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The Profiling Game: Intertextuality and Instrumentality
In the Hollywood motion picture The Game, Michael Douglas is again cast as an unpleasant, arrogant, and unprincipled business executive. Perhaps more than any other actor, Douglas’s on-screen persona or filmography—as evidenced in the motion pictures Wall Street, Falling Down, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Disclosure, and The Perfect Murder—has elicited strong reactions from members of various social groups who are troubled by his films’ representations of female sexuality, business ethics, race relations, and sexual harassment (Gabriel 1996; Davies 1995; Holmlund 1991). Type- cast in similar roles over the years, Douglas has developed an on- screen profile—the culmination or composite of many of his roles —of male victim, white vigilante, and corporate devil that often comments on contested areas of American political life. Douglas’s career has in some part shaped the popular imagination of the entrepreneurial excesses of post-Reagan individualism and the increasingly complex dynamics of race, sex, and class identity politics.
As an individual text, The Game also engages a quite different definition of profiling. The film begins with a now familiar Douglas character—rich, brash, and obnoxious—receiving a mysterious ‘‘customized adventure’’ birthday present from his estranged younger brother. Later, as Douglas’s character, Nicholas Van Orton, inquires about his gift at the adventure company’s office, he is unaware that by volunteering to answer a series of questions and perform a battery of simulations and tests that are meant to elicit his consumption patterns, personal habits, finances, and physical attributes, he has already started the ‘‘game.’’ The film’s suspense is subsequently sustained by the viewer’s inability to determine whether the adventure company has cheated Van Orton or has hypercustomized an intensely thrilling game. In other words, the audience is left wondering whether the company has solicited Van Orton’s profile to customize and enhance his adventure or whether it has done so to gain access to his many password-protected sources of wealth. In keeping with the conventions of the action genre, Van Orton and his female sidekick/ love interest face a number of seemingly life-threatening scenarios. Consequently, as the game becomes exponentially intense and seemingly dangerous, Van Orton becomes increasingly incapable of distinguishing fact and fiction. Unable to determine whether he is indeed playing a game, the protagonist is slowly but surely stripped of both his identity and institutional forms of identification.
Thus, viewers first believe that Van Orton’s profiling has resulted in severe punishment, but his subsequent abduction to a third-world shanty town eventually leads to a deeply spiritual reward—the ultimate goal of the brother’s gift adventure. As the game challenges Van Orton’s sense of self and value, he begins to undergo a transformation—by renouncing his narcissistic personality and actualizing his well-intentioned, benevolent ‘‘real’’ self.
Although The Game’s conclusion conforms to Hollywood’s need for happy endings, it also champions the (self-)revolutionary and spiritual power of consumer-profiling technologies—the ability of hypercustomized products and services to unearth the real self.
Despite the film’s romantic ending, The Game offers a telling account of the potential effects of divulging personal information. On the one hand, consumers face the fear and punishment of losing their virtual identities by having credit-card or Social Security numbers stolen or otherwise appropriated for purposes not of their own choosing, and on the other hand, consumers enjoy the ultimate convenience of being offered products and services that are ‘‘profiled’’ to their individual tastes. What’s more, given the ubiquity and complexity of today’s personal-information economy, initial ‘‘rewards’’ (such as free T-shirts for credit-card applications) can easily later turn into ‘‘punishments’’ (such as junk mail, irritating phone solicitations, identity fraud, and compromised and damaged credit). Such rewards and punishments of consumer profiling indicate the continuous and increasing attempts of producers to improve both quantitatively and qualitatively their consumer ‘‘intelligence’’ gathering—to track and integrate the everyday behavior of consumers into other production, sales, and distribution data.
Michael Douglas’s general on-screen profile is not the same as his character in The Game, who is subject to the sort of consumer profiling described above in the introduction to the film. But the actor’s persona or life’s work is condensed (or thematized), named (‘‘angry white guy’’), and consequently ‘‘read’’ against—or in conjunction with—various social and political phenomena (such as sexual harassment or affirmative action). In the field of media and cultural studies, Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (1987, 45) conceptualizes this first definition of profiling as ‘‘intertextual’’ relationships—‘‘the social organisation of the relations between texts within specific conditions of reading.’’ John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s (1983, 2) study of the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who likewise discusses the text as an ‘‘extensive’’ phenomenon, which for the authors means in conjunction with ‘‘industrial, institutional, narrative, generic, and professional’’ practices ‘‘existing outside the programme.’’
In the second definition, however, profiling is discussed as an instrumental and economic[chapter 2 for a theoretical discussion of panopticism and synopticism).
Thus, in lieu of focusing exclusively on the dominant trends in commercial iconography, advertising, and consumer culture that tend to end with questions of textual ‘‘representation’’ (are we in this picture?), this book highlights the process of attempting to avoid, redress, or otherwise account for the failure of producers to capture an audience, market, or consumer. In other words, the book examines the means (namely, the techniques and technologies) by which niche markets are targeted, customized, and rationalized. It focuses on the role that automated solicitations of consumer choices (at the cash register, video store, automatic teller machine, Web, and so on) and subsequent simulated maps play in the larger enterprise of forecasting market shifts and formatting topographies of consumption (whether in urban and rural landscapes or in cyberspace).
[1]In this book, the term economy refers to the exchange of monetary values and also to symbolic constructs or ‘‘linguistic, commercial, sexual, or legal’’ ‘‘symbolic economies’’ (Goux 1990, 10).
