Rather, if you want a live performance from 1988, I give you the following:
"Monitor"
Monitor outside
for the people inside
a prevention of crime
a passing of time
they come and they go
it's a passing of time
they come and they go
whilst we sit in our homes
sit back and enjoy
the real McCoy
our new air of authority
our sentinel of misery
his face was full of intent
and we shook with excitement
then the victim stared up
looked strangely at the screen
as if her pain was our fault
but that's entertainment
what we crave for in- side
no more second rate movies
from those people outside
Sinisterly enough, Siemens AG in Peenemünde, Germany first used closed circuit television surveillance (CCTV) in 1942 in order to observe, record, and troubleshoot the launching of V2 rockets. In the United Kingdom, the first usage of CCTV in the public sphere came in 1960 when a temporary rig was set up in order to monitor a crowd gathering in Trafalgar Square at the arrival of the Thai royal family. This twin-camera installation was repeated on 5 November 1960 to temporarily monitor any Guy Fawkes day activity in the same open space of Trafalgar Square. In 1961, a London Transport train station boasted the country’s first permanent CCTV installation: the Holborn station on the Central Line received five black and white cameras. Three years later, police in Liverpool began to “experiment” with four concealed CCTV cameras near the center of that city as a means to thwart crimes of property. During the late 1960s, banks and retailers, especially in the United Kingdom, began installing CCTV systems to prevent crime, yet a shift in pragmatic thinking tended toward catching suspects after the crime had been committed. Prevention and deterrence had given rise to becoming courtroom evidence after the fact, from muggings on college campuses to the identification of the perpetrators of the 7 July 2005 terror attacks in London – as well as the inability disprove excessive force or corroborate police claims due to botched operation and faulty logistics. The 1970s saw the largest-scale experimentation in the U.K. and the 1980s saw the largest public-sphere installation of CCTV systems, with the rise of traffic cameras to “monitor” arterial thoroughfares and high-speed motorways in and around London and other larger British cities and the development and employment of “red-light” cameras and other enforcement measures to capture wrongdoers in the act – often correctly. In the post-9/11 climate, reaction to CCTV has become more muted, with moderated and conservative-minded, pro-state persons actually calling for more. Legal challenges have been made in a few relatively isolated cases, but with several thousand CCTV cameras in place on London’s Tube and elaborate systems in airports and sports stadiums worldwide, CCTV is not on the ecliptic. At least in the U.K., funding is more than adequate, with funding for other means of crime prevention disproportionately low. In the London borough of Wandsworth – one of the most socioeconomically deprived environs of London, with high populations of racial and ethnic minorities – has a disturbingly high number of cameras per capita. Moreover, a majority of signs (or lack thereof) on public grounds are classified by at least one source as illegal or not descriptive enough. Nonetheless, benevolent deception from the State – as well as its coercive ability – becomes a framework for creating a form of “architectural incarceration”, a public-sphere prison where the public citizen eventually adapts and applauds monitoring, and welcomes it upon himself.
Surveillance, as a tool and technology, is capable of a “procedural-transformative” nature wherein comportment, activity, social structures, and far more can have meanings assigned, reassigned, and wherein the narrative of everyday life adapts to its presence and even mimics it. For instance, the rapid escalation of CCTV in the UK during the 1990s – despite CCTV already being prevalent and an everyday fact in the decades prior – was due in large part to the existence of the IRA and the perceived threat of terrorism, and little discussion or argument, outside the academic sphere, took place. In an interview, Christian Parenti argues that the debate was “technocratic” and the rise of CCTV in the United States post-9/11 mimics the mushrooming of CCTV in the UK during the 1990s. The transformation of the entertainment industry from pre-designed narrative simulating life into a Reality Mentality that monitored reality (or its own simulation) further erases the conceptualization of public and private. According to Parenti,
[T]he proliferation of surveillance themes within entertainment habituates people to the gaze of authorities and that fame culture is very important to this habituation. The problem for many young people today is not being on camera, it is not being on it. There is a homemade fame culture on the Web, around Webcam communities, people who broadcast their lives. […]Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the surveillance in and of itself … But one might raise the question of how this may habituate us all to constant observation and monitoring.
This system of “surveillance and narcissism” erases the ideal of public sphere and privacy within the public sphere, and aestheticizes surveillance. In some ways, this surveillance-narcissism and its subsequent aesthetic celebration is by no means a novelty. In the Christian pastoral tradition dating back five hundred years, a private citizen was obligated, once a year, to confess to all acts of the flesh that contravened law. Not only did sins come under the realm of spiritual scrutiny, but desires and thoughts articulated solely within the mind were to be expurgated, communicated in as detailed language as possible, and thereby no desire too small or weakness to minute could escape moral authority. The leap to the 21st Century is not a broad one when we consider the stylization of the confessional act, especially one of sexuality or “perverseness.” The viewing audience at home serves as a moral judge and jury when television programs like Taxicab Confessions or America’s Next Top Model air. Certainly, the audience administers some amount of judgment upon villainous acts, words, or deeds, but therein lies the core of the situation: viewership into the most private desires or ideas mitigates privacy’s sacrosanct qualities, and the presentation of material affects its reception. In the least stylized of programming, such as Cops where very little editing of raw footage takes place, with often only one camera, audience members are left to their own prejudices and experiences to filter out and mediate the boundary of breach of privacy. In television shows like True Stories of the Highway Patrol, truth as it is documented is narrated, crosscut, replayed, edited, shown from different angles, overdubbed, and underlaid with theme music, incidental music, and “personal” testimony all with a specific goal in mind: view the suspect or criminal as harshly as possible with no detail left to chance (simultaneously editing which “details” to send to the Confessor sitting on the couch at home).
Television shows like Big Brother, Survivor, Real World, and even Deadliest Catch – as well as web-based reality “showlets” – are all highly stylized and trivialize privacy and remove all power of enchantment, allowing for assumably authentic, private moments to be broadcast to millions while at the same time basking in paradoxical simultaneity of Schadenfroh and Narcissism, dismissing human experience at its nadir yet being titillated, and identifying and co-opting moments of private joy and success. In this manner, what may have been a public space – a backyard, an alley, a boat, a forest on a deserted island – becomes a public sphere: visibility yields to recognition, and accessibility becomes participation; by consistently monitoring the individual’s privacy within the context of hyper-public existence, we see the employment of individual rights (or lack thereof) in some sort of collaborative effort. At every grimace of pain and moment questionable mental judgment, from moments of emotional vulnerability to a desensitization to the abjectified and intensely private (bowel movements, nausea, and so forth) the entire human body becomes a sort of a public sphere within a larger contextually public space. The person loses agency over his or her own body as it is constructed within a fragmentary camera gaze, and through editing and mediation of privacy, the person loses grasp of free choice. Aside from eroticizing or fetishizing the body. the presentation of the person not qua a person but rather a body-object disembodied from the very tenets of humanity – choice, intuition, privacy, and intellect – is an incarcerative measure that imprisons the image of the body-object and tortures it for the benefit of the viewer. This is by no means a new phenomenon, at least in terms of women’s history: maps, poems, pieces of music, and works of art, obviously, have cast women’s bodies as fragmentary objects and even as foreign terrain to be navigated, mediated, and conquered at the hands of men. Men, however, are fairly recent newcomers to this phenomenon. In terms of verisimiltudinous fragmentation of the corporeal, we need not look any further than the most recent Saw “horror” film where torture becomes a method of imprisonment and the abject violence becomes the raison d’être and sublimation of viewing pleasure. In this situation, as in pornography, pure flesh and its decorporealization and extraction from reality becomes paramount despite how far-fetched the visual scenario becomes. The narrative of the imprisoned body-object becomes subsidiary to the experience of the viewer; voyeurism trumps authenticity, separation subverts proximity. Bleakly, the ability to change the channel – to insist that the viewer has ultimate power and would rather remedy his or her own discomfiting situation rather than to remove the body-object and its torment from the public sphere – becomes the ultimate act of free will: so long as the viewer casts his or her gaze on the imprisoned public privacy, the torment continues; once the channel is changed or power turned off, the implication is that all torment ceases. The narrative of the viewer is separate from the victim’s narrative; while one is located within the other, both will continue unabated: the “reality” on the television or monitor or laptop screen will continue, as will the order of the viewer’s. In short, the imprisoned’s narrative is a MacGuffin to real-world existence and experience.
Certainly, Siouxsie Sioux’s lyrics to “Monitor” are affective intellectually on all of the aforementioned levels, and highly effective in its like conflation of surveillance narcissism, and in the confusion of the definition of “public good” or best interest. The questionable nature of CCTV surveillance and the multiple-narrative construction of the lyrics become, then, our starting ground in analysis of the song as a whole.
II: That’s Entertainment: Violence, Voyeurism, Narcissism, and Panopticism
Approaching the song "Monitor" as a text can be deceptive, since "Monitor," lyrically and musically, appears rather straightforward in terms of semantic and semiotic meaning. Certainly, the linearity and economy of the lyrical-musical text seems to undermine any need for critical reading, but it is within this apparent lack of artifice that unapologetically subversive ideals and events unfold. Consequently, the resulting readings of this text, while exacted in performance as linearly as possible, are as fundamentally complex and austere as the song itself. Overall, there is a relative clarity within the text of the lyrics in terms of narrative and logical progression. The text appears unfettered and linear but is deceptively simple as there are several instances of "writerly" events: binary oppositions, references to outside narratives and works of literature, delayed gender identification, and a bitter reversal of fortune and cosmic irony. The song, both musically and lyrically, contains a wealth of multifaceted signifiers, and the performer and audience of the song become signifiers to the internal workings of the text. The structure of the narrative is highly complex, fractalized, self-reflexive, and itself a compelling marker for the previously discussed idea of an audience’s separation from the simulated (or authentic).
Aside from line breaks in the liner notes, the progression of the lyrics is continuous, with few immediate clues to its structural hierarchy. The only repetition within the lyrics comes with the line "they come and they go" which is duplicated two lines after its initial appearance, and the phrase "a passing of time" spread across two separate stanzas. In poetic structure, the lyric is four stanzas in length, with the first three stanzas four lines in length and the final stanza nine lines in length. The total line count of twenty-one, while perhaps coincidental, creates a mild undercurrent through the reading of the lyrics: long the Age of Majority in a number of countries, it has been touted anecdotally as a chronological rite of passage – furthermore, the age at which one became an adult, or, more to the point, became a man. Anthony Burgess, for instance, designed the novel A Clockwork Orange with the twenty-first chapter in mind as point in which the protagonist shirks reckless, violent immaturity. Addressing this aspect later, we turn our attention back to the breakdown of stanzas: the first and third have identical, controlled rhyme schemes in the double rhymed couplet, as the second stanza, weakly referencing the scheme of a sonnet's rhyme scheme, veers away from the strict aabb control. The order of terminal sounds in the second stanza is slightly changed, yet remains regular. A strict rhythmic pattern emerges as a highly ordered set of sounds that is duplicated musically. Viewing syllables that occur on downbeats, we have a great deal of regularity and the create of a caged sensation, an idea of sonic confinement between barlines. This sense of order, this seeming fixation on regimentation, is eviscerated in the final stanza, which bears no structural resemblance to the first three stanzas in terms of rhythm or rhyme scheme. Rhythmically, the stanzas become more and more active until we arrive at the end of the lyric – and end of its violence – as the last few lines of the final stanza resemble those of the first stanza, further increasing a return to the regimented burden. While the pitch realm never changes throughout the song, the narrative of the final stanza becomes grueling, harsh, and chaotic, bursting free from the order imposed while returning to confinement: the entire four-stanza composition is repeated to give the piece a long-term binary structure, and this binary sensibility is simultaneously occluded and magnified, as the first line of the song is superimposed over the continuation of the fourth stanza. This focusing in upon smaller elements of the text, repetition verbatim of the text as a whole -- veritably, replayed from beginning to end -- and imposition of order and control are not coincidences, either, and have their roots in one of the more sinister and insidious forms of social control: video surveillance.
The most ostensibly sensible reading of the lyrics frames the song as a mildly, and at turns chillingly, dystopian frame narrative of the conflation and confusion of surveillance cameras designed to prevent crime that become mediated entertainment to an unnamed audience, either the authority meant to thwart crime, an audience comprised of home viewers as loyal subjects of the State, or some combination of both. The tale includes the seen through CCTV (and presumably on television monitors) that begins nondescriptly: “they come and they go / whilst we sit in our homes.” The audience, through Siouxsie’s singing, is informed it should sit back, relax, and brace itself for the “real McCoy:” in the final, sprawling stanza of the lyrics, an attack, most likely physical and sexual in nature, is carried out in front of a camera and absorbed, with unknown reaction beyond immediate and instant, by the home audience. Yet the song is a narration in itself wherein Siouxsie gives an account of the action – herself a camera of sorts framing the spectacle in a certain manner – for a home audience of real, live, authentic humans – us. The first order of the narrative, the absolute external, then, is the real, live listener: the person or persons absorbing Siouxsie’s lyrics and music. This is the broadest external narrative within this frame narrative, which we will dub Narrative Zero. The second order, Narrative One, is the narrator, moderator, and messenger: Siouxsie herself, with the musical devices operating on equal footing with the lyrical text. The third order, Narrative Two, is the unclarified home audience watching the alternately joyless and exciting from their own construction of reality through CCTV. The attack, enjoyed by home audiences as they “[shake] with excitement” as it happens, is the final narrative, or Narrative Three, and the layer that receives the most telescopic focus: what we have is a recursive voyeuristic spectacle within a spectacle.
The boundary between Narratives Two and Three and the action in both are the most complex yet least abstract in some ways and will be our starting point for exploration. The obvious question is: who exactly is monitoring the situation transpiring in Narrative Three? Who is this audience? Are the viewers of the attack the Police or simply viewers at home indulging in the banal, egregious, and appalling? Who is the victim in the attack, and who is the attacker? The implied violence of the attack – with only one reference to pain – does more to propel the song’s action and disturb Narrative Zero listeners as it removes all specific action.
The final stanza of the lyric presents itself in a rather cinematographically ritualized way: we can envision a family huddled on a couch rapt with attention as a violent, unthinkable act takes place onscreen, with an extra-diegetic camera cutting between the reactions and actions. The conflation between reality and entertainment is a familiar trope to the casual TV viewer, and is ritualized in aggressive participation in entertainment. If, moreover, the attack is State-sanctioned violence for the Greater Good, is it then a vicious circle of “ritual violence” meant to perpetuate order – that is to say, keep the audience captive and imprisoned? Perhaps, but voyeuristically so. “Violence becomes simultaneously the instrument, object, and all-inclusive subject of desire,” writes Girard, where this desire manifests itself in viewership as “man desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess.” Setting aside gender and power for a moment, this conceptualization of possessing refers back to Parenti’s statement and locates the viewers as perverted narcissists, desiring to be in a position of fame, but refusing the consequences and torment itinerant. Girard casts this sort of behavior as the “monstrous double,” wherein we have the Narrative Two audience becoming the attacker, desiring the victim as much as the unnamed, unkown attacker. Girard further creates a construction of violent desire in the triangle of Subject-Object-Rival [FIG 3], and in this case, we can clearly position the victim as the Object, the attacker as Subject, and the Narrative Two audience as Rival, the interchangeable monstrous double with the assailant. The audience is Rival only because it exerts an equal, if only passive, desire for the Object, and ultimately fails at the pursuit. Girard discusses at length the conceptualization of the “surrogate victim” – a non-human object or animal as a stand-in for a human sacrifice; in this case, the sacrifice is indeed human, and the simulations ceased, replaced by the ultimate authentic. The sacrifice occurs to give pleasure and order to the Narrative Two audience, with the symbology pellucid: liberty and freedom from intrusion in the public sphere and a total lack of regard for privacy and sanctity. The Narrative Two audience sees into a most abject, perverse act of humanity, yet Narrative One and Zero audiences are peering into Narrative Two’s home and watching (hearing) their reactions to the attack. The State allows the attack to continue, never intervening; the home audience never intervenes and desires to be attacked. The circular culture of aestheticized fame at the expense of trivializing the sanctuary of privacy is at play. The on-screen sacrifice is the symbolic attack upon public-space freedom, and the home audience revels as it is conditioned to take all on-screen action as fiction. The sacrifice and loss, in this instance, is just one part of a continuum, where continual erosions of civil liberties and impositions of thought controls continue unabated. Girard posits that “it is entirely possible to regard the sacrificial rite as a commemoration of a real event;” here, however, we have a clear inversion, where the real event is taken (however profoundly) by Narrative Two’s audience as symbol. In line with a mentality a fictional (or real) police state may have regarding the imposition of social control and populace order, Girard writes that “even the most violent rites are specifically designed to abolish violence. To see these rites as expressions of man’s pathological morbidity is to miss the point.” This is perhaps most disturbing since Girard implies, out of humanity’s rationality and lack of necessity of animal instinct, that there is no braking mechanism for violent behavior in humankind, and therefore no end to the circle of violent acts and violent retaliation.
The audience in Narrative Two, though, seems to have no quibble with this statement. Continuing as the monstrous double, the audience sees what the attacker sees and Subject and Rival temporarily merge. The attacker initiates the assault, and the result is a chilling return of the audience’s stare: "the victim looked up / looked strangely at the screen / as if her pain was our fault." At the very least, the audience is complicit in the attacker's violence by remaining mute and still, watching rather than reacting. We have here as well a multiplicity within one of the principle tenets within Mulvey's asymmetrical power structure through the male gaze: the attacker was confirmed as male immediately, but the victim's identity as a female was marginalized: it is not announced prominently in the lyrics that the victim is indeed a woman, using gender only as an afterthought. The victim is first named only as a victim, several syllables later given a possessive pronoun within the center of a line. The attacker, male, is introduced immediately, as possessing a face; the victim is given no physical features and is therefore wholly disembodied. While both remain nameless, the positioning of the pronoun in the text attests to the lack of agency the victim has over herself; we are aware of violence in the “cut” from the attacker to the Narrative Two audience, and finally to the victim. The audience, as well, is characterized as excited, anxiously awaiting the next move. While Mulvey speaks specifically about film, recasting her theories into other media is acceptable here: the conflated television-authoritarian surveillance acts as another cinematic screen and frame through which dominant order has been set. Mulvey writes that the “magic of Hollywood…arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.” The sexualization and eroticization inherent in the viewing audience creates a form of reified pleasure through the anxiety before mental climax. The only gratification, though, can come from watching “an objectified Other.” All agency of the Other is stripped through voyeuristic intent; all power belongs to the one casting the Gaze – the attacker who becomes the State / home audience; only the attacker is gendered, extending maleness to the State. Between "his face" and "her pain" we have a perfect construct of the most abstract of Mulvey's structural power imbalance: her pain is the male gaze, if not agency over her own body, made double by the gaze of the paternalistic social order observing through the CCTV lens. This marker indicates that a woman can only possess pain and is always a victim through the man's/attacker's eye, always helpless, always weak, always the receiver of torment. The abjection of pain, of suffering, as a possession, as a qualitative thing, is marginalized and described as an afterthought. Woman, then, cannot even possess the pain that is inflicted upon her.
To simply state that every narrative level is an attacker or voyeur is to make overly simplistic the subtleties and layers of the accounts and their subsequent analyses. We have observed the identification of the attacker and victim at the deepest level of the narrative and their tacit repartee with the audience in Narrative Two; however, to fully elucidate theoretical approaches to the lyrics, we must consider the construction of the audience Siouxsie sings about. The attacker-victim binary is sealed within the confines of the television screen, some sort of Videodrome installed by the state for a double-sided social control; the audience exists in its own world, sealed away and insulated from the events of the attack. Mulvey states that “film [and by extension other media] portray[s] a hermetically sealed world indifferent to the presence of the audience.” There is a corroborated theme of transferral and distance present in both lyrics and music. There is a physical distance between what is seen by the narrative's audience – the sexual assault upon the woman victim – and the felt, visceral or tactile. Indeed the only one who feels is the victim through her pain, or to build upon Girard's explorations of violence, through her insulated victimization. The victim is completely isolated during the attack, save the bitterly ironic knowledge that there are onlookers, and is insulated from societal intervention. The audience is enclosed within its own cell, their viewing room or living room, drawn in by their own most unspeakable desires, being duplicitously convinced that what they are "seeing" is make-believe, if we take the conflation of voyeuristic surveillance and generic television programming at face value. The audience is thus isolated from the attack and the firsthand experience, and becomes a collective insulated victim of benevolent deception, as well as a victim of their own curiosity. Furthermore, viewing a slice of reality and taking it for fiction leaves the audience totally vulnerable to be placed in a similar situation for the benefit for others, or as Girard posits, to become the ritualized sacrifice to restore and preserve social order. The audience here, then, identifies with the victim, but other possibilities exist. The audience could be consuming the power and status emanating from the Gaze; that is, they appropriate the attacker’s power as their own, despite it being only virtual. Identification with the victim allows for their own victimization, if not creating a desire for victimization. The lyrics support this inverted desire. About the attack in general, Siouxsie narrates: “That’s entertainment / what we crave for inside / no more second-rate movies / from those people outside.” The total implication here is the audience is fully desirous to fixate on the violent act and through sadistic voyeurism and fetishism – should the “show” ever be rerun – fully support the Panoptical State’s fragmentary treatment of its subjects in line to perpetuate its own social order.
Further to the point of the dual role of the audience and the ambiguity of identity are the issues of fragmentation, gender construction, and confinement. As already stated, the distance between narrative elements is clear and yields an element of voyeurism, and as Doane portends, physical and psychological distance between the Object and Subject become criteria for voyeuristic treatment. Doane’s approach to Mulvey’s gaze reconsiders spectatorship and positions female spectators as powerlessly narcissistic, immersed in the female object, or in need of gender reassignment by taking on (as Doane implies) a disease of masculinization by having to identify with the male. The camera, the CCTV apparatus piping the attack into the audience, obviously has no gender, no sex, though in phallogocentric measures, the camera is the ultimate male gazer. If we follow Mulvey’s logic, we discover that the audience is always female while it is powerless to break the CCTV’s gaze, yet is always male through its regard and power over the screen. Combined with Doane, the audience is hermaphroditic as it identifies with both attacker and victim. This presupposes heterosexual identifications: returning our attention to the victim, the delayed onset of gendering in the lyrics may be more than a device to demonstrate subjugation in patriarchal society. The pronoun may simply be an arbitrary assignment to code a body that is differently gendered yet sexed in automatic, autonomic measures. Further, the “her” in the lyrics as the victim may instead embody another form of supposed radicalism or non-normative the State wishes to impose its order upon and eradicate: homosexuality, and, more specifically, lesbianism. Foucault states that “sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing to be administered.” While this statement deals specifically with coitus, we can logically extend this to the performers and receivers of sexual acts. To this end, it is likely that the hypothetical State discussed is indeed administering sex, the act of sex, and gender and orientation upon the victim.
We have seen thus far that the victim, assumed to be female, is represented through the lens of the camera only as an implied visage: “then the victim looked up / stared strangely at the screen”. We understand that, while otherwise totally disembodied and physically covered, and therefore corporeally disengaged from view, the power is not hers given the direction she in which she stares and the fragmented representation. In Mulvey’s doctrine, the victim clearly has no power. Yet given the implication – if only intellectually – from zero discussion of her body and only the discussion of pain, it is possible to read the victim’s pain in at least two ways: first, she is being assigned a body – either by the State or by Siouxsie (acting as an agent of the State?) – and a sex; second, the pain may very well be a symbolic powerless rejection of heteronormativity. It is possible to read this pain in binary terms, then, as the victim could be suffering palpably as s/he is being forced to become “feminine” and likewise being forced to differentiate as heterosexual. The lack of physicality – and the fragmented, assumptive representation we are given – could similarly be viewed as forcing a genital norm upon the victim. In this way, and for the “benefit” of the home audience in Narrative Two, the victim is an unwilling (and perhaps un-able) pawn under the rule of the State to perpetuate Puritanical norms upon gender and sex: the non-liberation, non-enjoyment, and implicit brutality couple with a manifestation of shame in the absence of body and absence of genitals in order to reinforce a heteronormative genital function. More perplexing is a simultaneous reading that would imply sexual violence – on some level – is acceptable as entertainment ritual, so long as it is only heterosexual. While there is little in the lyric to move beyond this into deploring or aggrandizing homosexual violence, the inclination is that the thrill of power belongs only to a male perpetrator, and the victim’s gender, sex, and orientation are at least beyond necessity of description so long as the State and the audience receive precisely what they want. Under Foucault’s reading of the Benthamist Panopticon, the triumvirate of social correction has played out to its full: the populace is completely supervised and under surveillance, with the unknown victim as the Defendant facing charges from the State; the control is likewise exerted by keeping the home audience confined and transfixed, and confining the victim to an abstract space, preparing for correction; finally, the correction is doled out to the victim – here, as (re)assigning a gender and sexuality against the victim’s will – with a subconscious corrector entering the eyes and minds of the viewers safe at home. We have a multitiered architectural incarceration and a system of confinement that is, despite its internal complexity, hermetic and independent of higher-order narratives.
What, then, do we make of Siouxsie, who relays these narratives to us? Positively, she herself acts as a camera of sorts, framing the narratives in her own textual and vocal declamations, and filtering out all but the most necessary courses of action. This problematizes, in some ways, the entire discussion of the lower-order narratives at this point: what, if anything, is Siouxsie censoring? Despite the matter-of-fact storytelling, does a possibility exist that there is more to the backstory? Assuredly, Siouxsie is an outside observer, yet there is a vacillation between being separated from Narrative Two and being immersed in it. Siouxsie as an active spectator takes on a Dickensian Marley role, providing a cautionary statement to the listeners; as a passive observer, she becomes a simpler non-diegetic voice. Still we have a binary system at work: in the Mulvey system, woman is passive, observant, and must channel desire through masculinization; only man is active. The reversal, though, comes in tense: the first stanza, being expository and fragmentary, has no verbs; the second and third – wherein Siouxsie creates Narrative Two – has present tense action verbs, or active viewing with the switch to participatory. Siouxsie, in the third stanza, becomes the voice of the State with the benevolent deception couched in imperatives (“Sit back and enjoy / the real McCoy”) just before an aside references the Panopticon itself (“our sentinel of misery”). In the fourth stanza – where the Narrative Three/Four attack and reaction occurs – Siouxsie narrates in the past tense, confusing the power and activity and obfuscating her own role and gender. Certainly, there is more at stake within musical markers that shed more light on Siouxsie’s position in Narrative One, and further encodes her as a voyeur – but as self-reflected Object as well.
Our identity, as listeners, participants, and collaborators in Narrative Zero, is constructed as the voyeur with the maximal amount of control, even more so than the representatives of authority who monitor the situation and can intervene as the violent act occurs (or choose not to). We simultaneously have maximum power through our eligibility to remove ourselves from the entirety of the sphere through stopping playback, and we have the absolute minimum of power, since, should we choose to hear, we become ultimately confined and surrogates participating in the violent act that will always unfold identically upon each subsequent listen. This profound helplessness – and a transference of the inner narratives’ confinement issues – is corroborated musically.
A complex network of identities and symbols reveals itself through the musical text, and while much could be written about every aspect of the musical product, we will confine our discussion here to those elements that discuss confinement and objectification, historically, as well as musical-textual devices that satirize the State and a puritanical bent it hopes to enshrine in its subjects.
