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Peeping Tom Trailer
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- from Peeping Tom (1960)
- Created by Michael Powell
- Distributed by Criterion
- Posted bySteve Anderson
The 1960 theatrical trailer for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, demonstrating the film's linkage of cinematic voyeurism and murder
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The Constancy of Threat in the Technological Age
by Survey of Interactive MediaThe Peeping Tom trailer shows the beginnings of an anxiety about technology, continued more explicitly in the film "Eagle Eye".
BY DOMINIC MATHENY
The trailer for the film “Peeping Tom” opens with the necessity of telling the audience to “Look out!,” not once but three separate times. These warnings, in conjunction with the constancy of the camera in the peeping tom’s attacks, suggests that as technology proliferates, the notion of threat and danger is ever-increasing. And of course this threat is not just limited to the cinematic – it appears over and over in virtual-reality films and computer films, as recently as the film “Eagle Eye”.
In “Eagle Eye”, the computer program ARIIA is created to protect the citizenry of the United States – and when a decision is made to override the computer’s logic, making a decision regarding a bombing that has a substantial chance of failing, ARIIA considers the government unfit, and begins killing the leaders as a result. This suggests the anxiety of technology, and the idea that simulated artificial intelligence, tied to computational processes, will give way to a sentience that may result in our most important assets being in the control of a numerical logic. ARIIA’s murderous rampage based on what was a 51% chance of a probable ID, deemed insufficient, makes explicit our anxieties about the nature of computational logic itself. If humans are no longer allowed to make decisions with a 49% chance of failure, which isn’t enough for the failsafe logic imbued onto computers by their human creators – we have created the tools which will rob us of our autonomy ultimately.
The worry here suggested is that there is an inherent lack of logic in logical programming – that logic includes an interpretive requirement, and by giving control to pure logic, devoid of the subjectivity of interpretation, the loss results in a tyranny-of-fact, crushing the cognitive awareness and judgments (for example ethically) under prescribed decisions with lack of nuance.