Yet in its slick cinematic spookiness--and its vaguely cloak-and-dagger rollout and subsequent scrubbing from most of the websites that had featured it in the weeks before the opening, including Metro Pictures's own--the trailer also points toward one of the more ticklish issues that has always attended Paglen's project: the slippery slope between a controlled deployment of certain
sub-rosa tropes for artistic effect and an overreliance on a theatricalization of the "covert" that the project as a whole would seem to critique.