SYDNEY’S PATH TO TRUTH
Unlike 24’s consistent attempts to shore up the validity of torture, Alias (2001–2006), of a similar genre and moment in history, seeks truth in a way that undermines the validity of torture. Alias depicts a type of national security that not only doesn’t rely on torture but actually posits its unreliability. The series also refuses to base the effectiveness of its operations on surveillance techniques or investigations of the body, such as one might see on a contemporary police drama that focuses on forensic evidence. Paramilitary action, surveillance, and forensics play a part in the successful missions that Alias depicts, but they do not have a foundational status for these missions. At the center of almost every mission shown on the series is instead the construction of a fiction, the creation of a false identity used to deceive the threat, usually an alias adopted by the heroine of the series, Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner).
Though critics often group Alias alongside 24 because it is structured as a spy thriller and it follows a small group dedicated to preserving national security, the two shows could not be more disparate. This opposition shows that Alias is not just different in its chosen methods but in its fundamental political bearing. In other words, it is not an accident that legislative, judicial, and military leaders invoke 24 when they defend their policies and don’t think to use Alias as a justification. It would lack the ideological utility that 24 has because of the attitude that Alias takes up to the process of acquiring information.
Alias contrasts with 24 in several key ways. The central opposition between the two shows concerns the effectiveness of torture, an effectiveness that 24 (as we have seen) simply takes for granted. In the world of Alias, torture remains consistently less effective then all other methods the federal agents use, but especially ineffectual compared to the lead character’s use of aliases to procure information. The primary task of the agents on Alias is to discover information or retrieve stolen high-tech items (such as bombs, satellites, or biological weapons) in order to protect national security. The agents certainly employ violence liberally throughout these tasks. What marks this series as different is its primary reliance on the fiction or alias as the most successful way of completing the tasks necessary for the preservation of national security. According to the conceit of the show, one particular agent, Sydney Bristow, leads the team and thus employs the most aliases. In the majority of the episodes, we see her perform a different alias (such as punk girl, nuclear physicist, prostitute, wealthy art collector, assassin, and so on) in order to acquire secret information, gain access to an otherwise restricted space, or gain the trust of an individual important to her goals. Though occasionally we see an alias fall apart after an initial success, the overall success rate of using aliases in the field for Sydney and her crew is very high.1 The aliases succeed on the series where torture fails. The aliases further the mission and produce reliable information, whereas torture does neither.
The turn to the alias marks a direct contrast with 24. Not coincidentally, Jack Bauer on 24 almost never uses an alias. The only time he seems to take on an alias is when he wants to escape from his life as a federal agent. The alias enables Jack to retreat from the project of national security rather than to serve this project. Several seasons start by finding him living under a pseudonym with an assumed profession and life from which he is very quickly pulled to help save the country from disaster. The contrast with Sydney Bristow is stark: in her everyday life away from the agency, she never adopts an alias but confines the fiction to her national security missions. Jack’s fiction is a private one, a fiction that permits him to escape public service and hide himself in private life. This occurs in between the seasons but is always swept aside once the season starts up again. Sydney’s fiction, however, is always public as it is staged for work. She doesn’t employ these fictions in her private life. For example, in the first few seasons of the series, Sydney was a graduate student in English when she was not working for the CIA, but this was not just a cover. She really wanted to become an English professor.2 Key to the success of Sydney’s fictional strategy at work is that she relies on her insight into subjectivity to create a successful alias and find the necessary information. This is opposed to Jack’s reliance on his insight about the vulnerability of the body as a road to truth. This does not, as it may appear, create a typical divide between active male and passive female; Sydney is often as violent as Jack on a mission, but the violence is not employed in the torture chamber. Instead, Sydney’s violence is employed to get her in and out of situations.
The entire structure of Alias revolves around Sydney and her ability to bring together intellect, brute strength, and excellent acting skills—the combination of which leads to success in the field. In one sense, this seems like the combination of talents that every good agent would have. But what makes Sydney remarkable—and what causes the series to stand out through its depiction of her—lies not in this confluence of skills but rather in Sydney herself as a desiring subject.3 Sydney, in contrast to Jack Bauer and most other representations of secret agents, recognizes herself as a desiring subject, and, at the same time, she sees others as desiring subjects as well. To put it in the idiom of Joan Copjec, Sydney constantly reads the desire of those with whom she interacts, and time and again this is the insight that allows her to complete a mission in ways that others could not.4
Sydney’s understanding of where the truth that she is seeking lies contrasts directly with the understanding of Jack Bauer in 24. Sydney sees all truth as embedded in a web of desire rather than as a fact deposited in the body. In this way, truth is a much more complicated entity in Alias. In fact, there is no truth that is separate from the subject’s desire, and following the path to desire is the only way to encounter truth. When one conceives truth in this way, one abandons the terrain of biopower and its conception of the body as the repository for truth. Instead, each body is inscribed in a desiring subjectivity. The truth that it hides does not exist separately from the desire of the subject, and thus one cannot simply extract it as Jack Bauer does.
When beginning with desiring subjectivity rather than the raw body, fiction becomes not something to penetrate in order to access the truth but a path that one must traverse to arrive at the truth. Fiction is not an obstacle to truth; it is essential to it. At a fundamental level, Alias holds to Jacques Lacan’s maxim that “every truth has the structure of a fiction.”5 The implicit claim of Alias is not that truth itself has a fictional status, that it is simply a construction, but one must use fictional constructions to find it. This conceit animates almost every episode of the show.
The preferred method that Sydney and her team of agents use on Alias is to stage a fiction within which they can use the target’s desire and way of seeing the world to their own advantage.6 Each subject is a subject of desire, and this desire distorts how the subject views objects in the world. On the basis of the subject’s desire, certain objects do not even enter into the field of vision, while other objects, though they might be small or apparently insignificant, stand out for the subject. But in order to take advantage of the disturbance that desire introduces into the subject’s perceptive field, the agents must have an idea of how their targets desire. The fictions that the agents create speak to this desire and thereby engage the subject within the fictional construction.
In Alias, fiction is the fantasy stage upon which the characters encounter the circuitous path of desire. The series correctly reveals that fantasy doesn’t involve giving subjects what they desire but rather creating a scenario in which they can experience their desire. As Elizabeth Cowie points out, “fantasy is not the object of desire, but its setting.”7 The agents on Alias, especially Sydney Bristow, are adept at creating the perfect fantasmatic setting that speaks to the desire of their target subjects. This emphasis creates a very different form and structure compared to 24.
On Alias, it is the path of desire that leads to the discovery of truth—whether it is where a bomb is hidden or the true nature of a relationship. Every truth remains tied to its fictional form, and the series shows that the belief that separating truth from fiction causes us to constantly miss truth altogether. The association of truth with desire leads Alias away from the body and toward the subject. This turn makes it impossible for the show to embrace torture in the way that 24 embraces it. By privileging the desiring subject at the center of the narrative, Alias is constitutively incapable of approaching torture as a productive means for uncovering truth.
In the contemporary torture fantasy, truth lies in the tortured body, and the torturer must use violence to rip away the fictions that hide it. Fiction is seen as not a path to truth but a barrier that one must eliminate to discover truth. This is the conception of truth that produces and informs the war on terror. But this is not the only problem with it. This conception of truth also inevitably fails. The miserable success rate for torture derives directly from a certain idea of truth that supports the practice. This idea sees truth as an object that can be obtained by threatening the victim’s survival. The problem is that the torture victim is not just a body but also a subject attuned to the desire of the Other. While being tortured, the victim attempts to read the torturer’s desire and respond to it with the appropriate fiction, not with the truth. In this way, unbeknownst to the torturer who believes in its efficacy, torture ends up being a fiction procurement device, not a privileged mode of access to truth, which is the prevailing belief about torture as espoused in films and shows like 24.
Within psychoanalysis, the idea of truth is inextricably tied to unconscious desire and the real. One of the startling aspects of the intervention of psychoanalysis at the turn of the twentieth century was its argument that the truth of one’s being lies in the unconscious rather than the conscious mind. This destabilizing idea suggests that the truth of a subject lies beyond conscious articulation and instead can only be found in indirect ways. Ways of holding one’s body, gestures, slips of the tongue, and free association became important markers of the truth of one’s unconscious.
Truth doesn’t just concern what the subject symbolizes but also—and even more importantly—what remains absent in its symbolic identity and articulations. In Jacques Lacan’s tripartite schema, the real holds a privileged position relative to the symbolic order and the imaginary. The real is a point of impossibility within the symbolic order, and yet this impossibility informs every signifying act. Desire emanates from the real, and thus the real provides the key to the subject of desire.
But Lacan does not equate truth and the real, as one might expect, and as some of his followers sometimes do. Truth is something different than the real. In fact, Lacan articulates a clear distinction in Seminar XXIII, where he claims, “the truth pleases, and this is what distinguishes it from the real. The real, it doesn’t please, necessarily.”8 The reason the real “doesn’t please, necessarily” is that encountering the real is traumatic. It indicates a desire that is always unconscious and that the subject can never satisfy in the way that it expects. One can, on the other hand, arrive at truth in a satisfying way. One can encounter it in the symbolic order and through symbolic methods, even if it involves taking the real into account. In this sense, truth can potentially be pleasing. This does not mean that truth does not have a relationship to the real. Truth becomes visible when we see the distortion that the real creates within the symbolic order. A psychoanalytic approach to the truth, then, means taking into consideration the manner in which the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real come together. This is, of course, often what good detectives do in their work. They consider facts (symbolic markers), imaginary understandings, and the subject’s desire in order to lead them to what they are looking for.
The contrast between a psychoanalytic approach and a biopolitical one becomes especially pointed with regard to the status of truth. Biopolitics reduces truth to the symbolic order and thus believes it to be entirely knowable.9 It ignores the imaginary and, more importantly, the real.10 The trend toward wearing devices that will constantly monitor your health statistics is a good example of this. It suggests that everything that affects our health can be symbolically registered and controlled. But when searching for truth, one cannot privilege the symbolic over the imaginary and the real. To actually improve people’s health, to continue this example, doctors must take into consideration the real (how their desire informs their well-being) as well as the imaginary (the impact of their conception of what health is supposed to look like). The torturer makes the same mistake as the doctor who ignores the imaginary and, most importantly, the real.11 The contemporary torture fantasy believes only in the symbolic facts and fails to recognize how desire distorts the symbolic.
Alias engages a very different way of understanding truth and thus rejects the fantasy of torture and the preconceptions of biopolitics. While torture does work a few times in Alias, it is not at all the privileged mode for obtaining information, and most often the series reveals it as completely ineffectual or even misleading (and thus counterproductive). For example, in season 2, episode 11 (“A Higher Echelon”), Sydney’s colleague and technological specialist Marshall Flinkman (Kevin Weisman) is kidnapped and tortured. Dr. Zhang Lee (Ric Young) tortures Marshall by pouring epoxy down his throat. Lee explains that he needs only to pour the agitating ingredient on top of this to make the epoxy harden and thus kill Marshall. Marshall resists the torture until they threaten his mother’s life. Then he agrees to reengineer the software they need.
It seems torture has worked in this scene. Throughout the episode, we see Marshall working on the software, and the viewer assumes that he is simply doing the bidding of the torturer. But, at the end of the episode, it turns out he has tricked them and instead engineered a simple video game. Not only that, but while creating the video game he sent a clandestine signal alerting his colleagues to his location, which allows Sydney to come and save him. In this case, the series shows that one can respond to torture with a fiction and thereby completely undermine it. Marshall distracts his torturer with the fiction of the efficacy of torture itself. The torture doesn’t work, and it also provides Marshall with the opportunity to subvert the villain’s entire plan.12
The contrast to torture in the series is the development of elaborate fictions. These fictions always have the structure of a fantasy that has the effect of creating the reality the target comes to inhabit. Thus Sydney’s approach to seeking lost government objects and information that will affect national security hews closely to Lacan’s position that “everything we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy.”13 Sydney understands that fiction stages how to desire, and, as a detective, she works to follow this circuitous web of desire even when she is sometimes creating it.
In part she accomplishes this as a desiring subject herself. In her aliases, she plays characters that are pursuing their own desire, but, beneath these characters, Sydney is pursuing her desire as well. This shows that being a desiring subject activates the desire of the other. For Sydney as detective, the web of desire provides the contours within which truth can be gained. This contrasts her with the torturers and the forensic specialists that dominate the contemporary film and television landscape.
For example, in “Reckoning” (season 1, episode 6), Sydney inhabits two different aliases, and each gives her access to needed items or information. In the first scenario, the scene opens in a high-end modern art gallery. Sydney is dressed in a green modern dress with a long wig and very high-heeled shoes to match her dress. Her partner, Marcus Dixon (Carl Lumbly), is dressed for the occasion as well. They are posing as wealthy patrons interested in buying the entire collection. To distract security so Sydney can slip into the office where the item they are searching for is located, Dixon lights a cigar. The patrons around them quickly become annoyed, and the gallery manager calls security over. Once the guard is lured away from his post, Sydney slips out of the gallery and into the office to find the object. Dixon continues to occupy the gallery staff by responding to their requests to put out his cigar with an inquiry into how much the entire gallery collection costs. Upon hearing this, they let him continue to smoke his cigar while haggling over a price. More than once, he inquires whether the cigar is bothering them, and they emphatically say, “No.” While Dixon is distracting everyone else, Sydney trips the alarm after obtaining the item they came for, hurries out, and enters the gallery playing her role as wealthy girlfriend. She marches up to Dixon and says, “I’d prefer the Lamborghini.” To which Dixon replies with a shrug and says, “It’s your birthday.” He then hands his used cigar to the owner as they leave.
In this case, Sydney and Dixon stage a fantasy scene upon which the gallery staff’s desire can play out. Instead of capturing the gallery owner and torturing him to give them access to his office and open the safe, Sydney and Dixon create a fantasy scenario within which the gallery owner’s desire is activated so that they can lure him away from his office and gain access to his safe. They stage the scene by creating characters whose own enigmatic desire activates the desire of their target. For instance, it is crucial for the success of the mission that Dixon smokes a cigar in the gallery. He does this to hold the attention of the gallery staff, but it also indicates his own status as a desiring subject. Clearly, there are very few spaces where people smoke anymore, and especially not in art galleries. Everyone knows that smoking is prohibited inside art galleries, but it is this prohibition that creates a space for the irruption of desire. The law channels our desire not into the paths of obedience but into particular modes of disobedience, even though most of the time we do not follow our desire and instead simply obey.
Furthermore, by flaunting his enjoyment in the act of cigar smoking even though it transgresses social laws, Dixon’s character is believable to the gallery staff. Because of this display of enjoyment, the gallery owner believes Dixon when he says he wants to buy the entire collection. At this point, the gallery owner’s own desire to sell the art is activated, and the fictional web of desire is engaged.
After Sydney obtains the item, she and Dixon must leave undetected. To do so, they again flaunt their enjoyment. Sydney’s character proclaims that she would prefer a Lamborghini to the art collection, and they abruptly leave. The gallery owner stands looking bewildered. He is bewildered at the desire of the wealthy patrons who might buy the art, but he never suspects Sydney and Dixon’s fiction. Desire is enigmatic, and no one knows this more than an art gallery owner who often relies on wealthy people buying art on a whim of their desire. Sydney and Dixon stage the very unknowable nature of desire in order to make the fiction believable.14
THE PRODUCTION OF AUTHENTIC FEMININITY
In all of her many different kinds of aliases, Sydney (often with the aid of her coworkers) creates a fictional web of fantasy that allows her to obtain information or items that the government seeks. Later in this very episode, for example, Sydney poses as a patient who needs to be admitted to a mental institution in Bucharest in order to get close to another patient there and obtain important information. Within the structure of this series, Sydney succeeds when she turns to fiction to enchant her target and arouse the target’s desire. The characters that use torture, on the other hand, rarely get what they are looking for.
The alias itself reveals an approach to truth that revolves around subjectivity rather than bare life. The way that these aliases are presented further reveals the radical nature of this idea of the priority of the fiction that animates Alias. Specifically, the series edits the deployment in a very unusual way, a way that violates the typical depiction of a woman in the midst of a masquerade. In this sense, editing is just as important to the political valence of Alias as it is to that of 24. In chapter 3, I link 24’s formal structure—the omnipresence of the digital clock defining the viewer’s experience of the plot—to its investment in the torture fantasy. The editing in Alias is crucial to the alternative that it poses to this fantasy. Whereas the key to 24 and its concept of truth is the ticking clock, the key to Alias’s concept of truth can be found in its presentation of the alias itself.
Alias uses editing to create a short-circuit to the production of femininity that we see in the aliases that Sydney adopts. This short-circuit to the production of femininity operates formally as an instance of the real, which then highlights the role of the real in the fantasy scene that the alias is staging. An investigation into how femininity is approached in the alias reveals more about the form’s opposition to biopolitics and the fantasy of torture as a tool to find truth. The performances themselves are often, but not always, contrasted to Sydney’s own personality. When Sydney is at home not working, her clothes are plain and minimalist, as is her general appearance. She wears very little makeup and has straight brown hair.
Though Jennifer Garner is, of course, attractive by Hollywood standards, the show plays down any glamour that could be attached to her looks as it tries to show her as an average young working woman when she is at home in her apartment. Similarly, when she is in the office (in strategy meetings, speaking with her coworkers, etc.), she is dressed either in workout clothes or very simple office attire. This nonadorned look underscores her serious nature. Throughout the series, Sydney takes a serious approach to her work and to her home life.15
Her aliases, on the other hand, range from more feminine depictions (that are still quite different from her own) to truly spectacular and completely adorned feminine characters. For example, when her aliases require her to appear in dance clubs or trendy bars, she wears wigs (including red, blue, and platinum), outrageously high heels or knee-length boots, and miniskirts. She also wears a great deal of jewelry and makeup. On a theoretical level, however, the key to Alias is not what is shown but instead what is never shown: the preparation for these performances.
Not all preparation is hidden: the show regularly depicts Sydney and her crew preparing to go out on an assignment. We see them researching information about the item they are pursuing or listening to demonstrations from experts concerning the directions for their mission. But one aspect of the preparation is, almost without exception, missing. Alias never shows Sydney herself constructing her appearance for her elaborate performances of femininity. Instead, the show typically cuts from a briefing to her entrance into the scene in which she has already adopted the alias.
The radicality of this cut and this omission cannot be overstated. The depiction of women dressing and adorning themselves is a staple of film and television. In this standard depiction, femininity appears as a construction but not as a masquerade.16 Though the focus on the woman preparing herself as feminine denaturalizes femininity, it associates femininity with the woman herself and not with the fantasy scenario to which that femininity belongs. In her account of feminine sexuality, Jacqueline Rose points out that masquerade captures the essence of femininity insofar as it does implicitly refer to this scenario. She writes, “masquerade is the very definition of ‘femininity’ precisely because it is constructed with reference to a male sign.”17 The traditional depiction of women putting on their femininity separates this act from the fantasy and thus disguises the masquerade that Alias foregrounds.
This tradition might be best embodied in a film like Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990), whose plot revolves around the transformation of a prostitute, Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), into an upper-class respected woman. Much of the film locates this transformation on her body itself, as multiple scenes depict changing her way of dress and her way of comporting herself from that of a lower-class call girl to the romantic partner of a millionaire. To this end, the film spends a good deal of time on Vivian shopping for new clothes, trying the clothes on, admiring how they look on her, and then finally appearing in a full makeover.
Certainly, the film reveals to us the constructed nature of femininity when it presents us these two different types (the lower-class prostitute and the upper-class romantic partner) in the same female character. It illustrates the labor that must go into changing from one to the other, but it also suggests that in this transformation Vivian Ward has finally discovered her true self. Hilary Radner argues, “These films are concerned with the theme of transformation, often represented as a magical makeover, the purpose of which is to give expression to an internal process of education, which, through the makeover trope, is linked to consumer culture.”18 Radner broadens this point to argue that Pretty Woman and films like it constitute a neofeminist cinema that parallels the feminist movement but links independence with consumerism, often within the structure of the romance comedy. Radner’s analysis insightfully shows the way in which consumer pleasure is linked to the production of a true sense of self in the film. The pleasure that Vivian gets out of the shopping in Pretty Woman is not just because constructing femininity is itself a true pleasure—though it is depicted as such—but also that it is pleasurable because it is the path toward her authentic self. In this way, Pretty Woman—like many other film and television shows—suggests that ultimately preparing for and creating the proper femininity is both the most sanctioned and the most successful path to social acceptance as well as to authenticity.19
This plot trajectory, of course, is based on an even more specific tradition in the Pygmalion story. Films such as George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964), Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990), Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), and Donald Petrie’s Miss Congeniality (2000) all have at the heart of their plots this hackneyed story of educating the woman into a more acceptable and upper-class femininity. One of the essential scenes in these films is the one in which she physically transforms. We first see her looking poor and ugly. The transformation scene involves new clothes, hairstyle, and makeup, all of which reveal, despite the fact that they further disguise the woman, her authentic inner beauty. In these films, the potential of the individual is literally located in their actual body. Their body both hides and is the secret to their fulfillment. The fact that the truth of the woman is located within her body waiting to be unleashed places these films in proximity to 24. Of course, no one tortures Vivian Ward to transform her from a prostitute into an upper-class woman, but the idea that her body contains a truth that someone might unlock parallels the prevailing conceit of 24. Though there are moments in television shows that contain moments of transformation, there are also whole reality shows based on this tradition. These reality shows dedicate themselves to making over the average woman and the supermodel alike. Shows such as Extreme Makeover (2002–2007), What Not to Wear (2003–present), How Do I Look? (2004–2012), and Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style (2007–2008) spend the majority of their time filming the participants trying on the clothes and even shopping for clothes before they present the women as a final product.20 The outcome of this emphasis is that the woman is finally produced as her true best self (usually upper-class, trendy, etc.), which is meant to make her a happier person.
THE HARD CUT TO THE FICTION OF FEMININITY
Alias works entirely against this grain. The hard cut to the performance of the alias that the series utilizes every time emphasizes the performance at the expense of the preparation. Here I will turn to one alias in the series that perfectly exemplifies the role of the hard cut and the absence of any preparation. “Phase One” (season 2, episode 13) begins with an alias performance. The episode opens with a shot of an empty hallway with a door at end of hallway. All of a sudden, the door opens dramatically to reveal Sydney clad in lingerie. The camera tracks back down the hallway as she walks forward until she stops to pose with a riding crop in her hand. The entire scene has the look of a music video (and AC/DC’s “Back in Black” is blaring as background music). It presents a typical sexist fantasy of the woman as an object of male sexual desire. In this way, the camera work formally presents Sydney’s fiction. The form of the editing itself shifts from its typically straightforward way of depicting Sydney to a more traditionally gendered way of portraying the woman as object of the male’s look. The form is also gesturing to the music video, with her hair blowing and her walk down the hallway slightly in slow motion. Thus the form itself signals that we are in a fantasy realm, specifically a male fantasy of the perfectly objectified woman.
The implications here are twofold: the alias is presented to the viewers as much as to the characters in the scene, and the form of the scene is from Sydney’s subjective position. In this case, the subjective position is the fiction that she is working to project and that the look of the scene helps to project. The man for whom she is performing evaluates her by looking her up and down and then says, “No, the red one” (in French). The scene then cuts to the same door as before, which again opens to reveal Sydney, now in the red lingerie outfit. The viewer never sees her dressing for either of these performances.
Sometimes, the show reveals why she needs to create a certain alias. For example, she must act like someone who is missing or disguise herself as a scientist who could get into the facility the agency must access. But other times, as in this episode, the show does not explain the alias, and this adds an element of detection for the viewer to try to figure out why she is performing this particular alias. After approving the red lingerie outfit, it becomes clear that the man thinks Sydney is a prostitute that he has hired. Once she is on the bed with him, she uses her bracelet to pull out a wire that she could use to strangle him and pins him down. She says, “What was wrong with the black one? Do you think it’s comfortable wearing clothes like this?” In response, he tries to push his emergency button, and she says, “This isn’t my first day on the job; I disconnected your call button.” Both these statements, while falling into the tradition of the pithy lines that action heroes utter during their physical struggles, also emphasize the working aspect of her aliases. Her comment about her annoyance that he wasn’t happy with her first outfit suggests that wearing the lingerie is an uncomfortable but necessary aspect of the job and holds none of the romance that advertising suggests. And her second statement emphasizes that her experience allows her to be completely unflustered even when finding herself in this seemingly demeaning situation.
In fact, she is in complete control, as is evident both in her physical prowess over a man much larger than she and her disconnecting his call button. After finding out where her target (the computer server) is, she delivers a swift blow to his head.21 She proceeds to get dressed, access the server, and transmit the data to the CIA. It is clear that the reason she was able to find her target information is because of the fantasy scene that she created, not the violence she uses at the end, which simply incapacitates the man after she finds out what she needs to know.
The episode then cuts to a brief flashback in which we are presented with the events that led up to this moment. We might expect a flashback scene to show us Sydney putting on the lingerie, but instead we see a repetition of the seduction scene itself, which is repeated from the perspective of a camera in Sydney’s earrings. The repetition of this scene allows for some important reinvestigations of the issues the first scene raises. Giving us Sydney’s literal point of view (from the earring camera) allows us to step outside the fantasy space she created. It shows the viewer Sydney’s perspective while weaving the pattern of this fantasy. The perspective allows for a critique of the “woman as object” fantasy. What is important to note is that the show gives us both the fantasy that Sydney is presenting and an approximation of her actual point of view. In this sense, the viewer doubly experiences Sydney’s alias, though this is the only time that the series does this.
Still, this double inscription of Sydney’s performance of the alias emphasizes her role as desiring subject within the fiction she creates. In other words, the earring camera perspective signifies Sydney’s desire to perform the mission. Unlike the first presentation, this scene crosscuts between Sydney’s experience and that of her colleague and boyfriend Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan), who is following the events by monitoring the earring camera with fellow agent Eric Weiss (Greg Grunberg) from another plane. Vaughn is clearly upset at her peril and then deeply satisfied when she beats her opponent (a bodyguard who comes upon her after she has found the computer server). After this fight, the scene dramatically ends when Sydney shoots out the plane window to rid herself of the rest of the bodyguards (who are sucked out the hole in the plane that Sydney’s gunshot has created), puts on a jump suit, curls herself into a ball, and lets go so that she is also sucked out the gaping hole of the plane to rendezvous with the other agents. During this scene, Vaughn and Weiss are left to just watch in shock. At the end of the scene, Weiss and Vaughn appear agitated, and Weiss says, “She’s all yours.”
Crosscutting between her activity and that of her male colleagues’ inactivity reinterprets the male look. Instead of a look of mastery with the woman as object, the male look here is one of helplessness with the woman as the subject of desire. Seeing the scene from her point of view, they automatically come face-to-face with the leering man who has hired her as a prostitute. The disgust on their faces in reaction to this man creates an implicit critique of that leering male position. At the same time, they are banking on her alias working in order to succeed in their mission. The filming of the scene separates the success of the alias from any investment in it or in the image of femininity that it conveys. Femininity in the series is a fiction that functions as a fantasmatic trap for desire.
Sydney is able to perform femininity in precisely the appropriate way because she can read the deadlocks in the symbolic order and create a fantasy space to assuage these deadlocks. This has the effect of putting people at ease and making her performance invisible as a performance. The key to the analysis of Alias lies in the complex relationship between the paths of desire as it is staged within the fantasy in these moments. This particular episode’s multitiered representation of the point-of-view shot in depicting experience stems from the complexity that is present (whether implicitly or explicitly) in every one of Sydney’s aliases. She is able to make herself into a figure of the real, and this figure always engages her target.
There have been several excellent forays into how one might analyze the real in the visual field. Joan Copjec’s work on photographer Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (produced between 1977–1980), however, is particularly relevant for analyzing Sydney’s aliases because it theorizes the relationship of the real to fantasy in the realm of the feminine. Sherman’s photographs are staged film stills that depict many different types of femininity that Sherman herself adopts. Copjec suggests that the key to reading Sherman’s photographs is not the different narratives or characters that her Untitled Film Stills create but rather that they show the same woman (the photographer) in each of the photographs. Sherman’s face itself, Copjec suggests, acts as the gaze—that stain embodying the real—because of is constant ambiguity. This is contrasted with the fantasy space of the film still setup, and it is the tension between the two that creates meaning and sets viewers on their own voyage of desire and confrontation with the fantasy scene.
Importantly, Copjec argues, the photographs force us to see that there is no authentic identity that the feminine fantasy hides. Rather, Sherman confronts us with our own fantasies and desires by equating the woman with the masquerade. Copjec argues, “It is as if these photographs were endorsing the thesis of film theorists regarding the closeness of the woman to the screen image.… But where film theorists condemned this theoretical and cinematic conflation of the woman with the image, the Untitled Film Stills does not. It accepts that there is ‘no exit’ for woman from the level of appearance, that ‘womanliness’ is always but masquerade.”22 Copjec’s analysis points out that truth exists within the structure of the fantasy itself; it is not something hidden within some more authentic space. Sherman understands this and engages the viewer’s desire through this provocative embrace of the fantasy structure of femininity itself.
Alias operates under a similar assumption. Sydney searches for truth within the fantasy space she creates. She engages the desire of those around her during an alias through her belief in appearance as such. Purposely staging the fantasy scene allows for a confrontation with the truth of the desire that this scene arouses. Sherman’s stills reveal the way the fantasy scene harnesses desire and provokes the viewer through the partial object (Sherman’s face) rather than an object that connotes wholeness. Sydney takes up this same position of the partial object.
The hard cut to the alias in Alias allows for Sydney to be the partial object because it does not present her as a whole authentic woman. The absence of any depiction of the preparation of the alias shows, at the same time, that the alias has no outside, just like the film stills of Cindy Sherman. The implication of this is not that deconstructing the ideology will simply tear it down, but instead that one must recognize the limit inherent in the language of authenticity itself.
The aliases neither serve to make her happier nor reveal her authentic self. And, yet, there is still something in this performance qua performance that represents Sydney as subject. Sydney seems sure of her abilities in espionage but never sure of her identity. She clearly embraces these performances as fiction, and it is her facility with this fiction—and her belief that it is only within the fiction that truth is discovered—that structures her identity and the show’s discourse. Even when Sydney’s own father can’t remember something essential to national security, Sydney relies on creating a fantasy space to probe his mind for the truth. She and the agency recreate a scene of his past. She poses as her mother in a scene on a set the agency constructed to look exactly like his old house in 1981. In staging this scene, they discover that Jack revealed secrets to his wife, who was in fact a Russian undercover agent. They also recover the important location they were seeking for their mission.
THE MOTHER DOESN’T EXIST
The show posits that one reason Sydney has this unique skill as a detective—she understands that one must arouse the real of desire in order to arrive at truth—comes from the traumatic knowledge she has about her mother, specifically about the noncomplementary relationship between mother and child. The counterpoint to Sydney’s aliases within the show itself is the way countries like the USSR demand far more difficult aliases from their women agents. The KGB demanded that Irina (Lena Olin), Sydney’s mother, take on an alias full-time for decades. In order to infiltrate the CIA, she had to adopt a long-term fiction and even have a child with a CIA agent.
The line between the truth and the alias, in Irina’s case, is constantly in question, especially for Sydney, who wonders if her mother ever loved her or if that motherly love was also a performance since she was conceived as part of Irina’s alias (which was as wife of Jack Bristow, Sydney’s father and a CIA agent). One of the recurrent motifs of the series is the ambiguity of Irina’s desire. Trying to point to the complexity and the severity of Sydney’s questions and questioning looks, Irina, several times throughout the series, replies with this phrase: “the truth takes time.”23 During their first encounter, Irina has Sydney tortured for information—but does not find any this way—and then Irina herself shoots Sydney in the arm. During the next encounter, Irina shows up again, and just when a viewer thinks she’s going to kill Sydney, she instead kills someone trying to kill Sydney and tells her, mysteriously, “the truth takes time.”
Later on in the series, in an episode titled “The Truth Takes Time” (season 2, episode 18), Irina leaves behind this same riddle for Sydney after she has escaped her captivity with the CIA (which she in part elected to endure to prove her love to Sydney). The message was left through Morse code that emanates out of her mother’s earrings, which supposedly belonged to Sydney’s grandmother. A seemingly contradictory artifact, the earrings fit perfectly within the form of the show. Passed down through three generations, the earrings are both high-tech and an ancestral heirloom. Common symbols of femininity, these diamond earrings have been refashioned in such a way that only a well-trained agent could decipher their message. As the reader of the message sent through Morse code, Sydney relies on her skills as an agent. Thus the earrings are employed in an unfeminine way, but ultimately the message they send is one sent by a mother to her daughter about their relationship.
The truth it points to, however, remains just as confused by the end of the series.24 The truth, it turns out, is unattainable no matter how long you wait. It holds the place marker of the impossible in the mother-daughter relationship, which stems from the original deadlock of identity. In reaction to this emotional situation, Dixon tells her, “No one can be blamed for trusting her own mother.” Implicit in this statement is the idea that no one can be blamed for her own mother’s desire. Or that no one can be blamed for the fact that even her own mother has an unconscious.
Irina’s professed love for Sydney seems evident in the way she looks at her and the sacrifices she makes for her at certain times. The relationship between Sydney and Irina reveals how fiction inserts itself even into what we believe are the most authentic relationships—between mother and daughter. The constant questioning of the maternal relationship points to the status of the real within the maternal. At the heart of the maternal relationship is not just a pure motherly love but rather a different version of Lacan’s “there is no sexual relation”: something like “there is no mother-child relation.” Ideology relies on this relationship being seen as one that provides wholeness for both parties. The mother receives all she needs when she provides love, education, and protection for her child. What ideology does not allow room for is the woman’s desire, which continues to exist even after she becomes a mother. Alias, however, suggests otherwise. It takes up Jacques-Alain Miller’s statement that “woman takes precedence over the mother.”25 Behind every loving mother is a woman who is a desiring subject.
The angst-ridden investigation into the mother-daughter relationship that occurs over five years of this series provides an unusual opportunity to illuminate the noncomplementariness of that mother-child relationship. Within the structure of this series—set up by the fictional performances of Sydney’s aliases and the privileging of Sydney as a desiring subject—the mother-daughter relationship necessarily had to be thrown into question. In turn, understanding this noncomplementariness helps Sydney come to a psychoanalytic conception of truth as the truth of the subject’s desire. She is confronted with a mother (and an Other) whose desire she must investigate rather than trust, and this frees her from the biopolitical conception of truth, a conception based on the idea of a secure Other as the background against which one can uncover truth. Alias suggests that our relationship to truth depends on our recognition that the Other doesn’t exist, that the secure bond informing our relations to others is not wholly symbolic and thus doesn’t exist in the way ideology would like us to believe. Sydney’s ability as a detective derives ultimately from her recognition that desire is as important as the facts.
DETECTING THE REAL
Sydney’s mode of detection fundamentally sets her apart from Jack Bauer. She is a creator of fictions that capture desire rather than a torturer of bodies that contain a hidden truth. Her status as a detective also sets her apart from all the different kinds of biodetectives that appear in shows like CSI and films like Zero Dark Thirty. Sydney is instead a detective of the real. She excels at navigating or creating the web of fantasy within which she can often procure the real of the subject’s desire. Recognizing the way the truth relates to the real, however, destroys many of her relationships (especially with her mother). But, at the same time, it allows for an ethics that acknowledges subjectivity and thus provides a real alternative to the biopolitical way of seeing the world.
Sydney does not look for what’s hiding in plain sight like the classical detective, nor does she fully involve herself with the criminal like the hard-boiled detective. While she may at times display elements of both these forms of investigation, Sydney represents a new form that corresponds to the exigencies of the contemporary world. She is the foremost exemplar in contemporary film and television of the detective of the real. Though Homeland develops this form of detective as well, Alias presents it in the most unqualified way. As a detective of the real, Sydney sees lacking subjects rather than fully present bodies, and this enables her to interpret their desires rather than torturing their bodies.
Sydney approaches each case through the construction of a fiction that will provide access to the real of desire, and it is the commitment to fictionality that separates most clearly the detective of the real from other forms of the detective. Though other detectives employ fictions during their investigations—Auguste Dupin deploys a ruse in order to steal the stolen letter in “The Purloined Letter,” for instance—they do not make fiction the foundation of their work in the way that Sydney does. The fiction is incidental for the classical and hard-boiled detectives, as it is for the biodetective. The biodetective places much more trust in information gained through torture or biometric surveillance than that which is obtained through a fiction. For the detective of the real, the situation is entirely different. The privileged position of the fiction enables the detective of the real to create a frame in which the subject’s desire will emerge—and this desire holds the key to understanding why the subject acts as it does.
Within the world of Alias, a world built around this detective of the real, there is no psychic space for the development of the torture fantasy. The torture fantasy cannot take root. Its conception of the truth as embedded in the body, the image of the ticking clock, and the idea that truth is governed by power neither acknowledges subjectivity as such nor the subject’s desire. Alias shows that we will only overcome our desperate willingness to resort to torture at the point when we accede to a conception of truth centered on the desiring subject rather than an object housed within the body.
The fundamental opposition today is that which exists between 24 and Alias. The great success of the former within the popular imagination and within political discourse signals the ascendance of biopolitical ideology. If we invest ourselves in this ideology, we invest in a logic that ultimately leads to the torture chamber. But the existence of Alias indicates that there is a viable, if less popular, alternative. The first step in struggling against biopower and the torture it produces consists in recognizing it as an ideology. Biopower functions not by controlling bodies but instead, like other ideologies, by harnessing the enjoyment and directing the desire of the subjects that it addresses. As an expression of biopower, the contemporary torture fantasy functions in a similar way. Disavowing this enjoyment, as I have argued throughout this book, is central to how the contemporary torture fantasy operates. The myriad representations of torture in film and on television, however, bring this enjoyment into view and suggest that it is possible to see the subject where a body appears. Seeing a subject instead of a body is the only true barrier to torture.