By introducing bipolarity as a character feature, Homeland suggests that Carrie suffers from impaired perception. In fact, her tendency to see things differently could be one of the side effects of her medication, as the substances used to treat the disease often alter vision (Miklowitz 98-132). As a response to the possible hallucinatory tendencies resulting from her condition, Carrie has developed an extreme faith in the objectivity of surveillance pictures. In order to prove her already staunch belief that Brody is a sleeper agent, she has his house crammed with surveillance cameras. Immediately after putting up the surveillance grid covering the Brody residence, Carrie goes home and switches on the control monitors for the first time. She greets the transmitted pictures with a surveillance cliché: "Hello, Big Brother." The name of the mysterious tyrant reigning on Oceania thanks to constant supervision has become a byword for panoptic surveillance. This archetypal surveillance antonomasia evokes one character watching a whole population (Lyon 202-3). Nevertheless, there is a major difference between Homeland’s visual apparatus and the panopticon: unlike the inmates in Bentham’s perfect prison house, who adapt their behavior to the awareness that there may be someone watching them at any particular time (Bentham 3), Brody does not know he is under surveillance. Consequently, rather than occupying the place of central panoptic observer, Carrie is the sole spectator in a synoptic configuration focused on a single individual. In fact, the synopticon is a post-panoptic diagram of power, which inverts the traditional "Big Brother is watching you" pattern in which the few watch the many. For Thomas Mathiesen, the synopticon provides control over the minds through the large-scale broadcast of media products (Mathiesen 98). Carrie spies upon Brody many hours a day, comfortably sitting in her sofa faced by three screens-her two surveillance monitors and her TV standing right behind them. The presence of the television set behind Carrie’s monitors is thus a sign that panoptic surveillance schemes are being replaced, or at least assisted, by synoptic ones. In keeping with this complementarity, Carrie is a perfect instance of what Marina Los calls the "surveillance-directed character type," characterized by "a high level of daily attention paid to diverse forms of surveillance . . . perceived as a system [that is] capable of making dispersed bits of information to coalesce around a particular individual" (Los 80).
<3> The series connects several types of watching practices into a surveillant narrative (Levin) centered on and generated by Carrie. The multiple screens acting to various degrees as surveillance aids provide the basis of Homeland’s aesthetics. Through the presence of these different types of screens, Homeland conveys a unique critique of current scopic patterns. Quite simply, a clever editing technique recurrently pairs the audience’s gaze with Carrie’s. By regularly inserting pictures of Carrie watching a screen, the series presents the images on her control monitor as, first and foremost, subjective shots. The pictures she watches then come to fill the screen of the spectators’ TV. Progressively, the signs of subjectivity disappear, such as the marks of surveillance in the shot suggesting that it presents what Carrie’s control monitor displays, and a more traditional filmic narrative regime emerges. The show thus proposes to assess the current state of watching patterns by using Carrie as a mediator. What gives the series its strength is its refusal to use Carrie’s disorder, an arbitrary character trait, as a facile way of accounting for her specific vision of events. My main argument in this paper is that, on the contrary, Homeland locates the source of Carrie’s perception disorder and, by reconstructing the steps that led to her specific Weltanschauung, shows that her scopic disease is that of a whole society.
1. Cultural References and Visual Influences: from Spy Fiction to TV Terrorism
<4> Because of its treatment of visual control and of its perspective on the post-9/11 context, Homeland ranks among other programs in a recent televisual genre that is informed by the politics of surveillance. Its focus on the complex motivations for preparing a terrorist attack and portrayal of an American soldier about to take revenge on his mother country places the series in the wake of such other shows as Sleeper Cell (Showtime, 2005-2006), where an American Muslim infiltrates a terrorist group, or Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi, 2004-2009), which centers on humanity’s paranoia concerning enemies, the Cylons, who look just like any American citizen [2]. Additionally, Homeland’s handling of surveillance, especially at the beginning of the first season, makes it akin to such programs as The Americans (FX, 2013-), which roots the 21st-century surveillance culture in the Cold War era rather than unilaterally presenting it as a byproduct of the World Trade Center attacks, or The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008), which questions the capacity for surveillance to ensure happiness, or even just safety.
<5> Nevertheless, while Homeland is close to such comparable series for its discussion whether surveillance should be an essential element to promote national security, Showtime’s series evinces a new trend in how TV programs connect audiovisual perception with protection. Unlike 24 (Fox, 2001-2010), whose complete narrative apparatus aimed at proving that surveillance can help special agents detect and defeat terrorists before they attack, Homeland focuses on perceptual disorders born from the war on terror, and which cannot be solved merely by resorting to the alleged perspicacity of monitoring devices. Like David Simon’s Generation Kill (HBO, 2008), for instance, Homeland relates the omnipresence of audiovisual technology to a decrease in the ability for human beings to actually see with their own eyes. Based on this same observation, a number of other series express the faith that human intelligence will compensate for the deficiencies of the perception machines. In The Mentalist (CBS, 2008-), Patrick Jane’s observational skills and mind-reading abilities make him a valuable aid in the context of police investigations. Elementary (CBS, 2012-) introduces an avatar of Sherlock Holmes who uses audiovisual technology as a complement, rather than as a replacement, to the brain. In the show, Sherlock has adapted his perception to ubiquitous technology, and therefore preserved his extraordinary talent at solving riddles to capture criminals [3]. In Person of Interest (CBS, 2011-), even though crime prevention is ensured by a mysterious surveillance machine, it is explicitly suggested that the said machine’s power resides in Mr. Finch’s expertise at using extant technology to predict upcoming crimes [4]. Other shows, such as Perception (TNT, 2012-), claim that perceptual disorders can be assets in promoting security rather than breaches in the American armor that terrorists will inevitably exploit. Daniel Pierce, the main character in Perception, is a neuroscience professor who suffers from schizophrenia. His condition generates hallucinations, mainly of other characters in the series, who act as doubles of himself with whom he dialectically constructs solutions to crimes. Whereas Elementary’s Sherlock is pathologically unable to interact with other human beings as a result of his superior perspicacity, Perception’s Daniel draws his riddle-solving talent from his perceptual disorder. In the beginnings and endings to the series’ episodes, where Daniel lectures his students about the mysteries of the brain, the upsides of neurological troubles are clearly advertised. In the opening to the pilot, for instance, Daniel explains that "reality is a figment of your imagination," which suggests that his own imagination helps him find out what really happened in criminal cases. In the same episode’s ending, Daniel didactically explains that there are positive aspects to mental conditions, and that seeing them is just a matter of finding the right perspective on so-called "diseases."
<6> In Homeland, there is a positive side to Carrie’s bipolar disorder too. Her condition makes her stick to what she considers to be the truth about Brody, i.e. that he is preparing a terrorist attack, which proves to be the case at the end of season one. This means that, were her colleagues to treat her as a consultant to be trusted the same as Sherlock Holmes, Patrick Jane, or Daniel Pierce are in similar programs, her condition would help protect many citizens.
<7> Nevertheless, unlike Perception, Homeland treats Carrie’s bipolarity as a pathology rather than as a gift. The negative effects of her condition do not offset the positives ones, and her colleagues never seem willing to act on Carrie’s insights. While this mistrust can be explained by her sometimes erratic behavior, it may also come from her inability to confirm her theories-in season 2, she plays no part in finding Brody’s video confession that eventually proves her right. Unlike Daniel Pierce, Carrie is not believed merely on her hunches. Besides, Carrie’s situation is that of a woman lost among men. Because she claims she has seen through Brody by actually spying on him, Carrie inverts the traditional pattern of the male gaze on the woman, and the power diagram that comes with it, as described by Laura Mulvey (Mulvey). The fact she organizes surveillance of Brody’s house unbeknownst to her male colleagues, except for Saul, proves her awareness of the risks attached to claiming visual power for herself as a woman. Followingly, when she asserts that she has pierced Brody’s facade, her superiors seem reluctant to believe her, on the assumption that visual acuity and intelligence should remain male preserves, because women are likely to be blinded by love. Ironically, that Carrie should fall in love with Brody all but prevents her from reading him accurately, until, in season two episode five, their love affair leads him to open up and admit to her part of what he has done.
<8> Consistently with this investigation of the connection between power and the male/female gaze, Homeland insists on the visual disorders provoked by Carrie’s condition. Her awareness of her sickness translates into her constantly expressed fear of not seeing something, based on her regret she has missed something that would have helped her prevent the 9/11 attacks. Because her disorder thus appears to be post-traumatic, its effects on visual perception are foregrounded: while psychotic moments are usually just one part of the bipolar condition, they seem to affect Carrie more steadily, as a result of her desire to increase her vigilance and repair the perceptive mistake she believes she made. While this focus on eyesight is not surprising in a culture where the visual sense takes precedence over the other four (Jütte 61-71), Homeland ascribes it to a disorder Carrie shares with a whole society, and indeed with the whole world. The series shows that both magnified visual attention and perceptual disorders can be related to a culture where security seems to depend on hypervision-a fact epitomized in the very slogan of Homeland Security, "if you see something say something" (Rowe 192-93). On many occasions, the show underlines the largely shared-although erroneous-belief that surveillance is mostly visual. In season two episode five, for instance, Carrie tricks Brody into leaking information by turning off the cameras in the room where she is interrogating him. She rightly assumes he will be drawn again into his former intimacy with her, and forget the microphones in the room have not been turned off, allowing Saul and Quinn in the next room to hear what he confesses. The current motto of national security, which invites everyone to become a spy, is thus summarized in Carrie’s "schizo-logic:" her belief in the possibility for "the un-seen and in-visible" to exist "within the visibly seen" (Elsaesser and Hagener, 156). Carrie’s bipolar disorder encapsulates the possibility for Brody to be a terrorist while unfailingly looking like the perfect American hero. In turn, it accounts for Carrie’s insistence on watching him permanently in order to expose him and reveal his opposite side, the invisible enemy within the friend of the nation.
<9> To further identify the roots of the current visual disorder that Carrie symbolizes, Homeland first focuses on the effects of her systematic mistrust of appearances, then traces them back to their causes. As "a figure whom the [spectator] discovers to be lacking in credibility" (Fludernik 27), Carrie soon becomes an unreliable narrator. Interestingly, what makes her reading of events unreliable is her persistence in seeing Brody as an unreliable narrator himself: his story is full of inconsistencies, which her own counternarrative sets out to expose. In Carrie’s opinion, he invents a fake past as a cover for his present treacherous actions, but also constructs a fictitious persona in real-time to conceal his true identity. The show thus ascribes Carrie’s lack of dependability to her propensity to see Brody through a number of prisms, a character feature that is merely magnified by the hallucinatory tendencies resulting from her bipolar condition. Carrie’s most obvious viewing grid is that of suspense narrative, and especially of espionage. As reader-response theory has shown, a narrative necessarily leads the reader to fill a few gaps (Iser). In most cases, readers find the material required to fill in the blanks in the story among their "knowledge, experience, and expectations" (Nikolajeva and Scott 2). In keeping with this theory, Carrie patches up Brody’s yarn, a jigsaw puzzle of TV and CCTV appearances, by resorting to tropes she borrows from spy stories. In episode one, for instance, Carrie is on a date in a jazz bar in which a television set displays news coverage of Brody’s return. Gazing at the music players’ fidgeting hands suddenly reminds Carrie that she saw Brody acting similarly on television. She then looks at the TV again to focus on Brody’s twitching fingers, and interprets the gesture as a sign he is using the media to contact his terrorist accomplices abroad-a regular plot event in sleeper agent stories, which 24 went to extreme lengths in exploiting. By scrutinizing the TV pictures and comparing Brody’s behavior in several of his appearances, she subsequently looks for specific signs that he is in fact a traitor. Her behavior suggests she found them, although the program never clearly proves the signs she spotted were indeed ways of making contact with the enemy.
<10> In addition, Homeland foregrounds another, less obvious facet in Carrie’s gap-filling strategy than her borrowing of narrative shortcuts from spy fiction. Carrie’s interpretation of Brody may be influenced by fictional clichés, but it is above all triggered by her conviction that he is constantly playing a part. Rather than just focusing on Carrie as she tries to identify the role Brody is playing, Homeland delves into her irrepressible inclination to see Brody’s persona as a façade. With Carrie, the spectators are constantly driven to scan Brody’s actions for signs of dissembling. Because this way of seeing Brody is constantly defused as a possible source of mistakes, Homeland exploits the self-reflexive dimension that naturally comes to television programs (Ellis 275-76). The series demonstrates that the spectator’s scopic regime is possibly as distortive as Carrie’s when she turns to her screens for evidence of Brody’s guilt.
<11> Homeland’s opening credits purport to help the viewer understand Carrie’s promptness to try and see through Brody. The sequence links Carrie’s blind trust in surveillance technology to the trauma of 9/11. As a massacre, the attack favored a manichaean opposition of good and evil (Semelin 19) and immediately generated the widespread fear of another surprise assault, especially as the event was broadcast live (Semelin 22). Carrie’s panicked statement at the end of the credits-"I’ve missed something before. I won’t, I can’t let that happen again"-shows she is prey to such "impalpable" fear as the one 9/11 generated (Semelin 23). To Saul’s reply that "everyone missed something that day," Carrie retorts that "everyone’s not me." This line points to the mixture of rationality and irrationality in her extreme vigilance. As a "powerful succession of images and reports" giving the audience the impression that "the attacks just kept coming" (Barnett and Reynolds 98), the media coverage of terrorism included in the sequence, which culminates in the final reference to 9/11, seems to cause Carrie’s dread that other assaults will follow.
<12> Rather than focusing on her condition to present her as a lunatic, the opening sequence thus presents Carrie’s personality as the product of 9/11 on TV. Her bipolar syndrome merely hyperbolizes a paranoia she shares with countless US citizens. She is a radical version of actual behavior, a kind of caricature the show creates to anatomize contemporary US society. In keeping with this hyperbolic vein, Carrie also suffers from the Cassandra syndrome: her "valid warnings" are "dismissed or disbelieved" (Jurin 86) because they seem to be prompted by "excessive fear" (Laqueur 270). Through the reference to Cassandra, a character whose function is to present a system of hypotheses that is possibly dysfunctional (Laqueur 269-70), Homeland suggests that the current way of fighting terrorism may be injudicious. Carrie also shares with the character in Greek mythology that she turns her beliefs into prophecies, thereby claiming her ability to predict the next terrorist attack. Unlike Cassandra, however, Carrie strives to underpin her conspiracy theory on objective data: the information her Iraqi asset gives her at the beginning of the pilot episode but also, throughout the first season, the intelligence she collects by spying on Brody. Carrie exploits the ability for surveillance to predict and anticipate (Quessada and Sadin 82), and exemplifies "the will to control time and space, present and future, here and there" that was generated by 9/11 (Bigo 62).
<13> As an illustration of contemporary faith in surveillance, Carrie urges to fill in the blanks in the CCTV coverage of reality, in order to establish the truth of her beliefs. This aspect of Carrie’s surveillance of Brody is the main object of episode five, "Blind Spot." The episode features Hamid, Brody’s guard and torturer in Iraq, who has just been captured and brought back to the United States. After Hamid has been interrogated, with Brody following the interrogation from the next room, the lieutenant demands to confront his torturer. Surveillance cameras capture their meeting, which predictably ends up in a fight. A few moments later, Saul informs Carrie that Hamid committed suicide with a razor blade. Given her suspicions about Brody, Carrie concludes that Brody gave Hamid the weapon during their brawl. She interprets the fight as fake, and demands to watch the surveillance footage, trusting it will provide her with the evidence of Brody’s guilt for which she has been waiting. Unfortunately for her, the precise moment when Brody could have passed the razor blade took place in an area of the room that escaped the gaze of the surveillance cameras.
<14> This missing surveillance moment, however, does not impair Carrie’s confidence in the validity of her surveillance reconstructions. Carrie is "driven by a faith in the truth of the body identification as a sign for a predictable pattern of behaviour," to take up the words Bigo uses to describe the surveillance frenzy that followed September 11 (Bigo 63). As a product of this context, Carrie immediately concludes that Brody is aware of modern counter surveillance techniques. As Gary T. Marx notes, "much resistance to surveillance involves . . . exploiting natural weaknesses such as dead spots" (Marx). Carrie is convinced that Brody was trained to spot the dead angle and use it to operate. In other words, she thinks she knows what happened during the absent surveillance rush, and proposes to counter Brody’s narrativisation of the surveillance tape by exposing it.
<15> Through Carrie’s reaction, Homeland brings 24 from the Bush era into the 2010s. The staunch belief that uninhibited surveillance would necessarily help profile potential terrorists has given way to the awareness that terrorists, just like everyone else, are aware that the whole word is virtually covered by CCTV cameras. The traitors Carrie has to spot, she believes, have learnt to live in this extensive panopticon, by locating dead angles in which to hide, but also by preparing their attacks under the very eye of surveillance. Carrie treats Brody as a spy who uses the "TV panopticon" (Bauwel and Carpentier 74) as a cover, but also as a tool to exploit, as is clear in the sequence of Hamid’s interrogation. The beginning of the scene focuses on setting up a complex surveillance apparatus. Saul will interrogate Hamid in a room, and Carrie and Brody will follow their conversation in the abutting room, thanks to surveillance cameras placed in the interrogation area. The apparatus, however, is more than a technological version of the two-way mirror that often features in filmic police interrogation scenes. The installation comprises microphones and earplugs enabling Brody to communicate with Saul, unawares of Hamid. This way, he can tell him what he knows about Hamid, and he can ask the right questions to expose the suspect as a liar. In this configuration, Brody can interfere with the contents of the surveillance images. By doing so, he is supposed to enhance the truth value of the footage. Given the possibility that he is a traitor, he may also use his intervention scope to manipulate the sequence. For instance, he may feed Hamid with cryptic advice so they are not exposed as accomplices. A shot in which Hamid looks up at the surveillance camera confirms this interpretation, by suggesting that he has realized about the presence of Brody in the next room. Consequently, Brody uses counter surveillance techniques he has probably learnt as a soldier to virtually edit out part of the CCTV footage of his interview with Hamid. Rather than remaining subjected to surveillance, he inverts the pattern of visual domination it contains to become the subject controlling the contents of the surveillance video, since he prompts Hamid to commit suicide by passing him the blade. He tampers with supposedly objective surveillance footage, which practically turns him into the director of the video, since he subtly introduces manipulative elements into it. As a whole, the sequence thus reminds the spectators that it is always possible to intervene on the contents of CCTV footage, and therefore to alter its level of objectivity, by unassumingly staging what appears in front of the camera. Through such moments as these, Homeland thus introduces, as an embedded structure, a scopic regime that is close to that of reality TV, which is characterized by "increasing levels of producer control and intervention" (Ross and Nightingale 2). Carrie’s propensity to fictionalize surveillance footage until it fits her vision of things brings her perspective on the truth close to "the so-called Reality shows or ’voyeur TV’" which "all resort to various degrees of compromise between scripted movie drama and the raw spectacle of the surveillance camera" (Ryan).
<16> The credits also account for Carrie’s reality-TV influenced perception of Brody by placing 9/11 at the end of a series of references to the televisual treatment of terrorism. The sequence shows that television is part of Carrie’s "normal daily round," and therefore constitutes her "’main point of contact’ with world affairs, politics and military events" (Connell 119, in Howie, Witnesses). As a child, Carrie was exposed to a scopic regime characterized by inherent fictionalization (Cubitt 72). The dramatizing quality of television pictures has a strong impact on "both behavior and judgment" (Mannoni and Bonardi 70; my translation), resulting in "screen cultures that represent what we think we have seen and what we think it means" (Howie, Terror 222). Even though, according to Olivier Mongin, this is especially true in the United States where people’s way of life is often considered to be spontaneously fictional (Mongin 192), this observation applies worldwide. If television necessarily involves a specific "reception frame" (Esquénazi 327; my translation), Carrie’s frame is undoubtedly influenced by TV coverage of terrorism. As many analysts have shown, TV’s treatment of terrorism easily leads to psychosis and paranoia (Mannoni and Bonardi 64), as a result of the constant circulation from reality to fiction and back that the medium implements (Esquénazi 340). This "spectacularization" of terrorism by both the media and the terrorists themselves (Mannoni and Bonardi 58-59) affects Carrie’s reading of the pictures on her screens. This prevents her from drawing a clear line between the actual terrorist threats and their fictional counterparts, to be found, for instance, in Hollywood films of the Reagan era she grew up in as a child (Vanhala 135-68).
<17> The title sequence thus presents 9/11 as the climax of a trend started years before. This acme of televisual horror, however, is also an
aesthetic turning point, as the moment when reality supersedes fiction (Semelin 22). According to Mongin, 9/11 can be read as the depiction of "something
that happened before, something scripted then shot, as in the movies" (192; my translation). For Howie, post 9/11 witnesses increasingly cling to "an image
that defines the criteria by which reality comes to be located and fixed" (Howie, Terror 221). Because of this tendency to "dramatize" fact
(Mannoni and Bonardi 59), TV journalism has turned the treatment of reality into the perfect reflection of a fiction film. This is the latest stage in a
long line of displacements of the partition between fact and fiction in representations of the real. Indeed, as analysts of documentary forms such as Bill
Nichols have shown, expressing reality has always been the result of a subtle alchemy between fact and fiction: "we hunger for news from the world around
us but desire it in the form of narratives, stories that make meaning, however tenuous, dramatic, compelling, or paranoid they might be" (Nichols ix).
Additionally, as Mark Fishman and Gray Cavender explain in the introduction to an edited volume about Reality TV crime programs, "the bounds of accepted
journalistic practice" are currently moving as some of the techniques of audiovisual fiction find "their way into local television news programs" (Cavender
and Fishman 11).
2. Exposing Reality’s Secret Story: Savvy Viewers vs. Talented Dissemblers
<18> Homeland shows that this constant evolution of the criteria used to discriminate fact from fiction on-screen has an impact on the way we watch, but also on the way we behave when we know someone watches us. With 9/11, terrorism turned reality into the setting for a reality-TV show, a type of program offering a "demoniacal hybrid of reality and (spectacular) fiction" (Di Vittorio 102; my translation). Accordingly, the omnipresence of TV in the credits sequence accounts for Carrie’s awareness that, in the post 9/11 era especially, TV pictures display reality disguised as fiction. This is why she is so constantly intent to unearth the reality behind moving pictures that she tends to interpret as simulacra. As a logical consequence of this trait, she turns to CCTV footage as the only source of objectivity that is left. At least, such is the case when Brody is the only character on her surveillance monitor. Strikingly, when he is with a member of his family, Carrie sees only pretence in Brody’s behavior. If he is indeed the traitor she considers him to be, even his family must not know about his new identity. Consequently, when Carrie mentions "Big Brother" at the beginning of the first episode, the phrase can be heard as a reference to the reality-TV show known for its exploitation of a surveillance configuration to dramatic ends, rather than just as a surveillance cliché. As in a reality-TV configuration, Carrie’s CCTV system covers the whole Brody house (except, importantly, for the garage). Unlike Big Brother contestants, Brody does not know he is under surveillance, but even then, he seems to be playing a part when he is with Jessica or one of their children. In fact, because Brody has a secret to hide from the other people in his house, and because Carrie tries to discover his secret thanks to round-the-clock surveillance, Homeland’s reality-TV apparatus is even closer to that of Secret Story than it is to Big Brother’s. In this derivative broadcast on French television since 2007, the contestants live in a studio whose rooms are equipped with cameras. The addition to the Big Brother franchise is that each entrant has a secret to hide from the others for as long as possible, a secret the spectators are implicitly requested to discover as soon as possible.
<19> Consequently, like a reality-TV entrant, Brody can only be his true self when he is on his own, i.e. when no one, except for Carrie, watches him as he exposes his true personality. His confession to his own camera in the season finale offers an extreme instance of this system of meaning, in which objective pictures are few and far between. The fact this moment of truth about Brody is turned into a falsehood at the end of season two proves the showrunners’ intention to present audiovisual images as unstable reflections of reality [5]. Until she has access to Brody’s confession in season two, Carrie sees Brody as a contestant in a reality-TV program of the Big Brother format.
<20> The reference to Big Brother in the pilot episode thus triggers a metaphorical reading of Carrie’s perception as reality-TV spectatorship. Throughout the season, the metaphor is extended in two main ways. On the one hand, Carrie’s reaction to Brody’s on-screen appearances likens her to a reality-TV viewer. On the other hand, Brody’s real-time construction of a role, based as it is on his true self, brings him close to a reality-TV contestant.
<21> When she watches footage of the Brody family house, Carrie develops most of the symptoms analysts of reality TV have noted in regular spectators. Because of the effort she invests in following Brody on-screen throughout the day, Carrie develops an intense satisfaction with viewing (Godlewski and Perse 153), which leads her to treat him as if he were an intimate acquaintance (Modleski 69, in Esquénazi 340). This is exemplified in the sequence when she lovingly enumerates the stages in his daily routine (season 1 episode 4). She thus evinces the "emotional attachment" that is typical of audience response to TV characters, especially when they appear in recurring and long-lasting programs (Ryan). The similarity becomes blatant when her addiction to the surveillance program she was so keen on watching generates a loss syndrome. Renée Dickason describes this phenomenon, and explains that analysts consider this type of audience response as a disease they name "soapitis" (Dickason 43-45; 106). Once the surveillance apparatus has been removed, Carrie clears her apartment of any trace it ever was there, as if her lover had just moved out. To compensate for the loss, Carrie decides to meet Brody in the flesh, and the extent of her emotional attachment becomes obvious when she starts an affair with him. Carrie then treats her real-life meetings with Brody as an extension of her former mediated contact with him, in an inflated version of what analysts describe as the increasingly participatory dimension of reality TV (Godlewski and Perse 148). Carrie thus pushes to a limit the "audience activity" that is typical of reality-TV viewing (Godlewski and Perse 149).
<22> Episode four insists on how alert she is while following Brody via reality-capturing devices. Four weeks have elapsed since the setting up of the miniature cameras, and Carrie’s surveillance warrant is reaching its deadline. As a result, it appears the tone of the CIA officer’s watching of the ex-prisoner of war has changed. Switching her surveillance monitor on in the morning, she looks pleased to meet again with the object of her spying. As every morning, she takes notes about his actions to try to identify possible signs that he is the one who has been "turned." She jots down a question-"more paranoid hallucinations?"-to account for his sleepless night. Since the question better applies to herself than to Brody, the episode treats Carrie’s watching with ironic distance. She then uses her notes about Brody’s daily routine to predict his next move, and the color of the tie he will choose. She even replies in Jessica’s stead when Brody asks where the item of garment is. With her reply, Carrie substitutes herself for the lieutenant’s wife, as a first step towards becoming his mistress. Her comment shows that she constantly tries to predict the character’s actions, in a form of gap-filling that is more typical of reality-TV audience response than of "reader response" to fictional narratives.
<23> In addition, this blank-filling is a sign that Carrie, like a certain type of reality-TV spectators, is "cognitively involved with the program because of the suspense involved in the unfolding of the action" (Godlewski and Perse 151). Her cognitive activity, however, goes beyond the level of suspense, as Carrie constantly interprets pictures of Brody to find out whether or not he is playing a part to conceal treacherous activity. As the elements in the credit sequence referring to Carrie’s upbringing in a culturally dense environment show, such as playing the trumpet and listening to Louis Armstrong, Carrie, as a child, was not only a voracious consumer of TV pictures, she was also a learned one. As such, she is likely to have acquired a no-nonsense approach to TV, possibly ranking her in the third category of "decoding spectators" defined by Hall: those whose decoding position is negotiated because they take exception to what TV offers them, based on their awareness that another, alternative version of reported facts may exist alongside the one TV delivers (Hall 396-97).
<24> This character feature offers a different perspective on her anxiousness not to "miss" anything again. Because she feels she was deceived by the TV coverage of the war on terror preceding 9/11, failing to read the upcoming disaster behind TV news reports, she decided never to be deluded again into thinking that on-screen pictures show reality as it is. Throughout the season, this trait translates into her keenness to see beyond the appearances of Brody’s on-screen pictures, which she always interprets at first as Brody playing the hero to conceal he is a sleeper agent. Carrie, therefore, radicalizes a certain type of reality-TV spectatorship, characterized by the awareness that the reality of reality TV is only reality by name. Carrie behaves according to Nichols’s view, for whom "any firm sense of boundary which such shows [as reality-TV shows] attempt to uphold between fact and fiction, narrative and exposition, storytelling and reporting inevitably blurs" (Nichols 43). As a character, she elicits the notion that the "reality" of reality-TV is often fake, and shows that this opinion is now widespread. This induces specific ways of watching such shows as Big Brother, as Fernando Andacht notes at the end of his analysis of the reception of the program in Latin America: "focusing on the evidence . . . that is perceived in it . . . enables the public to separate what is understood to be authentic-a revelation of the participant’s true self-from what is thought to be fabricated" (Andacht 136). Carrie watches Brody’s life on her screens as if she were a member of the Big Brother audience Andacht describes.
<25> For Annette Hill, "Big Brother has capitalised on [this] tension between appearance and reality by ensuring viewers have to judge for themselves which of the contestants are true to themselves" (Hill, "Big Brother" 34). Carrie’s systematically ironic perception, therefore, vicariously exposes the kind of viewers we are, "far too sophisticated to miss . . . the dramatic scripting of the data" (Ryan; see also Hill, Reality TV 57). Like her, we pride ourselves on being "savvy subject[s]" who escape "the fate of the dupe" (Murray and Ouelette 331), which is why we constantly try, like contemporary reality-TV spectators, to determine whether Brody is acting sincerely or just pretending to act spontaneously (Bignell 159; Hill, "Big Brother" 34; Watts 241; 244).
<26> Probably because of her condition, however, Carrie reads all types of situations as if they were part of a reality-TV program. The series includes sequences in which she is obviously right in doing so, and sequences suggesting she is wrong to treat Brody as a character. In the first category, Brody’s TV appearances after his return fully deserve Carrie’s approach. As the belated revelation that Brody has indeed been preparing an attack demonstrates, he willingly accepts political pressure to play up his character as a miracle survivor/war hero, because he knows it will help him act behind the scenes to prepare his suicide bombing unhindered. The perfect counterpart to Carrie’s savvy spectator, Brody is talented when it comes to being in the limelight. Like contestants deliberately constructing their media image by basing it on what reality TV presents them to be (Edwards 7), Brody immediately recognizes the opportunity to use the media anxiety to hype his return to get close to Vice President Walden, whom he wants to kill as an act of revenge. Brody’s televised persona is a perfectly credible alternative to who he has really become since, as the final episode explains, Brody has not turned from good to evil: he has just discovered that he was wrong to think he was one of the goodies. Like a contestant in a reality-TV show, he constructs his TV persona "as the result of his . . . essential personality" (Watts 237), consciously deciding to give viewers what they expect to see (Watts 238; Curnutt 248). Apart from the way it presents the two alternative Brodys-the hero and the villain-as believable, in an illustration of "the essential paradox of the reality-TV star" (Watts 239), Homeland includes many moments in which Brody constructs his character as an alternative perspective on the truth. In episode three, during his television interview, Brody answers one of the host’s questions by providing the following testimony about his experience in Iraq:
They want you to lose faith. In your country, which they say is the devil. In your fellow Marines, who aren’t coming for you. In your wife, who they say has her arms wrapped around someone else. But you survive, by having faith.
Despite the distrust usually placed in the contents of such interviews, especially so since Brody and the host have prepared this one beforehand, everything Brody says here has proven true or will prove true at some point in Homeland. His wife has indeed had her arms around someone else, and the final episode proves that he has lost faith in his country.
<27> As in a reality-TV show viewer/contestant relationship, Brody’s ease with his fictional persona leads Carrie to ask herself the "question of performance," which "complicates the search for authentic personalities" (Watts 243). A radical version of this questioning of Brody’s sincerity is transmitted to the viewers, who unremittingly search for the real self behind surface identities even during the most objective moments in the show. The most interesting ambiguity on which Homeland insists comes from the fact that, while Carrie’s perception of Brody is presented as distorted, it does not ultimately prevent her from reaching the actual truth about him. As the sequences in which he prays in Arabic alone in his garage indicate, Brody actually has something to hide from both his family and television news reports, which becomes even clearer when it is revealed he is indeed planning a bombing. In a similar vein, when Carrie considers the possibility that he has "paranoid hallucinations" at the beginning of episode four, Nazir briefly appears behind Brody in his mirror, causing him to start with fear. The show thus confirms that, even though Carrie does not know for sure because she does not see Brody’s hallucination, her intuition about Brody is right. Nevertheless, Homeland also shows that Carrie’s scopic regime, which she unconsciously modeled on that of reality TV, has become dysfunctional. Such is the case when it appears she sees Brody as a character even when he is not on one of her screens. Her decision to meet with Brody is consistent with her search for the true self behind the surface character. It soon becomes obvious, however, that Carrie is unable to see Brody clearly. The first reason is that she has apparently fallen in love with him, as a result of watching him all day long, the way a spectator may fall in love with a TV series star. The second reason is that she seems to have become unable to see otherwise than through the prism of reality TV, which ironically prevents her from seeing Brody as he actually is. Of course, Brody is a gifted actor, but Carrie’s non-stop surveillance of his actions is what makes her miss the opportunity of exposing him in episode seven. In this episode, the morning after their romantic night in a cabin away from the city, Carrie assumes Brody will have "Yorkshire gold" for breakfast, as it is his favorite tea brand. She thus plays the guesswork game she had been playing in episode four, when she had predicted what kind of tie Brody would choose, but she does so in real life this time, as if she had forgotten that her contact with Brody was no longer mediated. He immediately understands the slip as an unwilling confession that she has been spying on him. The ensuing conversation has her admit that she is "always working," i.e. looking for terrorists, and that, in spite of their affair, she is still convinced that he is working for Al Qaeda. Getting intimate with Brody, in a word, has not been sufficient to erase the perspective on the character born from her round-the-clock scanning of Brody’s activities on-screen.
<28> The fact that the series ultimately proves her right in seeing Brody as a traitor does not, however, mitigate the portrayal of her scopic regime as dysfunctional. What does alleviate her fault, in the end, is one of the show’s metacritical elements, leading the spectators to understand that Carrie’s mistake may be theirs as well. The sequences in which Brody goes into his garage to be alone and perform the Muslim prayer play this specific part. To start with, they downsize Carrie’s misinterpretation by overinforming the audience. The garage is the blind spot in Carrie’s surveillance. For the spectators, the garage sequences play the part of the "confessional" scenes of reality-TV shows, where the contestants can be their true selves and indulge in an "outpouring of emotions" (Watts 243). That Carrie should be deprived of such scenes partially accounts for her failure to prove to her CIA colleagues that her theory is right. On the spectators’ side, however, the sequences confirm Carrie’s hypothesis, but only up to a point. At the end of episode two, when we are offered footage no one else has seen, showing Brody at prayer in his only private space, we tend to react as Carrie would, jumping to the conclusion that because he has converted to Islam necessarily means he is a traitor, as suspected. As Mark Pester has noted, the sound of Arabic prayer in Homeland sometimes echoes "news reports in which praying Muslims and city-wide calls to prayer are figured as somehow threatening, alien sounds, often heard through the further distortion of a loudspeaker" (Pester). This leads the audience to think "terrorism" when they hear the familiar music of Islam. Later in the show, however, it appears that Brody’s conversion proves nothing at all. In episode two, an explanatory flashback complements the garage prayer sequence. It shows Brody going out of his cell in Iraq, seeing the light in the next room and choosing to join the praying Muslims. Such images suggest he may have been acting strangely just because he converted to Islam in a moment when he was desperate for spiritual comfort. His conversion, of course, does not necessarily make a terrorist out of him. Similarly, the end of the first season reveals that Brody’s motives for siding with the terrorists are certainly different from those that mechanically come to mind at first in front of pictures of Brody at prayer, such as fundamentalist brainwashing or some form of blackmail. Homeland induces interpretations, later to expose them as misinterpretations. The series thus demonstrates how subjected we are to the prism of reality-TV watching, which leads us to label people as character types as early as possible (Mittell 197; Bignell, Orlebar and Holland 115). Such red-herring tracks, however, do not merely comply with the rules of the "unreliable narrative" genre. They are also part of the reality-TV regime themselves, where the camera can raise "the suspicion that this contestant [is] going to be ’it’" i.e., for instance, the one about to be evicted), or more generally play with the spectators’ desire to predict what will happen next. Reality-TV programs manipulate the spectators’ perspective and generate suspense despite the fact that audiences anticipate plot developments according to their supposed familiarity with the codes of the genre (Ryan). Through such a parallelism, the series leads the viewers to realize that, like Carrie, they watch Homeland as they would watch reality TV, or even reality itself.
<29> The show includes several sequences in which the spectators are surreptitiously driven to fill in the blanks in the incomplete story of Brody’s
actions, and to use the logic of reality TV to reconstruct the conditions of producing truths, a natural response to reality-TV programs according to Di
Vittorio (100). In episode three, the series exploits the propensity in reality-TV spectators to "conspire and predict the show’s outcome" (Edwards 10) in
the framework of another red-herring moment. The sequence exposes the reconstructive attitude that the narrative encourages as a cultural reflex, by
showing Carrie and the CIA tracking down the wrong suspect, Prince Farid Bin Abbud, for making money transfers on an Al Qaeda account. The spectators’
predisposition to treat Bin Abbud as the culprit makes sense given the context in which he appears. His name, indeed, is a reference to Bin Laden, who
injected Saudi money into Al Qaeda. This induces both Carrie and the spectators to make hasty conclusions. Based on the show’s allusiveness to the American
counterterrorism context, the "Bin" character must be the one helping Al Qaeda. By proving this is a half-mistake-another "Bin," "Bin Walid" is
the one who is funding the terrorist organization-the series plays with our inclination to draw from real-life facts to reconstruct the blanks in a
fictional story. Such reactions are all the more easily induced as some characters in the show help prompt them in the audience. In season two, episode
eleven, to quote just one instance of this recurrent device, Carrie’s CIA colleague Galvez is immediately suspected of being the one who helped Nazir
escape, on the mere grounds that he is a Muslim. As usual in the series, this reaction is soon exposed as a foregone conclusion. In a meticulous way, Homeland turns our surveillant gaze into a distortive vision of things, later to make us realize we should have thought twice. The show forces us
to face our tendency, as viewers, to think we know better, as we distort even the most objectively-rendered moments in the series according to what we are
convinced a character’s name or behavior masks.
Conclusion: Reality-TV as Contemporary Quixotic Syndrome
<30> This aesthetic distance leads Homeland to the conclusion that the prisms through which we watch reality have changed in their essence. Literature, and later cinema, used to ascribe the distorted perception of reality to the influence of fiction. This is illustrated in the many occurrences, in western fiction, of patterns borrowed from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, as documented in the work of Marthe Robert, René Girard, Robert Stam, or Robert Alter, among others. Homeland shows that, while Carrie is obviously affected by old-fashioned Quixotism, seeing Brody as a traitor worthy of the best espionage or conspiracy-theory fiction, she also exemplifies a new version of the archetypal delusional syndrome. In the contemporary avatar of the knight of the sad countenance’s disease, which was also, metaphorically, that of a whole society seeing its values going away (Stam 135), a different sort of confusion prevails. Carrie shares at least two traits with Don Quixote: delusional tendencies resulting from a psychological disorder, and overexposure to a specific type of productions, as the credits sequence indicates. In her case, however, the productions that eventually distort perception are televisual rather than fictional. The essential difference is that, because they are televisual, the filters through which she sees reality are not radically fictional, but only fictionalizing. In other words, the quixotic condition-seeing characters instead of real people- has become the scopic regime of TV viewing, especially in the case of reality TV, where spectators have learnt to look for the truth behind the pictures. Homeland thus shows that the expansion of the reality-TV perspective generates a kind of inverted quixotic syndrome that, as in the novel, applies to a whole society epitomized in a protagonist. Where Don Quixote urged to see reality as fiction and had to bear the consequences of his delusions, we are all too aware that the reality we have access to is already fictionalized. As a consequence, we constantly try to decode pictures of reality, looking for fact behind fiction, an activity that is undeniably a source of pleasure but also, as Homeland demonstrates, a source of errors. The series thus shows that we read both TV and reality as if they were reality TV, i.e. as an unreliable narrative for us to expose as fiction. By embedding this structure of watching within its narrative frame, Homeland undoubtedly exploits its thrilling assets, at the same time as it exposes the dangers associated with it. The program thus epitomizes the ultimate post 9/11 fear: the dread not only of failing to predict the next attack on US soil, but also the most terrible premonition that we may not be able to see reality as it is ever again.
Notes
[1] To this date, Showtime has broadcast three seasons of the series. This article focuses mostly on season 1. Because of the sense of closure the final episode generates, the season can indeed be treated as a consistent unit.
[2] A complete analysis of the impact of the War on Terror and of the post-9/11 context on American television can be found in Takacs.
[3] In a forthcoming article entitled "Avoiding the Scooby Doo effect: Technological Updates of Sherlock Holmes," I study how Elementary ’s version of Sherlock Holmes exploits the reality-capturing, surveillance, and display capacities of modern technology to provide the sleuth with an updated investigation technique.
[4] I discuss the human element in Person of Interest’s prediction machine, as well as the impact of surveillance on the plots, aesthetics, and narrative systems of contemporary TV series in a forthcoming article entitled "Penser la scopophilie du dispositif: du voyeurisme cinématographique à la surveillance sérielle."
[5] In season two, the video of Brody’s confession brings confirmation of Carrie’s theory. At the end of the final episode of season two, however, after
Brody has attempted to redeem himself by helping the CIA, the terrorists use the video to present him as the author of an attack he is not responsible for.
They do so by sending the video to television right after the bombing of CIA headquarters during Vice President Walden’s memorial service. Inserted as it
is during the broadcast with which terrorists claim responsibility for the attack, the testimony presents Brody as an accomplice. The fact the bomb was in
his car when it exploded is supposed to confirm for the American people that Brody is indeed a terrorist-which, as the spectators know, is no longer true
at the end of the second season. Because she knows how easy it is to use television to distort the reality of objective footage, Carrie immediately
realizes this is a way of framing Brody for a mass murder in which he played no part. As a cliffhanger to the next season, Carrie then sets out to prove,
in a variation on what she did in the first season, that the TV Brody is not the real Brody-not by his own decision this time, but against his will.
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Filmography
24. Prod. Robert Cochran, Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, Joel Surnow et al. Fox, 2001-2010. Television.
Battlestar Galactica. Prod. Ronald D. Moore. Sci-Fi, 2004-2009. Television.
Elementary. Prod. Robert Doherty. CBS, 2012-. Television.
Generation Kill. Prod. David Simon and Ed Burns. HBO, 2008. Television.
Homeland. Prod. Michael Cuesta, Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon et al. Showtime, 2011-present. Television.
Perception. Prod. Kenneth Biller and Mike Sussman. TNT, 2012-. Television.
Person of Interest. Prod. J. J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan. CBS, 2011-. Television.
Sleeper Cell. Prod. Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. Showtime, 2005-2006. Television.
The Americans. Prod. Joe Weisberg. FX, 2013-. Television.
The Mentalist. Prod. Bruno Heller. CBS, 2008-. Television.
The Wire. Prod. David Simon and Ed Burns. HBO, 2002-2008. Television.
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