For a two-month span at the tail end of 2024, I returned to my childhood home to care for my mother as she died. For a few months after that, I felt functional and coolly productive. I still wrote, even if what I wrote was not fit to print; I ate in restaurants with friends; I rarely cried, though I was sad; I insisted I’d been lucky to be present for her death, as if watching one of the people I loved most in the world devolve into half-blind incoherence in the final hours of her life had been a teachable moment. This eerie, false acceptance carried on until March, when I awoke one morning with the awful sensation that I was being watched. I would not call this a paranoid delusion, exactly; I would say that it was more like a sudden awareness of how odd I must look to other people, who, in spite of my attempts at repression, presumably still saw my grief encircling me like a dark aura. It was something like this: I felt too large for every room. I felt as if every little gesture I made was like one that a drunk person might attempt if they were trying to seem sober; as if I were being filmed in extreme close-up all the time. Now that I had watched one terrible thing happen up close, I felt that a hundred more terrible things were free to slip through the newly opened door of my pain.
This went on for several months; it is still, to some degree, going on. As it turns out, this is relatively normal: both anxiety and paranoia are commonly accepted symptoms of bereavement. They are also, undoubtedly,acceptable symptoms of living in the present. The sense of malevolence that dogged me was not all in my head — it was also in the world, and on the screen of my phone. Flipping through Stories on my Instagram account during that time, I found myself routinely faced with visual juxtapositions that were savage enough to induce psychic whiplash: a rhinoplasty advert; protestors being beaten; smug dinner party images; a Palestinian man with the remains of his child in a plastic carrier bag.
In cinema, screens frequently play a significant or symbolic role in stories about paranoia and grief precisely because the screen functions, metaphysically speaking, in two contradictory directions at once: it allows us to get far too close to the action, and it also allows for a distancing effect.
In Andrea Arnold’s 2006 film Red Road, a woman named Jackie is employed as a CCTV operator, monitoring the area surrounding the deprived Glaswegian estate of the title. Jackie’s daughter and husband are dead, and the reason for their deaths is left opaque until more than two-thirds into the film. Early on, however, Jackie is shown fixating on a mysterious man who appears in the footage she records from her cameras, and we’re led to assume that her particular interest in him stems from his connection to her suffering.
The staggering poverty of the area that Jackie watches over means that crime — and violent or sexual crime, in particular — is rife. At one point, she fails to turn a lens in time to catch the perpetrators of a teen girl’s sudden stabbing, distracted by her fixation on the man we are sure must have abused her, or else murdered her child. We do not find out if the girl survives. Supposing she does not? We must assume that this girl has a mother, and that Jackie’s professional negligence has led to the creation of a sick new mirror for herself: another parent collapsing into rubble, like a tower block being blown to smithereens with dynamite.
Ultimately, to solve the problem of her grief, Jackie chooses to pass over. She switches from observer to observed, venturing out of her CCTV tower and into the offscreen world of the mystery man, whose name is Clyde. Formerly an all-seeing eye, she is now a civilian, walking through the zones usually covered by her cameras, slinking just out of Clyde’s sight.
It seems impossible, at points, that he does not see her, and when she finally slips into his flat during a party, it takes us by surprise that he does not know who she is. The scenes of her enacting a haunting — playing the specter — are a clever invocation of the grieving person’s status as a wan living shadow who feels, paradoxically, both ultra-conspicuous and wholly under threat.
Away from her slow pursuit of Clyde, there is a brief shot of Jackie holding two funereal urns in her arms under the duvet at home; one is so small that the sight of it makes your stomach churn. Later, she is shown stuffing a set of babies’ clothes, and then hugging them tightly to her chest. These are images that we can hardly bear. They are an ache transmitted through a screen.
Almost all of Red Road traffics in high-tension surveillance, and yet even a violent, vividly real-seeming sex scene near the film’s climax fails to equal the guilty voyeurism the viewer feels here. It is easy to see why Jackie might prefer to be a ghost, and why feeling like one might allow her to feel closer to her husband and child. Climbing into the monitor is, in a sense, the closest she can get to climbing inside that little urn.
Red Road’s brilliance (and it is brilliant, at least up until its rushed, rather glib dénouement, in which Clyde is revealed to have killed Jackie’s husband and daughter in a drug-fueled vehicular accident) lies in its earnest acknowledgement of Jackie’s existential despair, and its simultaneous depiction of this unhappy madness as being situated in the context of systemic unhappiness and madness.
All around her are dirt-poor, persecuted people for whom pain is both typical and constant — experienced as a birthright. In this sense, it is a fine piece of art about the singular experience of trying to metabolize a private experience of grief at the same time as being exposed to the scaled-up horrors being enacted elsewhere: horrors like poverty and government neglect, or war and genocide, or authoritarian crackdowns on minority groups.
Like Jackie, I found myself glued to my screens during those especially miserable and paranoid months, and like her, too, I found myself split in two by my desire to hide away and concentrate on my own small catastrophe, and my concurrent belief that it was necessary for me to bear witness to the suffering of others.
Eventually, Jackie — having at one time been out for single-minded revenge — seems to realize her place in a wider web of cruelty and familial estrangement. Man, as Philip Larkin once said, hands down inhumanity to man. This realization frees her, in much the same way as a ghost might be freed in an exorcism.
Would that this freedom was as easily achieved in real life, or that feeling a sense of resolution in one’s personal affairs made any kind of dent in the widespread evils of the age — but then movies are movies, and even a gritty arthouse thriller can succumb to the need for an uplifting ending.
Less relatable is Jackie’s unexamined role as a tool of the State. As a CCTV operator, while she might be said to be tasked with protecting civilians, it is also undeniable that her footage will be wielded like a cudgel against citizens whose most grievous crime is being poor, or using drugs, or doing sex work.
Funnily enough, before seeing Red Road, I had imagined that CCTV from the street was assessed after the fact, and not watched in the moment by a living, breathing person with their finger hovering over a button that allowed them to zoom in on our faces. Naïve of me, perhaps, to assume that a person could be guaranteed even a moment of true privacy in public in this century.
Four years before Red Road was released, artist Deborah Stratman directed a short film with the offbeat title In Order Not to Be Here. It is made up almost entirely from CCTV footage, showing dark, empty parking lots and unmanned gas stations, closed superstores and silent gated communities and empty fields. Overlaid with crackling police scanner audio, the whole film has an atmosphere of suffocating closeness, an almost unbearable tension arising from its combination of a God’s eye perspective, and a landscape in which absolutely nobody appears.
That title, it turns out, is a fragment of a longer phrase, and this phrase appears in full at the start of the piece:
YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE ELSEWHERE IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE.
As I watched Stratman’s film for the first time a week or so ago, this eerie and dissociative sentence, in addition to the work’s surveillance-centric structure, made me think about Jackie, who so perfectly embodies the half-there splitting of grief.
In Order Not to Be Here does not have a happy ending. Instead, after twenty or so minutes of non- narrative shots, we are rewarded with the closest thing we’re getting to a story: a long and unbroken aerial shot of an unknown man running frantically, trying to escape from the camera. He fails, since there is nowhere else to go. This time, I did not think of Jackie. Instead, I looked at the running man and, momentarily, selfishly felt as if I were watching footage of myself.
