‘The gates of hell’: the cruel optimism of national security in Secret City

ABSTRACT

Despite the rapid expansion of counter-terrorism legislation in Australia since 9/11, recent polls show that Australians feel no safer. In this article, I examine the affective dimensions of national security in Foxtel’s political thriller Secret City (2016). I draw on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to illustrate the ways in which Secret City frames the desire for security itself as problematic. Secret City uses the logic of security and the visual language of surveillance to alert viewers to the threat that national security legislation poses; when politicians and intelligence agencies erode civil rights, journalistic freedoms, and democratic processes, citizens lose their ability to secure against their own security forces. However, in creating such a pervasive atmosphere of fear and threat for its viewers, Secret City actually validates the foundational desire for security which it shows to be so easily exploited. I argue that Secret City illustrates an impasse in which the desire for security is affectively binding, even when security practices jeopardize the very safety and wellbeing they promise.

KEYWORDS:

• Secret City
• national security
• Lauren Berlant
• cruel optimism
• Australian television

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Malcolm Turnbull’s 2017 press conference announcing the Department of Home Affairs, in which he and Peter Dutton repeatedly assert that uniting Australia’s intelligence, policing and border control agencies into a single portfolio will ‘keep Australians safe’.

2. The need to secure Australian values is also felt by the general public: the 2017 Roy Morgan survey on security-consciousness in Australia found that 61% of Australians believe that the ‘fundamental values of our society are under threat.’ The poll does not specify what those fundamental values are, or precisely what kind of threat Australians perceive, but nevertheless demonstrates that the public understanding of national security involves attachments to multiple objects.

3. It is worth noting that, for Kim and Harriet, their personal security is frequently invaded through gendered violence, which is especially significant given that the producers chose to make Harriet female in the show – in the novels, Harriet is Harry Dunkley, a male reporter. When the Director of ASD forces a male guard to strip-search Kim – who, as a trans woman, is especially vulnerable – or when ASIO agent Charles Dancer abuses his sexual relationships first with Kim and later with Harriet to lure them out to a secluded forest where he intends to kill them, their violence is unmistakably coded as sexual. As both men are representatives of state security institutions, their abuse seems intended to signify a severe violation of the social contract between government and citizen. The gendered and sexualized dimensions of this violation highlight the societal intimacy and trust that this violation betrays.

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Katie Cox

Katie Cox is a current PhD candidate in Literature at the Australian National University, specializing in contemporary speculative fiction, popular film, American cultural studies, and political theory. Her doctoral research brings affect theory into conversation with critical security studies to examine the consequences of post-9/11 national security logic through the lens of Marvel’s Iron Man films.