Stereotype and Surveillance in the television series “The Blacklist."
The Blacklist is an American crime drama series that premiered on NBC on September 23, 2013 (The Blacklist - NBC.com, 2016). The series revolves around Raymond Reddington alias Red, a former US Navy, who turned into a high-profile criminal (ranked 4th in FBI most wanted list) who turns himself in and offers to help in solving crime in exchange for immunity. He insists on working only with Elizabeth Keen, a new profiler for the bureau. In the course of the three series of the drama, stereotyping and surveillance have massively been employed.
Stereotyping
Going by a simple definition of the term, a stereotype is a generalized perception of a specified group of people. Stereotyping ignores the specific attributes of the individuals comprising of the group and slap the entire group with the characters that may only be exhibited by only a few members of the whole. In The Blacklist, one of the depictions of stereotyped groups is the operations of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) as secretive and beyond the understanding of an ordinary person (Weiner, 2007). With the help of Red, Elizabeth Keen can reveal the misery behind assassinations that to the normal people would appear like just accidents.
The stereotype of FBI and other federal security institutions operating in secrecy and basing their facilities in areas which would not be easy to detect is shown here, with Elizabeth Keen being flown to a site where no one knew existed as an office for FBI taskforce. In the series, an abandoned ship in the sea is shown to be a secret prison for CIA where criminals are held and sometimes executed by hanging. This stereotype depicts the stereotype that most federal government agencies operate in ways unknown to many Americans.
The racial stereotypes in this series are well covering the long time collectivism with which races have been grouped into. The superiority of the white people is depicted in the drama as all the people in the superior positions such as judges, attorney general, and sophisticated scientists are all whites (Greenberg & Kosloff, 2008). The black people are given the roles of fugitives, low-ranking police, and lawyers. According to the storyline, criminals such as “Berlin” are Russians or from Eastern Europe. The depiction of Reddington as a thoughtful criminal who is able to navigate through the crime world without being discovered as a police informant while criminals from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe are seen as irrational underlines the superiority of the whites as the dominant race.
The serialization of large companies as insensitive to the wellbeing of the environment and the communities in which they operate is clearly indicated in this drama series (Greenberg & Kosloff, 2008). In season two episode eleven, Anneca oil’s top management does not acknowledge that their pipeline has contaminated water leading to deaths of hundreds of villagers while others are critically ill. According to one of the men who allowed the company to drill in Uzbekistan, by then former Soviet Union, two villages were wiped out by the contaminated water due to leakage from the first pipeline and the present pipeline is also leaking. One of the people dead due to the contamination is the younger brother of Ruslan Denisov, a militant who is fighting oppression from the foreign owned company.
It is generalized that all people holding senior government offices are involved in some kind of syndicate for protection and survival. This stereotype is well illustrated in the drama as the senior members of the government including Attorney General of the United States are all involved in some form of organization that protects their illegal operations (Zhernovaya, 2014). Despite Red being a criminal who is believed to be on the run, he has connections to the highest ranking officers in the government. Red derives his power to perform business from the officers highly ranking in the government of United States. Red and Berlin are easily able to go to Moscow and assassinate the Russian minister of finance and then escape back to the United States, an action that requires one to have very strong connections to dare.
The stereotype of corruption and injustice being performed in the name of “national security” is emphasized when a murder case involving Elizabeth Keen and her husband is thrown out after deputy director Harold pulled some strings (Weiner, 2007). In the drama, Tom Keen kills a harbor officer who discovers where he was being held by Elizabeth to protect her from going to prison for kidnapping and torture. Despite a judge proposing that Tom be charged with murder and Elizabeth on perjury, the office of attorney general forces the judge to terminate the case and let the accused walk free in the name of "protecting national security." Illegal operations of FBI and CIA agents in the United States have been widely covered in the United States to the extent that Americans questions the legality of operations of the two organizations.
Surveillance
The entire series of The Blacklist, importance of information is undermined. Reddington surrenders to the FBI and despite being fourth on the list of most wanted fugitives by the bureau, he is granted immunity in exchange for information (Monahan, 2011). It is clear that Red has a very sophisticated surveillance machine that he uses to get information on other criminals, targets and the government agencies (Walters, 2001). He always know where to turn to get information on any specific occurrence and hence he is viewed as a high-value informant by the FBI, with Deputy Director Harold willing to let Anslo Garrick kill FBI agents rather than let him have Red.
The reason for success in business according to Reddington is having access to information, synthesizing it and using it to your own advantage. By using the information he has on various criminals, he is able to utilize the resources of FBI to catch criminals while in most cases, he was the beneficiary of elimination of the criminals (Walters, 2001). For instance, Red takes advantage of FBI trying to get back a kidnapped CIA operative in Uzbekistan to force Anneca Oil leave the industry in the country and have a company in which he has interests in getting the rights to mine oil in the country.
Both FBI, CIA, Mossad and other investigative bodies in the world use surveillance to gain access to information that allows them to prevent attacks and secure the country. Samar Navabi, a Mossad operative get is given a route into the FBI special operations group by Reddington to get information from the inside. Reddington was the first to hire Tom Keen as a covert operative to spy on Liz before he flipped and started working for Berlin (Monahan, 2011). The importance of information gathered through surveillance is underlined by the ability of Reddington to quickly interpret situations that people would let go as accidents and help the agency solve them. This is because he already had gathered information on them and once they attacked, he quickly identified them.
Information is the only thing that is keeping Raymond Reddington alive despite having some of the most prominent persons in the government of the United States and those of other nations such as China as enemies (Greenberg & Kosloff, 2008). His survival is because they believe that Red has the Fulcrum, a device which contains evidence that can put the agents away for a long time or even have some of them executed. Eventually, some of the people start to feel like he is just bluffing and that he has no evidence. They order a hit on Reddington who is lucky that he does not die when he is shot in the chest. When Elizabeth Keen proves that Red has the Fulcrum, the life of Red is save as they believed that his death would trigger a series of events that would culminate in releasing of the information contained in the fulcrum into the public domain and the syndicate could not risk it. Proof that Red had the Fulcrum saved his life when an assassin was just about to blow open his head.
When red presented himself to the FBI in the first episode of the show, he insists on only talking to Elizabeth Keen, a rookie profiling agent who was to start her job on the same day. He protected Elizabeth because he knew that she was the key to finding Fulcrum, which was vital for his survival. “The man with apple” was sent to watch Elizabeth to ensure that she either had the Fulcrum or not, although we are not sure who had sent him (The Blacklist - NBC.com, 2016). It is clear that Red treasured Elizabeth more than anything else despite there being no blood connection as she had initially suspected. The only reason he was protecting her was to use her to get the Fulcrum and hence be assured of his safety by blackmailing the other criminals who were highly ranking in the government hence protecting himself from them.
Reddington understands the power of surveillance, and he tells agent Samar Navabi that one of the reasons he was hard to trace and capture is because he had no habits like other criminals (Brennan, 2014). Reddington carries no phone, and he has no email address through which you can track his movement or communications (Fuchs, 2011), (Molz, 2006). This allows him to remain a shadow lurking behind the scenes and only appearing to attack. The CIA has been critiqued for collecting data from Americans and other persons of interest from all over the world. In underlining the importance of surveillance, Red tell Elizabeth that “anyone’s dirty little secrets are useful to someone” and probably this makes surveillance a monster when the information falls into the wrong hands.
Information attained through surveillance can be used in protecting the people from attacks, but it can also be used to blackmail the government or acquire information about government informants and spies which may be lethal to them (Brennan, 2014). An example of information in the wrong hands is illustrated by the case of Wu Jing, who steals information from a CIA operative in China and after decoding it sends men to kill the Chinese-American contractor who had given CIA information on the construction of Chinese buildings Beijing (Weiner, 2007). The good use of information is also indicated as Elizabeth Keen sends the same information to his colleagues who rush to the rescue of the Architect and his son who were on the brink of being killed by the Chinese operatives who were under the command of Wu Jing.
In conclusion, among other themes, stereotyping and use of surveillance to attain power are well illustrated in the drama. Stereotyping of federal security organizations as organizations that perform illegal operations and their sophistication in acquiring information are well outlined in the series. The white people domination is illustrated with all the successful people holding important positions in the government as per the series are whites. Most of the criminals in the drama are either from Asia, South America, Eastern Europe or they are black people. The stereotype that all people high ranking in the government are involved in illegal businesses run by syndicates is well shown in the series. The power of information that is mostly acquired through surveillance is indicated with a criminal such as Raymond Reddington surviving just because powerful people believe that he has the fulcrum.
References
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Fuchs, C. (2011). New Media, Web 2.0 and Surveillance. Sociology Compass, 5(2), 134-147. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2010.00354.x
Greenberg, J., & Kosloff, S. (2008). Terror Management Theory: Implications for Understanding Prejudice, Stereotyping, Intergroup Conflict, and Political Attitudes. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(5), 1881-1894. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00144.x
Molz, J. (2006). ‘Watch us wander’: mobile surveillance and the surveillance of mobility. Environ. Plann. A, 38(2), 377-393. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a37275
Monahan, T. (2011). SURVEILLANCE AS CULTURAL PRACTICE. The Sociological Quarterly, 52(4), 495-508. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2011.01216.x
The Blacklist - NBC.com. (2016). NBC. Retrieved 16 March 2016, from http://www.nbc.com/the-blacklist
Walters, G. (2001). Human rights in an information age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Weiner, M. (2007). Declassified C.I.A. Archives Detail Illegal Activities. Nytimes.com. Retrieved 16 March 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27cnd-cia.html?_r=0
Zhernovaya, O. (2014). Stereotyping of Americans in Modern International Political Jokes and Anecdotes: A New Reality or an Old Form in New Clothes?. Asian Social Science, 11(3). http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ass.v11n3p267
