Few things inspired more clammy dread in the average Western democracy-dweller during the last century than the idea of constant electronic surveillance - basking in the gaze of Big Brother 24/7.

But that was a long time ago, before camera phones and YouTube minted legions of amateur stalkerazzi, before the area surrounding George Orwell's former London flat was outfitted with 32 TV cameras, the better to capture miscreants, brawlers and litterbugs in flagrante delicto.

We're a nation of spies and the spied on, and a new crop of films plays out the uneasiness of an era in which we have lenses aimed at us on traffic lights and at 7-Elevens, on ATMs and in nanny-cams.

Clearly, something about the notion of being watched and judged is still profoundly upsetting to us - despite how much we ask for it on "American Idol." And lately our collective anxiety about it is seeping into the movies.

But the spying that's bothering us in recent films seems to have more to do with the sort of ad hoc, vigilante monitoring we subject one another to than any kind of organized, institutional effort.

What concerns them is not Big Brother but the ways in which we've internalized voyeurism, prurience, violence, schadenfreude and self-policing.

In Andrea Arnold's "Red Road," Kate Dickie plays a Glasgow City Eye operator, whose job consists of monitoring the comings and goings of the people in a low-income neighborhood. One day, she spots a man to whom she has a mysterious link on one of her screens, and she begins to insinuate herself into his life without telling him how they are connected.

A week later came "Disturbia," a gadget-obsessed Hitchcock knockoff, and then "Vacancy," in which Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale check into a motel whose rooms are outfitted with hidden cameras.

And all of them follow on the heels of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's acclaimed "The Lives of Others," and Michael Haneke's equally acclaimed "Caché."

The last time the subject of surveillance was this ubiquitous in the movies, Watergate was a current event, and the prevailing mood was one of profound mistrust of authority coupled with paranoid self-doubt.

Films like Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" (which starred Gene Hackman as an expert in electronic surveillance who lives in fear of being bugged) and Brian de Palma's "Blow Out" (in which John Travolta plays a movie sound engineer who accidentally records a Chappaquiddick-inspired political assassination and finds himself enmeshed in a major political conspiracy disguised as a sex-crimes spree) reflected a political moment characterized by clandestine operations and dirty tricks.

In the last few weeks, video clips of director David O. Russell throwing an on-set tantrum at Lily Tomlin have been widely passed around and picked over. Not long ago, cellphone shots of Vince Vaughn enjoying a private rant at a restaurant were posted online and dutifully deconstructed.

Easy access to the means of production and distribution of media - that is, camera phones and YouTube - are leading to a glorious democratization of media, or so the thinking goes. So why does so much of what goes viral feel so repressive and hostile?

One possibility is that the degree of monitoring we've gotten used to has colored our behavior. Our civil liberties may be weakened, but you'd hardly know that we cared by witnessing our enthusiastic embrace of electronic surveillance and public exposure as a national pastime - kind of like how a preadolescent playground bully might emulate an abusive parent.

What "Caché" recognizes is that guilt is usually present if you know where to look for it. In most people it's a latent quality awaiting exposure, a seed to be coaxed into blooming.

What's being acted out in movies these days is not so much a fear of entrapment, but a creeping fear of casual contact, or even intimacy, being held up for public dissection or worse. President Bush recently cited this as the main reason he doesn't e-mail at all - you never know what will land you in trouble.

We've become accustomed to having our every move, customer-service phone chat and financial transaction recorded for posterity - that much is familiar and predictable.

This is cache, read story here