CINEMA-USA: ‘Enemy of the State’ Shows Surveillance Society

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Dec 8 1998 (IPS) - In today’s United States, where the president’s testimony about his sexual affairs is aired daily on television, the latest Hollywood trend is for movies about the very real fear of being watched.

The idea of constant surveillance lay behind one of the summer’s biggest hits, Peter Weir’s grim fable ‘The Truman Show’, in which Jim Carrey played a man unaware that his every move was broadcast on live 24-hour television.

Now, a new hit film, ‘Enemy of the State’, distributed by Touchstone and directed by Tony Scott, offers the ultimate vision of a fugitive: Will Smith as a lawyer pursued by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The film’s simplistic plot turns and reliance on explosions and other Hollywood staple devices sometimes obscures its message that the modern-day state’s reliance on information technology can menace the citizens who are viewed by it. Yet the paranoid thriller succeeds in creating a mood in which the NSA’s ability to watch just about anything is taken to a giddy extreme.

Smith, for example, is traced by bugs implanted on just about all his clothing – forcing him to strip to his underwear to elude NSA goons who are out to catch him. Oddly, this is one of the few films in which chase scenes, often a cliche in modern movies, actually have a political impact, as the multiple images taken by various hidden cameras of the fleeing Smith underscore how totalitarian a world ruled by information technology can be.

As he flees government agents without knowing what he has done to earn their pursuit, Smith is followed by cars, helicopters, satellite cameras, tracers and what seems to be a small army of computer-clicking bureaucrats, led by a sinister NSA official played by Jon Voight. (The plot, concerning an NSA plot to cover up a political killing which was accidently videotaped and received by Smith, is standard for the genre.)

His only defense, ultimately, is to forge an alliance with a cynical former government age code-named Brill, played expertly by Gene Hackman. Hackman’s reclusive character shows the flip side of the coin to Voight’s all-seeing government agent: He has been driven so deep underground to avoid being watched that he barely exists in the outdoor world at all.

The thriller, although as full of holes and gratuitous violence as any Hollywood action film, succeeds in presenting a compelling case for the privacy of individuals against the demands of states to combat terrorism.

Smith, a normally witty and cool actor, is effective at showing the terror that a powerful government can cause in its pursuit of justice, while other characters – including Smith’s wife, played by Regina Taylor – openly state the film’s theme: “Who will monitor the monitors?”

Ironically, during a year in which the incessantly televised Monica Lewinsky scandal has hovered over Bill Clinton’s presidency, that question has been the backdrop of a variety of successful films.

‘The Truman Show’, which earned more than 100 million dollars at the box office, depicted a dispiriting world in which Carrey’s protagonist was forced to flee from the television producers who essentially dictated his entire life.

A more explicit look at U.S. politics, Barry Levinson’s ‘Wag the Dog’, included even more eerie parallels with Clinton’s plight, showing a team of political experts (led by Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro) trying to extricate a president from a sex scandal by concocting a fake, televised war with Albania.

In all of the movies runs two common threads: Don’t believe what you see; and, sooner or later, everything ends up on television. For Bill Clinton, whose videotaped confessions of what he called “inappropriate intimate behaviour” have been aired around the globe, those lessons don’t just apply to the movies.