"Just being transparent Baby": Surveillance culture, digitization, and self-regulation in Paul Schrader’s The Canyons

Slaymaker, James (2020) "Just being transparent Baby": Surveillance culture, digitization, and self-regulation in Paul Schrader’s The Canyons. In, Moore, Michelle E. and Brems, Brian (eds.) ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 155-170. (doi:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474462037.003.0010).

Abstract

Paul Schrader’s micro-budget 2013 feature The Canyons was almost unanimously disparaged upon release, with critics pointing to its emotional detachment, flat digital aesthetic and lack of realistic characterization as its major flaws. This chapter rails against these criticisms and explores the complex aesthetic, socio-political, and moral purpose of Schrader’s film. The chapter argues that a theoretical approach to The Canyons as an expression of the post-humanist condition fostered by the influx of surveillance cameras and social media into the fabric of everyday life allows us to perceive of his work as a cultural tool that forces us to reflect upon our relationship with media images. A reading of the feature through the theoretical framework of Foucault's visual economy of self-regulation fills a gap within Schrader scholarship by arguing for an interpretative paradigm which investigates the symbiotic relation between alienation, narcissism and the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience at the centre of The Canyons, thus offering a substantial insight on the fragmentation and disintegration of affect and personhood within a digitized culture.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics