Participating from a distance; or, Untraceable (2008)

Marketed as 'The Silence of the Lambs for the Internet Age,' Untraceable tells the story of a young adult angered over the way in which his father's suicide became a national laughing-stock on Youtube, decides to build a website that is intricately connected to people he has captured and now places into precarious positions: wired to a lethal dose of blood thinner, surrounded by heat lamps, in a glass box piped to sulphuric acid. They aren't necessarily dead yet. But I say precarious because our antagonist has rigged it so that the more people that log onto the website to witness the scenario, the sooner the victim meets his death. Spectatorship is no longer neutral observation, its active participation, a kind of weapon. The online public becomes an accomplice to a murder that otherwise never would have happened. Needless to say, the number of watchers surge into the millions faster and faster with each new exhibition.

Untraceable flopped at the box office and most critics hated it for either being too conventional or else not following those conventions of the thriller genre. Adam Tobias of the Watertown Daily Times points out,

Part of the problem with “Untraceable” is the identity of the killer behind the Web site is revealed way too early, thus taking most of the mystery out of the movie.

and

But what is confusing is that while Jennifer, Griffin and Eric are trying to stop people from being murdered one by one, the workers in the FBI office are glued to their computer screens watching the terror unfold. Which begs the question: If these are the people who are paid to protect us, then why are they helping out the killer by speeding up executions?

The film does back-off from the cynical position of bluntly accusing the watching public of being evil as at one point someone in the film suggests, 'its only human to be curious.' But it is clear the audience is meant to feel complicitous and ultimately guilty for the way the internet so easily allows us to make light of the most gruesome situations, the most degrading humiliations. And there is somewhat of a conservative edge to any such pronouncements which, in the next breath, often want to move towards censorship and restraint. Much like any city will want to incarcerate or 'relocate' its homeless population whenever the Olympics of even a democratic convention rolls into town. What remains untraceable is still all those millions around the world without an internet connection. Yet our movie has no trouble substituting its middle-class online spectators with that larger group known as 'humanity.' Once more the language of ethics (who is responsible?) stands in for that of economic inequality and considerations of personal freedom stand in for doubts about capitalist social organization itself.

We have, at least, finally gotten our answer to why the slasher genre--so lucrative in the 80s and 90s--is all but old-fashioned and exhaustive to today's audiences. The serial killer has become obsolete and luke-warm in a culture where "everyone" is equally, politically, legally responsible.