To See and to Be Seen: Surveillance, the Vampiric Lens and the Undead Subject

Abstract

This chapter addresses the self, as it sees and is seen, in contemporary media culture, and the attendant compulsory identity changes which result from ‘vampiric’ surveillance. Pramod K Nayar in Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance (2015) links continual surveillance, with specific reference to CCTV and visual observation, directly to identity formation so that one’s sense of self is directly related to the acts of seeing and being seen. Christopher Slobogin states that the “inevitability of being observed and recorded” (2007, p. 94) changes people, which Nayer sees as an act of violence where one’s real self is aggressively replaced by an inauthentic identity that is created for and in the observing lens/camera. (Nayar 2015, pp. 1–2) There is much within this construction that can be considered undead in some way—that which is caught between being alive/real/ authentic and dead/unreal/inauthentic. How this might work and the way it affects the surveilled subject can be more clearly shown with a close reading of the scenes involving Count Dracula, his lair and his gaze in the seminal vampire novel, Dracula by Bram Stoker from (1897) and its first official screen adaptation by Tod Browning from (1931). These will highlight how the metaphor of the vampire is correlated to certain aspects of surveillance, which will then be applied to two more recent films, Afflicted (Lee and Prowse 2013) and Daybreakers (Speirig Brothers 2009). The present study will add to current research by showing how the ubiquity of surveillance in the twenty-first century cannot only be considered as vampiric, but that the identity changes it forces on those being observed leaves the subject, on some level, as undead.