The Ubiquitous Pocket Snitch

Re-examining the surveillance state with Decision to Leave

Author

Jesse Raub
August 04, 2025

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“Re-investigate with this.” — Song Seo-rae

A few days after a tech CEO was caught with his arms around an employee at a Coldplay concert, the band came to Madison to play the University of Wisconsin’s football stadium. As nearly 58,000 people (21% of the city’s population) walked down Regent Street and other avenues to the stadium, it was hard to ignore that almost every single one of them would have a smartphone with them. When the Patriot Act launched in 2001, it was extremely alarming in how much it authorized the US Government to spy on its own citizens. I can’t imagine a single author of that legislation ever imagined how voluntarily the US population would surveil itself in just ten short years. After all, it wasn’t the Kiss Cam that sold out the executive infidelity; it was the smartphone video of the Kiss Cam being passed around on social media. As much as people joined in on the fun, some savvy tech writers showed concern about what this says for privacy.

In the time since those incidents occurred, I’ve rewatched Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (available on Hulu) from 2022. The movie tells the story of Song Seo-rae, a Chinese immigrant in Korea whose older husband is found dead at the bottom of a mountain. An avid climber, his death could easily be ruled an accident, or even a suicide. Nevertheless, Detective Jag Hae-jun is so smitten with Seo-rae that he prolongs the investigation, holding her as a suspect even when he thinks she’s innocent. The movie is equal parts romantic drama as it is a mystery, and in that regard, it’s best that those who haven’t watched the movie should maybe skip this piece and come back later.

Our first view of the dead climber is through Hae-jun’s screen as he takes pictures of the dead body on his personal phone. We see a wedding ring on the climber’s hand, letting us know he’s married. We see his thumb’s pinch to zoom in on a broken Rolex face, noting the time of death. For Hae-jun, there’s no hesitation to grab his phone to document the scene. For modern viewers, all of this tracks. Smartphone users rely on their devices for everyday tasks, and it’s only with a bit of distance that we might question the opening investigation of Decision to Leave. What are the rules around storing digital photos of a potential crime scene on your own personal device? What’s the liability of having this sensitive information on your phone?

The modern convenience of always-on technology blurs procedural lines. It also raises some ethical questions. When Seo-rae is brought in for initial questioning, she states that she wants to see photos of her dead husband rather than have them described to her. Without hesitation, Hae-jun turns his phone screen around to show her. It’s fitting, then, that the same phone with photos of her dead husband is also used to snap photos of her lingering injuries from his abuse. Even though Hae-jun invites a female officer to come shoot the bruises on Seo-rae’s upper thigh with a standard camera, Seo-rae instructs Hae-jun to use his phone instead, cementing sensitive areas on her body into Hae-jun’s photo album. Both her dead husband and her underwear line are now visible to Hae-jun whenever he wants on a device he carries around in his pocket every day. Here is the dead man; here is what he did to his wife before he died.

Racked with insomnia, Hae-jun spends his nights on stakeouts, watching Seo-rae in her apartment with a set of binoculars while dictating what he sees into his smartwatch. Under full surveillance, Seo-rae performs for Hae-jun. She acts the part of a heartbroken widow, pretending to cry into her arm while knowing he’s watching, knowing that the more the detective falls in love with her from afar, the less she’ll be a suspect. When he watches her bury a crow delivered to her front door, he leans over a half wall to record her speaking in Chinese to the stray cat responsible. “Bring me the head of that kind detective,” Hae-jun hears, auto translated to Korean by a transcription app, his phone face up on a makeshift table from his stakeout perch. In older movies, the detective would have caught her monologue on tape and would have needed to bring the physical media to a translator to learn what she said. In this modern smartphone era, Hae-jun’s obsession with Seo-rae is allowed to grow in secret, with only the digital evidence on his phone pointing to his growing unscrupulous behavior.

Still, Hae-jun treats Seo-rae as a suspect until threatening letters reveal her ex-husband was accepting bribes, framing his death neatly as a suicide. Cleared from all wrongdoing, Hae-jun finds a new permission structure to interact more directly with her, cooking her dinner in his apartment after his partner wrecks hers. The evidence of his emotional affair grows on his phone as he and Seo-rae begin texting regularly, even building towards a moment where Hae-jun’s wife grabs one of his earbuds only to hear him listening to Seo-rae’s favorite song, unbeknownst to her why her husband has a sudden interest in music. Around halfway through the movie, however, it’s Seo-rae’s phone that becomes the catalyst. Or her second, secret phone, to be clear. When checking on one of the older women that Seo-rae cares for, Hae-jun noticed that the granny’s fitness app logged 138 flights of stairs on the same day that Seo-rae’s husband died. Knowing that this data is constantly collected, Hae-jun realized Seo-rae swapped phones with the woman in her care to hide the evidence that she climbed the other side of the mountain, waiting for her husband to scale the difficult route so she could push him off the cliff edge. The convenience of modern technology, at that moment, turns directly into incriminating spyware.

It’s a turning point for Decision to Leave. Most of us think our fitness trackers are innocuous until they snitch on our whereabouts. We’ve seen similar things unfolding in real-time with period-tracking apps in an era where miscarriages can land women in prison. From here on out, smartphones are an extreme liability for every character. When Hae-jun confronts Seo-rae about the fitness track evidence, confessing his fascination with her, and declining to prosecute her as well, Seo-rae uses the phone with the incriminating movement data to record the conversation. Later, when she and her new husband escape to the island where Hae-jun now lives full time with his wife, her new husband winds up dead after placing two phone calls in the middle of the night to Hae-jun’s wife. Hae-jun’s wife can clearly see the missed calls on her smartphone, noting exactly the time they came in, making her suspect that Hae-jun was an accomplice in the murder.

As it unravels that Seo-rae prodded one of her new husband’s perturbed financial clients into killing him, it was the new husband’s discovery of Hae-jun’s confessional recording that prompted her to take the big leap. To add to the misery, this client was able to track Seo-rae because, you may have guessed it, he secretly installed a tracking app on her phone. People often note that most older movies could solve their main conflict if only the characters could have sent each other a quick text message. Decision to Leave posits that modern phone technology is its own debacle, leading, in some cases, to murder. Still, this technology is also the main characters’ only source of joy.

For Seo-rae, the only love and care she knew was from the recording of Hae-jun in her apartment, laying out how she broke his heart when he discovered she was just using his attraction to avoid prosecution. Playing back the recording is integral to her well-being as she suffers through being married to another dumb and abusive husband. For Hae-jun, the only time we see him happy or excited is when Seo-rae sends him a text message. Even while washing his car in the middle of the night, Seo-rae asks him to check on one of her grannies elicits an elation in him that we never see anywhere else in the movie.

Decision to Leave pits the active act of surveillance against passive technological surveillance. On the snowy mountaintop, Seo-rae uses a translation app on her phone to better express her feelings to Hae-jun., telling him that she can see how depressed he is because she’s been watching him at his job from afar. She posits that he needs to be pursuing her as a criminal in order to be fulfilled. “You know the word suspect? Someone the police is watching,” Hae-jun states. “I like that,” Seo-rae answers. Being observed by Hae-jun, through binoculars on a rooftop across the street, gave Seo-rae a sense of being desired as well as safe. The evidence against her, however, preserved forever in the databanks of the smartphone in question, endangers her safety just by still existing. “Re-investigate with this,” she says, handing him the phone, hoping to reinvigorate the detective and restart their emotionally intense cat-and-mouse dynamic.

It should be noted, however, that the only time Hae-jun actively solves a crime, it’s through physical photographs. Stuck trying to track down a known murderer for a different case, Hae-jun gives a stack of pictures of the suspect’s old girlfriends to Seo-rae to browse. After just a few minutes, she neatly identifies the woman that he must be hiding out with. It’s a nod to old shoe leather police work, but it also suggests that physical media has power than data on smartphones does not. When Seo-rae grows close with Hae-jun, she declares that having printed out crime scene photos plastered to his walls is what’s keeping him up at night. She uses his insomnia, then, as an excuse to destroy photographic evidence of her husband’s crime scene, implying that these photos had the power to implicate her. Never once, however, did Seo-rae think to destroy the telltale phone and its “flights climbed” evidence. In fact, Seo-rae asking Hae-jun to look after that specific older woman led to him finding the phone in the first place.

It’s impossible to know how Park Chan-wook wanted viewers to interpret that scene, but it’s almost as if Seo-rae wanted Hae-jun to find the phone, wanted her crime to be discovered. And in that reading, it’s suggested that no matter how heinous our behavior is, the allure of passive digital surveillance drives us to risk-seeking behavior, regardless of the consequences.

I’m not implying that most Coldplay Kiss Cam footage sharers have the same imp of the perverse on their shoulders driving them to kill two of their husbands like Seo-rae in Decision to Leave, but perhaps the root of that impulse has some undeniable pull. And that, if anything, is worth considering how willing we are to carry a ubiquitous snitch in our pocket at all times.

Read

There’s something to the speculative fiction of the 1960s that suggests the countercultural revolution led a lot of people to think about the annihilation of the human race. In The Drowned World, a climate disaster has melted the ice caps, flooding the continents and raising temperatures drastically. The novella follows a researcher who starts feeling a reptilian impulse to stay behind in a flooded lagoon while his military escort travels back to Greenland. It’s a quick read and Ballard is a sharp writer, but I’m not going to sugarcoat it: reading the perspective of characters who are ready to embrace the regression of humanity is a wild way to unwind in 2025.

Watch

Based on a 1983 novel and adapted in 2018, The Little Drummer Girl is a tough watch these days. John le Carré’s espionage novel tracks a politically minded acting student being recruited by the Mossad to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist cell in 1979. Throughout the show, the lead becomes extremely attuned to the Palestinians’ cause, even if she is torn by some of the violence they’ve inflicted. It’s worth watching now because Israel is currently executing a genocide in Gaza, and it’s worth examining how attitudes towards Israel’s abhorrent and wanton murder of an entire people have been framed throughout the years. It’s also beautifully shot, well-crafted, and incredibly moving, even if the show feels almost overly sympathetic to Israel. This show is likely to challenge people in 2025, but I think it’s worth experiencing even if you don’t agree with the show’s outcome at the end.

Listen

As the track that introduced us to the band on their debut 1981 EP Signals, Calls, and Marches, That’s When I Reach For My Revolver” is a helluva calling card. Smart, intricate, exciting—it’s hard to sum up how Mission of Burma took the energy and political bent of early punk and drove it home into the type of music that would be defanged and categorized as indie rock just a decade later. It’s a worthy track for any playlist you’re building for yourself, and why not challenge your perception of complacency while taking a nice sunny stroll in the park?

Consume

  • Liquid Death Sparkling Water at bars

One thing that irks me is the knee-jerk reaction people have to brands they think are trying too hard. The consensus, amongst a lot of people, is that Liquid Death is stupid, cheesy, and annoying. It’s understandable that any capitalist pursuit couched in counter-culture signifiers would read as phony. At the same time, Liquid Death isn’t owned by Coca-Cola, like Topo Chico is. Coca-Cola is an actively terrible company that has wreaked havoc on poor communities around the world with its cutthroat business practices, and yet, skeptics give their drinks a pass when they’re thirsty. The phrase “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is often used to justify needless consumption among some groups on the left, when in reality, its original designs are to help persuade the conscious classes to make the best decisions they can under the circumstances they’re stuck with. Liquid Death was founded with the idea that cans are easier to recycle than glass or plastic, and their punk/hardcore/metal aesthetic meant that bars would be more likely to stock them in the cooler next to beers. The other week, I was at a bar in Fort Wayne with co-workers, and I didn’t feel like having a drink. Lo and behold, Liquid Death Sparkling Water cans were right there for me to see. Do I think Liquid Death is inherently good as a brand or company? No. Do I appreciate that I can get water at venues that resent refilling the free Gatorade jug from the tap when it runs dry? Yes. I’m very grateful that Liquid Death’s marketing and schtick worked in those exact cases.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.