Although cancelled after only one season, AMC’s Rubicon (2010) offers an example of a televisual text that challenges viewers by presenting little in the way of narrative explanation, alongside a complex plot structure that plays with contemporary fascinations with conspiracies and the flow of global power. Following a group of intelligence analysts at the API (American Policy Institute), Rubicon portrays the actions and decisions of the members of the think tank as they attempt to track a previously unsuspected individual, who they quickly decide is the central agent within an international ring of fundamentalists, mobsters, and foreign intelligence agents. Here, the show draws on larger cultural anxieties over power, information, and terror.
What the thirteen episodes illustrate is twofold: the first is a model of paranoia and overinterpreting information that is at once the content of the show as well as its form, inviting the audience to participate in the fantasies, theories, and anxieties of the lead characters; the second is a critique of the function of power in the twenty-first century. These two qualities work in tandem to invite the audience into the narrative of Rubicon, allowing viewers to partake in a process that critiques power while being impotent in the face of its labyrinthine machinations. Without the current configuration of global power, the form of overinterpretation and paranoid reading in which the show participates would only be a pathological form of interpreting the world. With it, we see Rubicon as a critical text that reflects the anxieties and uncertainties created by immaterial and amorphous systems of political decision-making. At our current historical juncture, a paranoid reading is both a highly entertaining and a critical reading of the world. One cannot simply dismiss a paranoid reading of power and information when the current structure of power engenders such a reading. Two semiotic concepts, or models, from Umberto Eco—the open work and overinterpretation—will serve as a foundation for the following analysis. With these semiotic (perhaps even psychological) concepts, we can understand the problems that audiences pose to a text and its own act of reading. In addition, Gilles Deleuze’s concept of control, as well as N. Katherine Hayles’ information theory, will serve to investigate the manner in which the complexity of the digital age forces us to rethink the nature and function of power.