The new James Bond movie, Skyfall, came to Campus Cinema last weekend. In it, there was a scene in which M, the head of the British foreign intelligence agency MI6, has to defend her handling of a security issue. Because of the high-handed though seemingly ineffectual way in which she has dealt with the matter, the government has held a public inquiry. There, backed by a dramatic musical score, she justifies her approach to tackling the problem in a little monologue, saying: “I’m frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map, they are not nations, they are individuals. Look around you. Who [sic] do you fear? Can you see a face, a uniform, a flag? No. Our world is not more transparent now, it is more opaque. It is the shadows. That’s where we must do battle.” 

Then she goes on to recite some lines by Tennyson about heroism, strength of will and moving earth and heaven, while the shots revert between her and James Bond saving the world. The scene nearly crumbles under the weight of its own overdone, melodramatic earnestness, but the job is done. The movie has done its task in creating public opinion about government secrecy and the expanding sway of intelligence agencies. Skyfall will forever affect the way we view judicially unapproved drone strikes, the hacktivist group Anonymous, Wikileaks and whether someone blowing up your car should be the proper tipping point for going berserk trying to kill them. 

All works of art have the effect of shaping cultural values, and when viewed without a critical eye, art can become propaganda. But cultural values are also shaped in much more subtle ways than by M telling us that intelligence agencies need less oversight and governments need less transparency. Subliminal messaging exists everywhere. Either in an institution existing in society or a line we hear in a movie, all social artifacts bring with their own presence certain underlying messages that construct reality. They scatter into the mass mind conceptions about what people are like and how people are supposed to behave. And as we regard these social artifacts as givens, these messages become regarded as truth. 

But when we look through the subliminal messages and ideology contained in the things around us, our minds, at least, are emancipated. We equip ourselves to not unconsciously accept values that are harmful and to oppose endeavors that enforce or preserve wrongs. 

An example is the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). This bill was introduced last year to allow certain companies exemptions from privacy law, through which they can collect threatening information about people, such as private communication data. Furthermore, broad immunities were offered for sharing this information with the government, thus helping it keep an eye on its citizens and curtailing loosely-defined cyber-threats. CISPA was opposed last year for being a gross attack on civil liberties and Internet freedom by organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Under pressure from such groups and the public, it was defeated in Senate. But last week, it was reintroduced in the House of Representatives. 

I’m not claiming that the sponsors of the bill thought, “Well, after that Bond movie that came out last year, people won’t mind CISPA this time.” I write only to call for vigilance. Ideas about what is good for the world and what is right are always being generated and discreetly embedded into society. Various cultural artifacts are responsible for this. Some, like Skyfall, are works of art which contain ideas and communicate them. Others, simply by being what they are and existing as socially-validated entities, communicate the ideas that lie behind them and go along with them -— for example, the assumptions and ideas about society that lie behind commercial art existing at all. 

We live in an ocean of subliminal cultural messages, and if we are not vigilant, many of these can and definitely do lead to problems that suave secret agents won’t be able to cure. So, let us be critical of culture, lest the sky fall.