Not on the red carpet!” Hayden Panettiere’s publicist advised, after the 18-year-old star of Heroes threatened to “kill” an Us Weekly journalist at the Emmys last week. It was good advice, but about 50 years too late. In 1957, perhaps, there were places a homicidal munchkin looking to off a nosy reporter could do so with a reasonable expectation of privacy. Today, when 100 million cell phones are moonlighting as security cameras; when surveillance-industry entrepreneurs are developing devices that can see through walls and measure the heartbeats of occupants on the other side; when University of Maryland researchers can pick you out of a crowd by analyzing the way you walk and thus establishing your “gait DNA,” the red carpet is everywhere.
Look at O.J. If he got the urge to decapitate his ex-wife today, do you think he could be on a plane to Chicago before the bodies were even found? Now, you can’t even heist some old footballs without leaving enough documentation behind to fuel a Ken Burns miniseries. What kind of sentence, if any, O.J. will get for the allegedly armed room service he provided at the Palace Station won’t be settled until the hot, righteous tears of Geraldo Rivera melt a new shipping route through the Arctic Ocean, but at least one thing’s for certain already: Even Johnny Cochran couldn’t rhyme his way out of the audiotape and security-camera footage that place O.J. and his goons at the scene of Ocean’s 14: Nordberg’s Revenge.
What was the Juice thinking when he decided to commit unilateral memorabilia exchange in the only city in the world that’s monitored more intimately than Jenna Jameson’s pleasure flue? Probably the same thing as Britney Spears. When the semi-dormant superstar appeared onstage at the Palms Casino for her triumphant MTV comeback, a nation gasped at her scandalously befleshed pelvic girdle and dead-on impression of a 35-year-old stripper losing her will to live one bored hip-grind at a time as a Britney Spears song plays poignantly in the background. Had Pfizer introduce some new bacon-flavored version of Xanax? Was the David Lee Roth Fright Wig Boutique having a pre-Halloween clearance sale on pre-owned hair-extensions?
How could she possibly go on live TV looking like that?
Lost in all the snarky trash-talking was a simple, startling fact: This was actually Spears’ greatest public performance in years! Yes, she wasn’t quite as trim as she was in her To Catch a Predator prime. Yes, each episode of Don’t Forget the Lyrics features more people who know the words to her songs better than she does. But at least she didn’t hit-and-run someone’s car as she dirty-wobbled around the stage like a deer caught in the headlights of thermonuclear fame. At least her famously extroverted vagina stayed tastefully sheathed in a modest pair of sequin-studded whore-pants.
For the last 10 years, every moment of Spears’ life has been show time—whenever she steps outside, there are as many cameras aimed at her as there were at the Palms. Under such conditions, apparently, resentment shifts to indifference, then indifference morphs into a kind of bemused despair. Why strive for perfection—or even competence—when you know that eventually the cameras are going to capture you doing something stupid, looking awful, behaving dishonorably? Look at the weary, shit-nibbling smirk on O.J.’s face in his latest mug shot. “Big deal, you got me,” it says. “You’ve been watching me 13 years now. What took you so long?”
If relentless scrutiny were just O.J.’s burden, Britney’s crisis, the future wouldn’t seem so ominous. But of course they’re just the canaries in the coal mine. Reading the headlines these days, with their constant revelations of horny senators and depraved quarterbacks, it sometimes seems as if civilization is undergoing some kind of epochal integrity crisis, when in fact we’re merely suffering from detection overload.
Surveillance cameras infest our cities like pigeons. Their presence doesn’t seem to stop us from mugging old ladies or threatening entertainment reporters, but what sort of impact will they have on us over time? In the past, our imperfect monitoring methods gave us the freedom to behave badly with some measure of discretion, and thus maintain the fiction that we weren’t all that bad, or at least not unredeemable. Now, as mounting evidence tells us otherwise, will we crack like O.J., snap like Britney? A British professor recently told BBC News that in 2057 security cameras will outnumber humans in his country by a factor of 1 million to one. Death at the hands of Hayden Panettiere seems merciful by comparison.