You may think you know what you're dealing with but, believe me, you don't.
- Chinatown

The computers don't lie....The Negroes are the trouble spot.
- The Spook Who Sat by the Door

While Richard Hofstadter identified the presence of a "paranoid style" throughout American political history in his seminal 1964 essay, the truly paranoid decade of American history may have been one he did not live to see: the 1970s.1 In the wake of the political assassinations of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, and public revelations of CIA activity (including Operation MKUltra) in 1975, politicians, activists, philosophers, and artists struggled with older narratives and theorizations of state power that seemed insufficient or even naive. Power appeared, somehow, more diffuse and harder to locate. It was lurking deep in the shadows of state bureaucracy, a "System" with a capital S, as Jeffrey Sconce puts it, that was "everywhere and nowhere at the same time," a "sinister bureaucracy in which no one individual occupies a determinative position of power."2 The paranoid cinema of the 1970s — films like Chinatown (1974), Marathon Man (1976), and Alan J. Pakula's "paranoia trilogy" (1971-1976) — helped negotiate this anxiety by imagining vast conspiracies and systems lurking underneath the surface, an approach that Fredric Jameson has called the "poor person's cognitive mapping."3 Jameson locates a kernel of utopian promise in these conspiracy narratives, which he reads as grasping toward an understanding of totality, even if this understanding remains necessarily incomplete or insufficient. However, this promise is usually tempered with notes of failure or resignation. In Network (1976), the televisual populist Howard Beale, originally "mad as hell" and "not gonna take [it] anymore," submits to the "one holistic system of systems" after being told by a mysterious capitalist that he has "meddled with the primal forces of nature."4 In The Parallax View (1974), protagonist Joseph Frady is killed at the exact moment he realizes he has been set up as the patsy in the very conspiracy he has been struggling to uncover. In Chinatown, detective Jake Gittes' attempt to expose a mysterious real estate scheme is cut off by an eruption of violence; we are left with the suggestion to "forget it," along with Jake.5 The genre seems to simultaneously insist that there is a conspiracy hidden in the shadows and that this conspiracy will always remain just outside of view; every revelation is undercut by the further sensation that, as Chinatown's villain Noah Cross puts it, "you may think you know what you're dealing with but ... you don't." Disaggregating the utopian potentiality of paranoid cinema from its pessimistic content would seem to be no simple matter.

Expanding our conception of paranoid cinema beyond its most familiar generic boundaries, however, demonstrates that while the 1970s may have been a paranoid decade, such paranoia was experienced differently by varied historical subjects — particularly Black radicals, against whom the state deployed accusations of paranoia and schizophrenia. The distinct discourse of Black paranoia in turn provided different imaginative possibilities for Black independent cinema than were available to Hollywood productions. One such example of these alternate possibilities for paranoid cinema is Ivan Dixon's radical combination of blaxploitation aesthetics and Third Cinema concepts, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), based on Sam Greenlee's 1969 novel of the same name. (Greenlee also co-wrote the screenplay and was heavily involved in the production.) Set primarily in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Spook tells the story of Dan Freeman, who is hired to be the first Black officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a result of a political PR stunt, reflecting Greenlee's own experiences as one of the first Black overseas officials for the United States Information Agency (USIA).6 Freeman, who secretly possesses a revolutionary agenda, uses the skills and knowledge he learns in the CIA to transform a Chicago street gang, the Cobras, into a guerilla unit, with Freeman as the unknown, unseen leader (known to the public and the state by his pseudonym, "Uncle Tom"). As the film ends, the group's insurrectionary actions erupt into a full-on war of liberation, and their message spreads across the United States, implying the successful completion of Freeman's stated goal: "What we got now's a colony, but what we want to create is a new nation."7

This film, released shortly before Chinatown and The Parallax View, offers an alternative account of the paranoid 1970s. Rather than passively accepting the state's pathologization of Black Americans, Spook co-opts the state's own paranoid projections of Black radicalism and conspiracy, treating them as an enabling condition for visualizing revolution. In turn, it mediates a distinct set of historical contradictions that Black radicalism faced. Depicting the postwar liberal state as an ineffectual technocracy and the Black bourgeoisie as complicitous counterrevolutionaries easily tempted by sexual and other pleasures, the film conjures Freeman as a hypercompetent, hypermasculinist, and notably stoic superspy who can reinvigorate the techniques of a sterile state toward a revolutionary solution. This cinematic ideology — which I call, after the work of Michael Rogin, "counter-countersubversive" — produces its own set of imaginative limits, however, as Freeman risks reproducing the very state he has sought to topple, if only more effectively.8

Most discussions of paranoia and film focus on an overwhelmingly white canon of noir, neo-noir, and conspiracy thrillers, paying limited attention to race. When race does appear in accounts of paranoid American cinema, it tends to be as a discrete topic addressed, among others, by specific films that otherwise resemble the white conspiracy film, generically and formally.9 Racialized content, in this way, becomes a variation on a supposedly unraced — which is to say, white — default. However, Black paranoia represents a distinct historical and discursive phenomenon that would, I argue, produce unique aesthetic and cultural effects. By placing Spook in this context, I hope to widen our understanding of what might constitute paranoid cinema and expand our sense of how Black cinema sought to disrupt the "grand, multifaceted illusion" of Hollywood's representation of Blackness.10

Black Paranoia and the Countersubversive Imagination

In the 1960s and 1970s, Blackness and paranoia were associated both discursively and materially across political, medical, and cultural contexts, and Black radicals participated in this discourse directly. Within the medical field, as Jonathan Metzl has explored, schizophrenia (including paranoid schizophrenia) shifted from a diagnosis associated with victims who were "largely white, and generally harmless to society" and became understood as a "violent social disease."11 "Mainstream culture," he claims, perceived systemic critiques of white supremacist society as "threats" to the "racial status quo."12 This process was often direct, as when "psychiatric authors conflated the schizophrenic symptoms of African American patients with the perceived schizophrenia of civil rights protests."13 It also solidified a more general and lasting portrayal of Black people's non-compliance with the racial status quo as "a form of madness that is, still, overwhelmingly located in the minds and bodies of black men."14

These medical manifestations, which allowed clinical professionals to "knowingly or unknowingly pathologize protest as mental illness," are part of a larger social context in which such associations were formed and maintained.15 The FBI did not hesitate to diagnose movement leaders such as Malcolm X and Robert Williams with schizophrenia from afar, promoting these diagnoses in the press to suggest these figures were unpredictable, impulsive, and delusional.16 The FBI had obviously not diagnosed these figures in a clinical setting, but the larger social association of Blackness and paranoia provided a cultural vocabulary with which to delegitimize political opponents from a distance.17

This association also provided a language of resistance for reframing Black paranoia as a material and historical condition — even, perhaps, an advantageous one — rather than a biological maladjustment.18 Psychologists William Grier and Price Cobbs, in the influential Black Rage, write that "for a black man survival in America depends in large measure on the development of a 'healthy' cultural paranoia. He must maintain a high degree of suspicion toward the motives of every white man and at the same time never allow this suspicion to impair his grasp of reality."19 Huey Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide represents a similar reframing; Newton rejects the pathologization under which Black struggle has been understood "as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks." He instead understands "any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force" as "suicidal."20 Such revolutionary suicide is not "a death wish" but "a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity" fought out "even at the risk of death."21

Black thinkers also provided their own counter-diagnoses of white society. Robert Williams, contorting the very accusations leveled at him by the FBI, describes racism as "a mass psychosis" that has "thoroughly warped" the minds of Americans.22 Using a similar rhetoric to the state, Williams positions Black Americans' supposed paranoia as a natural reaction to living amongst a psychotic, mind-controlled white population. Stokely Carmichael, at the "Dialectics of Liberation" conference in July 1967, presented the Black freedom struggle as directly opposed to the psychological approaches to social change of cybernetics-influenced thinkers like R. D. Laing and Gregory Bateson, who emphasized the individual as the horizon of action: "I've been very confused, because I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, I'm a political activist and I don't deal with the individual. I think it's a cop out when people talk about the individual." Rather than seeking to correct people's individual thoughts, Carmichael maintains that what must be confronted is the system itself: "we're out to smash that system ... or we're going to be smashed."23 He pictures the American situation as one in which a white man has a gun trained on a Black man: "The black man is not the sick man." Instead, Carmichael asserts, "it is the white man who is sick, he's the one who picked the gun up first," and, thus, "the psychologists ought to investigate and examine their own corrupt society. That's where they belong."24

The state's attempts to frame Black protest and resistance as paranoid and delusional provide a potent example of what Michael Rogin calls "countersubversion" and "political demonology," features of Americans politics wherein the "inflation, stigmatization, and dehumanization of political foes" produces "monsters" emanating from a "conspiratorial center of evil."25 Importantly, cinema is one of the main terrains on which Rogin sees the battle of countersubversion being fought. For example, he discusses the work of D. W. Griffith, chiefly The Birth of a Nation (1915), as an important entry in this history, but he notes that while Griffith drew attention to filmic technique, positioning the director as the figure who could expose the truth of the demonic threat through the cinematic apparatus, the Hollywood film ultimately developed in a distinct direction. The classical Hollywood style "disguised the artfulness of film cuts," producing a "final cut that eliminated all those shots, scenes, and versions of the plot where something had gone wrong."26 As I will argue, Freeman, in Spook, represents just such a "something" that has "gone wrong." In their film, Dixon and Greenlee seek to reverse this cinematic-demonological process, reemphasizing the techniques of cinema (and the techniques of statecraft) and drawing the viewer's attention to the cinematic apparatus, albeit toward opposing political ends to Griffith's. In this way, the film engages not merely in a "subversive" aesthetic response to the culture of the Cold War, but, specifically, a "counter-countersubversive" one. As I will show, the film relies upon the countersubversive techniques of the intelligence community and of Hollywood cinema as tools that can be reappropriated, effectively reversing their polarity toward revolutionary ends.

We cannot simply understand Spook as a radical and independent work of resistance that resists the US state exogenously. Rather, the film is tied up in matters of the state. As Rogin claims, countersubversion did not only demonize its political foes but allowed "the countersubversive, in the name of battling the subversive, to imitate his enemy."27 Hofstadter, similarly, suggests that in the paranoid style, "it is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him."28 In Spook, we see this process repeating itself, as if a feedback loop: Freeman literally becomes a CIA agent and ultimately builds a revolutionary cell that reinvigorates the countersubversive techniques of the state. He does so in a very particular context, however. For Rogin, "cold war countersubversion" was dominated by fear of the Soviet Union, as the fate of civilization was seen to rest on a Manichean battle "between Moscow's agents (intellectuals, government employees, students and middle-class activists) and a state national-security apparatus."29 Indeed, in Spook, the state consistently interprets Black revolutionary action as necessarily rooted in the Communist threat; the latter must be the puppeteer pulling the strings of Black resistance. Thus, while the Black radical is clearly demonized by the countersubversive imagination, as we see above, the nature of the Cold War demonic hierarchy is specific, with masterminding Soviets manipulating maladapted, impulsive, and delusional Black Americans. Spook imagines this paranoid vision of the state, projecting specters of Communist activity wherever it looks, as producing the conditions under which Black counter-countersubversion might take hold. The film suggests the state's diagnostic gaze, which has been weaponized against Black subjects, holds the potential to create the conditions under which a truly revolutionary subjectivity might be formed. And given the faulty, paranoid, countersubversive nature of that statist vision, it suggests that such a revolutionary subject might be hiding in plain sight.

Sitting by the Door, Hiding in Plain Sight

The Spook Who Sat by the Door and the novel on which it is based build on a long history of Black radical literature imagining Black-led revolutionary movements acting against a racist state.30 In adapting his novel to cinema, though, Greenlee sought to bring its message to a larger audience and situated the novel's radical plot within a specific cinematic language drawing on multiple genres. In its didactic message and instructional content, in which Freeman trains his fellow revolutionaries, Spook mirrors the pedagogical aims of Third Cinema, presenting itself as a visual how-to manual for revolutionary activity à la The Battle of Algiers (1966).31 It pairs this revolutionary content with mass cultural aesthetic signifiers, however. Herbie Hancock's electrified funk score and Freeman's hypermasculinist characterization link it to the conventions of blaxploitation, and the film features many sequences of intricate spycraft and intense action that recall a mainstream espionage thriller. As Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall argue, these generic combinations are not unconscious but represent "a deliberately articulated political strategy to generate funding for the film," which was presented to film executives as a financially viable chance to cash-in on the blaxploitation craze (the producers secured United Artists as a distributor as a result).32 As Marilyn Yaquinto relates, "once studio executives saw the final cut, they were outraged, prompting Greenlee, contract in hand, to force the studio to release the film anyway."33 The attempt to smuggle a radical project through the US studio system was limited by the FBI, who, Dixon and Greenlee allege, removed the film from theaters.34 One can only speculate about what the film's fate would have been if it remained in theaters, but this supposed interference in artistic production, alongside many other institutional limits facing Black filmmaking, goes some way to explaining why Spook stands in a relatively unique position as a didactically radical cinematic subversion of the US state's paranoid vision of Blackness. The film's production and distribution, in addition to its content, exemplify the dynamics of countersubversion, as the filmmakers sought to hijack the literal screens and projectors of Hollywood for counter-countersubversive ends.

While the alleged interference of the FBI went some way toward disrupting the film's radical intentions, the revolution depicted within the film itself is miraculously successful. In order to imagine this defeat of the state, however, the film must first imagine that state: it must find a way to render its otherwise diffuse form into a visually ascertainable one, to produce it as an "enemy" that can be encountered and, thus, defeated. It is surfeit with instructional content — from how to structure a revolutionary cell to how to make explosives from easily obtained, everyday materials — but its most important pedagogical goal is teaching the viewer to understand the state and how the state "sees." The state is a complex entity, and any attempt to render it visible relies on reducing that complexity such that it can "fit" within the frame. The film shares this problem with the state itself, which, as James C. Scott explains, "sees" in a necessarily reductive and simplifying fashion.35 Similarly, the film must reduce, via synecdoche, the state into a unit that is "small" enough to capture within the camera's frame. Hence, we do not see the entire government, but a single senator. We do not see the various other cells Freeman has helped install throughout the country, but only the Chicago-based former-Cobras. We do not see the entire military apparatus, but only a single general (who is kidnapped by the Cobras, dosed with LSD, covered in minstrel-style face paint, and released on a bicycle before being shot to death by a sniper).

The film, however, mediates its own "reduction" of the state by imagining how the vision of this "reduced" state itself functions. In the first scene, Senator Hennington discusses his reelection campaign with a group of advisors. After Hennington asks his advisors "what is our image?," he is answered with a long string of digital technobabble:

We've programmed the latest polls, senator. Lewis-Harris gave us the random-pattern sampling with peer group anchorage. Gallup, a saturization vertical syndrome study with horizontal personality backstopping. And NORC ran an ethnic study with racial and religious breakdown, status group compensation, and socioeconomic balancing... It checks out on both computers plus the one we have as a safety valve backstopping cross-check. If the elections were held together, you would lose by 1.846 percentile.

From the very start, the film establishes that this state knows itself and the world around it through computation. The details of the dialogue are fairly impenetrable: the specific content of this relentless assault of jargon is less important than the general sense of information overload. The state has reduced the vast plurality of the world into numbers, through arcane means, which have spit out the ultimate answer to the senator's problems: "The computers don't lie ... The Negroes are the trouble spot ... The computers indicate a sharp decline immediately after your law-and-order speech last Winter."36 Hennington does not actually understand these processes, but he is nonetheless forced to act based on their outputs. He knows the computers do not "lie" in that he must act as if the data they produce is real and, as a result, the data will bring about real-world effects — and in that sense become real — regardless of whether or not it corresponds to the "actual" reality. That is, whether its simplifications are "true" or not, the state must function as if they are, lest it be caught in informational limbo. The vast and complex African American population, then, is reduced to a single datum in the perception of the state, a datum that must be altered. The state is established as that which can only see Black Americans indirectly, through the medium of the computer network.37

As crucial as they are to the film's conceit, however, these computers are never actually seen; they exist outside the film's reality, which is distinct from the reality of the state. In these first shots, we see the senator and his two advisers, contained within a single room (only the cigar smoke is missing), listening to the truths the unseen computers proffer. An absent referent, the computer serves as a synecdoche for the larger workings of the state, in their obtuse complexity, which lie outside the frame. We will further glimpse this system throughout the film, in shots of television screens showing CCTV surveillance footage, discussions behind two-way mirrors, and images of doors that open to reveal hidden informants.

This informatic, computerized vision might be seen as paranoia-inducing and all-encompassing, but it also provides the means through which a figure like Freeman can enter the CIA undetected. Indeed, it is as a direct result of these computerized polls that Freeman will first enter the Agency: due to his struggles with the Black vote, Hennington attacks the CIA's lack of diversity, leading to a recruitment project whereby a large group of African American men are recruited. These recruits are then put through a rigorous training and testing procedure to determine who, if any, will become agents. The film cuts to a wide shot of the entire class of potential candidates, seated and facing the camera as a white CIA official delivers a speech. Each recruit is fully visible within the frame, though miniaturized by its wide scope. The frame is symmetrically composed, with an equal number of recruits and officials on either side of the podium; a slight downward tilt of the camera ensures that even the recruits in the back row are discernible. The Black recruits are thus ostensibly in full view of the state's vision, each occupying a unique point on a Cartesian grid. What that state's digital perceptions could never detect, however, is what is lurking behind the surface, in one of these recruits' minds.

By beginning with such an emphasis on the state's abstracting gaze, the film goes on to imagine how this gaze might be turned toward revolutionary ends, as we see Freeman successfully navigate the recruitment process, learn various techniques, and then use those techniques against the very state that trained him. Greenlee himself directly stated that the novel on which the film was based was "a training manual for guerilla warfare ... That's why it scared the white folks so much."38 The film, as a rather faithful adaptation in which Greenlee was involved as writer, producer, and fundraiser, seeks to expand this manual to a wider audience and, potentially, bring about the very events that it fictionally depicts. In so doing, it is self-conscious of its own simplifications: whereas the state's simplifications are imagined to occlude as much as they expose, Greenlee and Dixon, in drawing attention to their use of cinematic technique, imagine their simplifications as self-conscious decisions that serve a pedagogical function for the viewer.

The primary formal technique through which the film instructs its viewers in these matters is montage. As in the iconic training scenes of later sports films like Rocky (1976), the CIA recruits are shown in extended montage sequences learning and gradually improving on a variety of techniques, from fighting to diving to written exams, all set to Hancock's funk-laden score. Whereas the training montage in the tradition of Rocky emphasizes the gradual strengthening and improvement of one individual body, however, the montage sequence in Spook does not showcase the development of an existing protagonist, as no such figure has been narratively established. Freeman, as protagonist, does not enter into this montage; he emerges from it. Though he appears throughout the training montages, he does so quite anonymously. Even when he appears in the frame, he is not privileged in any way, nor has he been named within the dialogue or otherwise marked by the film as a more "important" character than any of the other potential agents. Freeman moves right in front of the eyes of the viewer and the state, who barely notice he is there.

By withholding Freeman's centrality for so long, these montage sequences instruct the viewer in a more formal way than their status as a "training manual" suggests. The film does not simply teach the viewer specific techniques; it formally instructs the viewer in terms of how the state "sees" and, thus, how that vision can be manipulated. Freeman is not accorded any particular importance by the framing of the shots, the movement of the cameras, or the editing of the sequences. The state and Dixon's camera both seem to have failed to register his exceptionality. The viewer is unlikely to even notice him for long stretches, as the "protagonist" of the montage sequences appears to be the recruits as a collective, reflecting the state's vision of them as a homogenous, racialized population group meant to serve a simple, informatic end (the production of the media item indicating the placement of a Black agent into the CIA). Accordingly, the state, in biopolitical fashion, reduces this population to trackable data: they are literally weighed and measured as the opening credits play, and we see them submitted to written examinations, psychological profiles, interviews, and physical tests, all of which produced quantified results and rankings. From this mostly undifferentiated mass of recruits emerges a smaller group of ten finalists, whom the CIA describes as "the best of your race."39

While Freeman is among these ten, he is still not privileged by the camera until he finally emerges as a named character over nine minutes into the film. As the recruits, now down to six, are practicing scuba diving in a swimming pool, two CIA officials discuss their progress from the other side of a one-way mirror. The officials occupy the right third of the frame, while, in the center, a single recruit sits on the side of the pool, away from the camera, rendered indistinguishable from any other by his scuba gear, which covers every inch of his body but his hands. This man is Freeman, though the viewer does not know it yet (nor does the senior official). The junior official describes how Freeman has slipped through the cracks to emerge as the most likely candidate, much as he is currently occupying the center of the frame without our knowledge: "Somehow, I forgot Freeman even existed. He has a way of fading into the background, but he's been among the top three in academics and first in athletic training."40 Almost ten minutes into the film, Freeman is now a name, though he is not yet a face: he is simply a potentiality, one of the six divers practicing behind the glass. The scene that introduces Freeman as the film's protagonist simultaneously registers that both the CIA and the camera itself have failed, as yet, to identify him. The senior official asks, "Which one is he?" With the junior official's answer, we realize we have been looking at Freeman's back this entire time, though we still cannot be sure which of the six he is. Freeman dives into the pool, and the film cuts to a medium shot of a Black man at work on a typewriter. The words "Hey, Freeman," uttered by someone off screen, confirms who we are looking at.41 Ten minutes into the film, Freeman has finally emerged from this montage into a frame all his own. Finally, he has become the singular figure the rest of the film is going to present him as: an individual not only uniquely capable of undermining the state but uniquely aware of its vision.

Despite existing directly within the state's visual field, Freeman manages to emerge from "outside" the state's perceptions, given his propensity for "fading into the background." The film's title, in addition to punning on CIA slang and a racial slur, characterizes Freeman as a sort of ghost, and Freeman himself later notes that "a smiling black man is invisible," recalling associations of Blackness and invisibility by authors such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright.42 Freeman's invisibility, however, does not rely on moving literally underground, as it does for Wright and Ellison's protagonists. Rather, Freeman operates directly in the state's vision, knowing that it is incapable of perceiving him as he truly is. While the film establishes, from its opening moments, the ubiquity of CIA surveillance, Freeman alone warns the other recruits that "this place could be bugged."43 In being aware of his surveillance, however, Freeman also knows how to manipulate that gaze, how to present an image that accords with what the state wants to see. In this way, Dixon and Greenlee take the Black male paranoid figure conjured by the US security state and reimagine him as a hero of extraordinary physical and mental capacity, with unique awareness of the systems designed to ensnare him — an awareness that others might call paranoid.44 Freeman is thus able to produce a specific informatic identity of quantifiable traits (high grades and perfect physical measurables) while avoiding subjective qualification: no one remembers him well enough to exclude him for one reason or another. He succeeds and becomes the first Black agent in CIA history.

Freeman's success is limited, however, by the CIA's sole desire for a Black employee to place "by the door," creating a visual informatic of its supposed racial integration. While one of Hennington's assistants had previously predicted that "whoever [the CIA] select[s] will be the best-known spy since 007," Freeman is given the title of "Top Secret Reproductions Center Section Chief," which, in effect, places him in charge of the copier. Freeman's status as a low-level information worker provides another vantage point into the state's informatic perceptions: the state can only perceive what can be rendered onto the forms that are legible to it. It also oddly foreshadows Freeman's secret agenda, by which he will become a sort of revolutionary information worker, acquiring data on revolutionary strategy and tactics from the CIA and transferring this data to the Black population. This possibility, however, is not imagined as something exogenous to the state's perceptions but as something produced by its own contradictory vision, its inability to see what is right in front of it.

Freeman Goes Analog

Even after Freeman emerges as the film's protagonist, his ulterior motives are not revealed. The viewer is not yet "in on" Freeman's plan. A crossfade takes us to a time when he has worked up to become the CIA director's assistant but is about to leave the organization, telling the director he will "use what he learned here" to "work with my people and show them the way" by pursuing a career in social services.45 Despite this, the state is still paranoid about Freeman: we see the director order Freeman to be put under constant surveillance and his phone to be tapped. This paranoid state, which surveils everywhere, cannot conceive of the gaps in its own vision. The CIA and the viewer, however, nearly a third of the way into the film, have encountered no sign that Freeman is up to anything. The diegetic revelation of Freeman's mission finally occurs more than a third of the way through the film, when he finally contacts the Cobras, ostensibly as part of his social service work, and asks, "You really wanna mess with whitey? I can show you how."46 Once again, though, Freeman was hiding in plain sight: having told the CIA and the viewer his honest plans to "use what he learned here" to "show them the way," he does just that.

When Freeman begins to "show" them "what he learned," the film yet again returns to its montage mode, in a sequence that mirrors the first, but now with Freeman as the instructor, passing along the same information he learned in the initial sequence. In a sense, the CIA has not only taught Freeman the specific information that is related by these repetitive sequences, but it has also "taught" the film the technique of montage, which can now be repurposed toward revolutionary ends. Whereas it has previously been used by the state to train the Black recruits in methods of spycraft and counterinsurgency (and, unwittingly, to create Freeman), it is now used to create revolutionary guerilla fighters. Montage itself is thus the chief of the "master's tools" (to use Audre Lorde's famous phrase) that Freeman seeks to repurpose against the state.

The film's interest in montage is an aspect of its more general interest in "analog" means of resistance against the digital, computerized state.47 As Freeman instructs, "If we get sophisticated equipment, we'll use it, but we don't rely on it... We match technology with spontaneity and improvisation. Men against machine. Brains against computers."48 In another example, we see Freeman and a Cobra setting up snipers throughout Chicago using a sextant. The camera switches to a POV shot through this device, complete with reticule, casting the surveilling gaze of the state, trained on the Black characters throughout the film's first section, back onto the wider, white-dominated world. Under their analog vision, Chicago becomes an open book for the fledgling resistance force, from which even the state cannot hide. The high-tech, informatic state, as we have been taught, cannot see what is actually going on, filtered as its perception is by computerized polls and reproduced forms; the Black resistance, simultaneously, is out in the city measuring physical distances and perceiving the city in a seemingly "unmediated" fashion. In this way, the film creates an ideological dichotomy of high-tech and low-tech, digital and analog, mediation and immediacy, visibility and invisibility, which function in tandem to suggest that the state might be defeated through the flaws and aporias produced by its attempts to visualize race.

As I have argued, the most important analog technique that the film "learns" from the state is montage, and in one of the film's most formally daring sequences — as Freeman and the Cobras seize a radio station — we see this cinematic technique repurposed not only to train the rebel/viewer in other techniques but as an offensive weapon in itself. From the beginning, the seizure of the station blurs the film's textual and metatextual levels of reality. We see a shot of the Cobras, armed with stolen guns, taking over the building as a DJ puts on a record playing the same Herbie Hancock music that has up to this point provided the film's extradiegetic score. The film then cuts to a masked Freeman, in his "Uncle Tom" persona, speaking into a microphone, and then to a shot of the city skyline; Freeman's speech continues without interruption, though the sound quality is altered to indicate we are now hearing the broadcast at one of its receiving points (e.g., a radio), rather than from its transmission point. The transmission continues over shots of a variety of locations, showing its reach throughout the city, even to the halls of power, via a shot of the Chicago mayor's uninhabited office. As Freeman explains their plan to rig the office with bombs, we see masked Cobras entering. The camera then tracks their movements across the office from a low angle, with cuts to close-ups of their setting explosives and wide shots of the exterior of the building. The film then cuts back to a tight shot of the masked "Uncle Tom," almost perfectly mirroring the original shot of Freeman at his desk during the CIA recruitment process; he states, "It's almost time," and begins counting down from ten. At the count of "three," the film cuts to an exterior shot of the windows of the office ("two"). We return to the static shot of Freeman ("one, blastoff!"), and then, finally, back to the windows, which explode in fire. Freeman proudly declares that "the mayor's office is now air-conditioned, courtesy of the Black Freedom Fighters of Chicago."49

The film laces the scenes of the rigging and Freeman's broadcast together in a textbook example of parallel montage, with the countdown perfectly synchronizing the disparate locations of the station and the office into a shared narrative present. At least, that's what appears to have happened. And it is what the state thinks happened: after the explosion, the film cuts to a shot of a cop car driving toward the camera, as Freeman's broadcast narration continues. In the next shot, as the policemen enter the broadcast booth, Freeman is still speaking without interruption. Now, however, his voice carries the same aural qualities it did away from the station. A reverse-shot finally reveals what the police are looking at as they arrive: a tape recorder. The continuous nature of Freeman's voiceover narration — including the precise timing of the countdown — and the apparent continuity editing of the parallel montage makes this seem impossible. There was no gap in the sound during which Freeman could have replaced himself with the taped message. As it turns out, the viewer, as well as the police, have been tricked: while the repurposed filmic technique of montage suggested that the soundtrack and visuals were synchronized in time, things were not as they appeared. The group has not just engaged in an act of revolutionary terrorism, they have disturbed the temporal continuity of the film itself. Whereas William S. Burroughs, another proponent of analog resistance to technocracy, wrote that "a camera and two tape recorders can cut the lines laid down by a fully equipped film studio," Freeman and his group start an insurrectionary revolution with only one.50 While the state, terrified of Black revolution, has penetrated every inch of visual space with its digital network in an attempt to render all quantifiable (and thus, to the state, "seeable"), the Black radicals — created by the state's paranoid vision — are everywhere and nowhere at once, disappearing into the analog infrastructure of film itself.

The Revolution Will Not Be Projected

Spook's co-optation of montage as a revolutionary technique demonstrates how the film is more than simply a "how-to" manual, a content-based list of suggestions for cheap revolutionary tactics (done through tape recorders, sextants, and other low-tech means). Rather, the film suggests that cinema itself — a highly technical and expensive medium requiring large amounts of funding, labor, and coordination — is also one of these tools. In this sense, the film participates in a long tradition of revolutionary cinema that, as Yaquinto points out, continues in the era of cheap digital technology that unlocks "the ability to oppressed peoples to use film and video to advance their agendas, with new technologies making it possible for nearly anyone to become a journalist or a political filmmaker."51 It is notable, however, that within the logic of the film, Spook's capacity for revolutionary montage is not drawn from Third Cinema or the writings of Soviet film theorists like Sergei Eisenstein, but from the CIA (through an act of form/content collapse) or from Hollywood (with the film's aesthetic trappings of action and espionage).52 In this way, the film does not simply co-opt Hollywood genres but engages in a complex process of formal counter-countersubversion, wherein those aesthetic techniques — themselves countersubversive codifications of earlier cinematic experimentation — are repurposed (or re-repurposed) for revolutionary ends. By concentrating these counter-countersubversive energies into the individual body of Freeman-as-vanguard-leader, the film collapses this formal repurposing with Freeman's political program. As such, the film seeks to simultaneously reinvigorate the techniques of post-studio Hollywood and the midcentury liberal state, both of which it imagines as stunted and ineffectual institutions in dire need of Freeman's radical and profoundly masculine energies.

Spook is not unique in critiquing this midcentury liberal state and its techniques of administration, which were likewise critiqued by figures as various as Herbert Marcuse and the New Left, liberal philosophers like Hannah Arendt, and cultural conservatives.53 In reappropriating these techniques, however, Spook suggests the methods of the liberal state are not necessarily fatally flawed but, rather, that they must be wielded with greater efficacy. Indeed, the fact that the CIA's tests accurately select Freeman as the most competent of the recruits shows that their methods are not in themselves unsound. In this way, Freeman does not so much provide a radical alternative to the midcentury liberal state as a perfection of it, an untethering of the state from bureaucratic inertia and decadent prurience. These methods borrow not only from CIA counterinsurgency doxa, but also the domestic policy of the War on Poverty and private institutions like the Ford Foundation.54 In particular, Freeman's recruitment of the Cobras almost certainly alludes to the Office of Economic Opportunity's direction of funds from the War on Poverty to the Chicago gang the Blackstone Rangers. Whereas this real-life engagement between a Chicago gang and the liberal state resulted in a "fiasco," involving shootings, murder charges, assault, and few job placements, Freeman proves much more effective in reengaging the Cobras in their community, eventually successfully training and "placing" them in new job (as revolutionaries).55

To reignite its techniques of intervention, however, Freeman must contend not only with the liberal state itself but also with the Black bourgeoisie, an empowered class who mediated the liberal state's top-down attempts at social administration. The film depicts this class as composed of upper-middle-class strivers easily given into capitalistic and sexual temptation, in contrast to Freeman's stoic professionalism. Indeed, in the first scene in which Freeman is fully established by the camera, his fellow recruits try to tempt him to go with them into Washington, DC for a night of bourgeois indulgence, which Freeman steadfastly refuses by saying "No, got some studying to do." The fellow recruits, who we learn have been attempting to goad Freeman out for weeks, grow increasingly angry with his steadfastness; one recruit in particular demands Freeman "cool it," "join the team," and stop working so hard Freeman, in turn, chases the recruit out of his room, threatening to "kick [his] ass."56 This combination of focus, competency, singularity of purpose, and willingness to engage in righteous violence typify Freeman, from the beginning of the film, against his weak-willed bourgeois counterparts.

Sexual lasciviousness is not exclusive to the recruits, however: the liberal state itself proves to be just as easily tempted. Freeman, himself, is not lacking in a sex drive (which would undercut his hypermasculine characterization), but seeks to put even his libido to work at invigorating the revolutionary process. In the scene immediately following the above, we see Freeman at a bar, by himself, ordering a drink for a Black female sex worker, whom he quickly takes to bed. This moment would seem to initially contradict his prior rejection of the recruits' enticement, but Freeman ultimately recruits the sex worker, who he rechristens as Dahomey Queen, to seduce and inform upon the CIA director. Freeman's sexual prowess, here, seems to be another tool of the state he has reinvigorated: while the CIA director's sex drive undermines his aims, Freeman's helps actualize his own. The sexual realm still proves a dangerous one for Freeman, however, as Dahomey Queen has her own countersubversive mirror in Joy, Freeman's college sweetheart who intuits that he is Uncle Tom. She subsequently turns him in to Dawson, a Chicago police officer and Freeman's childhood friend, stating that Freeman "was defending those animals [the Cobras], and then he caught himself. He said all the right things, but it just wasn't him. It just wasn't the man I know."57 In allowing himself to be known via sexual and romantic intimacy, Freeman exposes himself to potential capture in a way that mirrors the director.

This mirroring demonstrates the film's commitment to a masculinist vision of political revolution. While Queen and Joy have opposing political aims, their similar formal positions suggest that, for Spook, if women have roles in the revolutionary struggle, on either side, it is via the ability to seduce and sexually pleasure powerful men. Stephanie Dunn argues that the film presents Black women with a double bind, in which they can either "be used by 'the Man' to maintain white patriarchy" or "willingly yield to black male phallic power, both sexually and politically."58 Yaquinto seeks to defend Joy's characterization by reading her rather as a "stand-in for the black middle class" motivated by "fear of losing her middle-class status and reverting back to the hardships of ghetto life."59 Yaquinto is certainly correct to note the class motivations behind these female characters: Dahomey Queen uses sex work to improve her class position to that of a high-end escort for powerful government officials, and Joy seeks to maintain her current position within the Black bourgeoisie against which the film is ideologically pitted. But this very class critique is why, for the film, the embodiment of revolutionary competency can only be a man — and a hypermasculine, sexually dynamic man at that. Women's gendered position renders them, in the film's logic, incapable of weathering a potential "reversion" to "the hardships of ghetto life," and thus only able to occupy a revolutionary subjectivity by using their own weakness (as sexualized subjects) to exploit the sexual weaknesses of men.

Freeman, meanwhile, is imagined as exactly the figure who can master his own sexual prowess without submitting to the temptations of upper-middle-class enjoyment that have rendered the liberal state and the Black bourgeoisie politically and sexually impotent. While his detection by Joy reveals a limited weakness, he ultimately overcomes that weakness by displaying his resistance to yet another temptation: that of friendship. In the film's climactic scene, Dawson — personifying the Black bourgeois attempt to fix the system from the inside — confronts Freeman with the knowledge that he is Uncle Tom, but, like the countersubversive state, Dawson assumes Freeman must be a puppet of the Communist threat: "Are you working with the Commies like they say? Who's behind you?!" Against Freeman's dismissals, Dawson insists that this was "the work of an expert" against which Freeman proudly declares, "I am an expert!" before overpowering and killing Dawson. In presenting himself as such a mastermind and physically destroying a synecdoche of the Black bourgeoisie, Freeman exemplifies the paranoiac as a "militant leader" who, per Hofstadter, presents themselves as participating in "a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil" in which "what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish."60 The film "finishes" this conflict through Freeman's refusal of romance and friendship and his insistence upon expertise, violence, and brute force as the solutions to the film's contradictions.

Spook's confidence in its ability to utilize the liberal state's techniques while avoiding its pitfalls exemplifies how political demonology, per Rogin, "begins as a rigid insistence on difference" motivated by "fears of and forbidden desires for identity with the excluded object."61 In Rogin's analyses, the repressive state holds a forbidden desire to identify with the racialized other, the immigrant, or the secret Communist spy, but we see this process at work in Spook in the opposite direction. Freeman does not resist the white supremacist state by offering a radically different vision of organizing society: rather, the issue is who is in charge. The "centralized, secretive, inquisitorial state" that Cold War countersubversion sought to justify via a Communistic threat turns out to not be particularly centralized (with its extensive overhead and complex bureaucracy), secretive (with its easily-seduced agents), or inquisitorial (with its inability to detect Freeman, clouded as it is by patronizing and racist assumptions).62 The body that proves to be "centralized, secretive, [and] inquisitorial" enough to achieve that which the Cold War state cannot is not an alternative administrative body, but Freeman's body itself: a spectacularized image of an individual Black man who can successfully resist temptations (of sex, of friendship) due to the absolute singularity of his vision. The organization headed by such a dominating and domineering body is, perhaps, just as masculinist and top-down than the white supremacist state as the film depicts it, if not even more.

It is precisely this body — of a bloody but victorious Freeman — onto which the revolution that closes the film is effectively projected. Within the imagined world of the film, montage theory has led to montage practice, and Freeman and the Cobras' actions kick off civil unrest throughout the country. A final montage of these images of violent protest and resistance is superimposed on top of Freeman, who struggles with a gunshot wound, as if his body were the screen on which the revolutionary film is being projected. In this moment, the montage-as-collective and the close-up-as-individualizing are collapsed into one image. The film stops short, though, of showing us the revolution's completion and the new society that will follow; we are left instead with images of something in motion, something taking form. But what exactly that something is remains outside of our cinematic view.

The restrictions of art, of course, prevent The Spook Who Sat by the Door from doing much more than this. Diegetically, even Freeman meets the limits of what he can accomplish as a personification of the racialized "trouble spot" in the paranoid state's vision, whereas the film participates as part of the revolutionary struggle it simultaneously imagines but cannot, by its own virtues, actualize. Much like Freeman, it has started a process that must necessarily exceed itself. This non-fictional revolution obviously did not come about, and even the film's imagined vision of it reveals much about the gendered and statist limits facing the countersubversive state and the radical imaginary alike, as both formed demonic bestiaries full of paranoid heroes and conspiratorial enemies. In the end, we see how the 1970s produced not only a series of discrete paranoid individuals but a paranoid situation, one in which potentially conspiratorial ideas about how the world provided historical subjects, artists, and state actors alike to (imaginatively) navigate an otherwise incredibly complex world of opaque systems and unseen threats. Here the CIA and the Black revolutionary come to mirror each other not only in their techniques, their sexism, and their paranoia, but also in their flawed attempts to make sense of a seemingly nonsensical world. In The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Dixon and Greenlee could literally project one way of making sense of this world — and perhaps escaping it — onto the screen, but only real material practice can truly navigate a path out of these paranoid conditions and their sexist and statist trappings. As the film comes to an end and the superimposed montage fades, we are left with only Freeman. He holds his glass to the camera; the rest is up to the viewer.

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Devin William Daniels is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, where he teaches courses in literature, film, media studies, literary theory, and writing. His research focuses on the connections between literature, digital technology, and the state, as in his first book, Becoming Data: US Fiction and the Informatic State, which is under peer review at Columbia University Press. He is currently researching the paranoid styles and subjectivities of contemporary American culture, with attention to the novel, fictional and documentary cinema, and born-digital media, from online message boards to podcasts and YouTube. His work is published or forthcoming in Post45, Representations, Mediations, English Studies in Africa, Contemporaries at Post45, and The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Film.

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Banner Image The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973).

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References

For their invaluable help in improving this essay, I would like to thank Annie McClanahan and Arthur Wang (my editors at Post45), Sarah Brouillette, Lilian Crooks, Matthew Ellis, David B. Hobbs, Dan Malinowski, Alex Millen, Michael Martin Shea, Anna Zalokostas, and my anonymous reviewers. Anything worthwhile herein is to their credit.