Suspicion
The other day I watched the neo-noir movie Angel Heart (dir. Alan Parker, 1987) starring Robert De Niro as a character named Louis Cyphre and Mickey Rourke as a hard-living detective named Harry Angel. It struck me that Mickey Rourke's character only identifies Cyphre's name as a pun on Lucifer at the end of the movie. And throughout Angel Heart, which as a neo-noir film seemingly thrives on suspicion as a structure of feeling, the characters are remarkably free from guile. Cyphre's function, as the Devil, is to punish those who are not who they say they are, including Harry Angel. Except that Angel doesn't know until the end of the movie that he's not who he says he is. In a sense, it is precisely this guilessness that makes Angel Heart a movie about the limits of suspicion as a method for discovery. Angel has to forget everything about himself in order to learn his true identity.
In the long-twenty-first-century US, conflicts and panics around authenticity, solidity, and performativity perforate our connections with each other. We are suspicious of each other and of who we are. These suspicions find their outlets in a variety of social and subjective formations — for example, through questions about the legitimacy of institutional structures, romantic love, the law, identity, and the politics of knowledge and experience. The question of knowledge and experience, both symbolic and embodied, becomes especially pertinent in light of the culture wars, with current panics around critical race theory and transgender children raising suspicions about historiography, experience, and embodiment. Across the US, mask requirements and other Covid-19 cautions in place since 2020 have been suspended and even criminalized as politicians and other authorities prioritize capital, particularly its maintenance and expansion. Skepticism, a practice arising from suspicion as an ontic state, emerges as a dominant mode of relation for contemporary US society.
In "Suspicion," we consider how suspicion as an epistemology, affect, and aesthetic condition functions in various culture industry outlets. While our objects of scrutiny are wide-ranging in form, each essay takes "suspicion" as the point of discovery for how each object, text, or question moves and operates in discourse.
Olivia Stowell is interested in how suspicion, vis-a-vis paranoia, structures reality TV as a genre. Suspicion as an epistemology becomes a mode of relation for cast members, as "[t]he only way to survive is to remain appropriately suspicious of everyone around you, to use your suspicions to accurately interpret 'reality.'" Suspicion has become the primary mode of reality TV's gamification, and knowing how to "play the game" requires constant refining of one's suspicions of others in the show.
Sheera Talpaz considers how the underlying rubric of suspicion as a settler response to any Palestinian action (or inaction) in occupied Palestine enables "a perceptual state of emergency," which has become a central theme in Palestinian poetry. The politics of state suspicion in Israel results in the imprisonment of Palestinian poets, and the archival traces of suspicion run alongside post-1948 Palestinian literary history. Beyond the territory of Palestine/Israel, organizations like Canary Mission export this legacy of colonial surveillance via blacklisting professors and students at universities in the US and the EU. Suspicion becomes a method for discipline, one that shapes institutional policies.
Steven Watts examines how Lydia Millet's novel Ghost Lights identifies and elaborates upon suspicion as an ambivalent affect in environmental fiction. Watts describes how suspicion in the environmental humanities is an epistemological given, one especially helpful for understanding structures of harm. Relatively recently, it was revealed that scientists at ExxonMobil had predicted climate change in the 1970s and that those making decisions for the corporation knew that their efforts were bringing it about; this exposure offers no sense of resolution for critics, however. The fiction of Lydia Millet responds to this tension between suspicion, knowledge, and the feeling of being right.
Madeline Lane-McKinley identifies how the "Shadow Pandemic" of rising domestic abuse rates during the Covid-19 pandemic structures the circulation of suspicion as an affect and structure of knowledge in limited streaming series in American TV. Namely, suspicion structures domestic dramas by centering on the conflict within families as social units within a larger community, thus bringing in the destabilizing force of the political. These domestic dramas figure the role of suspicion as a vital paradigm for understanding "an impulse toward the logic of conspiracy, as a mode of explanation amidst this Shadow Pandemic" of domestic abuse. In shows including The Undoing, Anatomy of a Scandal, and The Staircase, Lane-McKinley theorizes how ambiguity — one of suspicion's outputs but also, sometimes, its antidote — works as an aesthetic, plot, and character device, one that connects to contemporary debates surrounding feminism and #MeToo.
Samuel Catlin theorizes how suspicion is operationalized politically via transmisogyny, thinking with Roald Dahl's children's novel The Witches and how normality is explicitly figured in opposition to the masquerade of "witches." He argues that recent controversies regarding a new edition revising the text map onto contemporary anxieties around gender and childhood. Catlin notes that a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (via Paul Ricouer) ultimately fails as a system for signification and transmission, since "at best, it is an affective tool that can assist a disciplined hermeneutical praxis in generating certain styles of insight." These styles are indelible in the current gender-panicked moment.
Suspicion as a concept interpenetrates different categories of experience — political, social, aesthetic, and affective. What the essays in this cluster reveal is that suspicion is a destabilizer. Suspicion, wielded, destabilizes connection, community, and communication precisely by virtue of the fact that it is intended as a stabilizer, as a prophylactic against the unfamiliar or the all-too-familiar.
Eleanor Russell (Twitter: @eleanoir; Bluesky: @eleanoir.bsky.social) is a writer living in Rogers Park, Chicago. She earned her doctorate from the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University. Her current book project theorizes the relationship between stand-up comedy, sound studies, and the avant-garde.
