perceptual process. This tendency conditions his desire for truth and indeed provides the material basis for his growing obsession.

Subsequent investigations into what he believes he has seen ultimately serve to expose the possibility that the more he enlarges the images, the more he distorts them, revising the past and inventing the crime. As Iain Sinclair has pointed out, there are similarities here to Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” in the way that the voyeur indulges in fantasies as a response to “ennui and sexual repression”. (2) At the risk of presenting myself as a bored and carnally unfulfilled individual, I would like to show how easy it is to submit to a gnawing obsession, in thrall to a technological environment which lends itself so readily to the exhaustive scrutiny of not-necessarily reliable data.

capture, by any mediating instrument, of a slice of reality which only at a later stage comes to achieve greater significance than the subject in focus. The power of such an effect is “discovered prescience” and it cannot operate without the benefit of hindsight. One disturbing example of this effect emerges from David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’. In the European “film” version of the pilot episode, Laura Palmer’s mother remembers a scene where she scans her daughter’s bedroom, only to realise in horror that she has actually overlooked and now sees in memory the figure of “Bob”, barely visible and crouched at the foot of the bed. She screams and jumps up in her chair.
The character of “Bob” came to be central to the series only after two chance instances were seized upon and connected by Lynch. Firstly, when set dresser Frank Silva was arranging furniture for the “remembered” scene and was temporarily stuck alone in the bedroom, Lynch ordered him to stay there and be included in one of the panning shots, in case it could be used. Later the same day, immediately after the “scream” scene was filmed, the camera operator insisted on a retake because a crew member had been accidentally caught reflected in the mirror behind the actress as she jumped up. The culprit? Frank Silva. This shot was kept and used in the final version. Knowledge of this story and the option to spot “Bob” by pausing the frame compounds the terror of this scene in the light of the series as a whole. (3)
Instances of the appearance of prescient information in frozen, reviewable form excite the mind’s relentless yearning for the capability to discern a general pattern from particular instances, and fuel superstitious fallacies that the future is there to be divined if one is equipped with the insight to recognise relevant symbolic indicators. (4) Although Blue 439 initially lacks the conclusive certainty of retrospective knowledge, he is compelled to review his images by the promise of having captured an illicit liaison, and finds himself in possession of incriminating information from which a natural conclusion would seem to follow. This results in a drive toward induction, with the temptation to invest the innocuous with profound meaning and infer a concrete causal chain of events.

The promise of a concrete resolution to this mystery provides a tantalising glimpse of a more grounded and “meaningful” reality within which he can situate himself. The frantic attempt to find answers through control and mastery of technology at his disposal is at the same time a response to and justification of his own decadent existence. His apparent inability to achieve a state of satisfaction is inextricably linked to the value he attaches to mediated reality over and above the immediate

There is something deeply unsettling about the unintention