Enemy of the State · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the shot you remember: an overhead view of a city block, Will Smith reduced to a dot crossing a crosswalk, the image stamped with crosshairs and coordinates, slightly grained, slightly wrong. Nobody is holding that camera. It floats in orbit. That single anonymous frame is the whole film compressed — and it's also a small philosophical event, because it shows you a way of seeing that has detached itself from any human eye.

Deleuze had a word for that. He called the most extreme form of the perception-image the gramme or photogramme: vision freed from any living center, the camera-eye as pure matter, the world filming itself with no one home behind the lens. Most movies anchor every shot to somebody's looking — a character glances, we see what they see. Tony Scott's surveillance feeds cut that cord. The satellite, the traffic cam, the thermal scope: these aren't anyone's point of view. They are the apparatus perceiving, indifferent, mechanical. When the film grafts those acentered images into Dan Mindel's clean 35mm — saturated, kinetic — it builds an epistemological hierarchy you can feel in your gut. There's how Dean sees (partial, embodied, panicked) and how the State sees (from above, from everywhere). The grain is the argument.

And here is why the Deleuzian lens actually earns its keep instead of decorating the film: those degraded images don't just show, they have to be read. Deleuze's late cinema turns on the lectosign — the image that loses its automatic, glance-and-grab obviousness and asks to be deciphered. A clean Hollywood shot tells you instantly what it is. A flickering CCTV capture, a washed-out heat signature, a satellite frame thick with compression artifacts — these withhold. The NSA operators arrayed before their monitor banks are doing nothing but reading: enhancing, cross-referencing, deciding what the smear of pixels means. The film makes us do it too. To watch Enemy of the State is to be conscripted into the labor of interpretation, leaning forward to resolve the murk. That's the lectosign as plot engine.

Which puts the spectator in a very particular seat. Deleuze's relation-image (his Thirdness) is the image whose meaning lives in the relations a knowing third party holds together — the audience as the one who gets it. This whole movie runs on it. A bag of bird-watching footage means nothing until you, and the NSA, know it also recorded a congressman's murder. An object becomes evidence only inside a chain of relations. Scott's surveillance montages — feeds spliced with map overlays and the reaction shots of operators — are pure relation-image machinery: meaning assembled, in real time, from scattered data by watchers who know. The dossier's lineage names the ancestor exactly. Coppola's The Conversation built surveillance audio as the forensic medium where a recording reveals and conceals a murder at once; Scott inverts it into the visual register and even casts Hackman as Brill, so Harry Caul walks straight out of 1974 into 1998 to close the loop.

There's a tension the film can't resolve, and shouldn't. By Deleuze's scheme the action-image — situation provokes hero, hero acts, situation transforms — is the classical American form, and Enemy of the State badly wants to be that movie. Dean and Brill versus Reynolds is a clean binomial, force against force. But Will Smith's star wattage is doing something the script fights: he radiates agency while playing a man with none. For most of the film Dean cannot act adequately to what he perceives — every move is already anticipated, every space already watched. That's the texture of Deleuze's crisis of the action-image: the sensory-motor link jams because perception has outrun any possible response. The film only restores the action-movie machine by a trick — it sics one surveillance apparatus on another, the mob on the NSA, letting the systems cancel each other so a human can finally move.

Formally, Scott is ahead of his moment. The editing — short takes cut on movement and audio overlap, crash zooms, the frame kept restless even in a kitchen conversation — is what critics now call post-continuity: the abandonment of stable, legible screen space in favor of continuous affect, velocity over geography. Scott isn't being sloppy. The disorientation is the content. To live inside Dean's predicament is to drown in information, and the cut rhythm puts that flood in your nervous system.

The ancestry is honest and the inheritance large. Antonioni's Blow-Up taught cinema that a photographic image holds truth only until you enlarge it into grain — image-degradation as the very form of knowing — and Scott built his entire visual hierarchy on that lesson. Pakula's The Parallax View supplied the panopticon-proscenium, tiny humans dwarfed by governmental architecture, which becomes Scott's NSA control room and his ironic use of Washington's marble. De Palma's Blow Out and Pollack's Three Days of the Condor handed over the recorded-evidence trap and the analyst-plus-burned-operative pairing.

Then history did the strangest thing to this film: it came true. In 2013 the Snowden disclosures turned what played as paranoid hyperbole into something close to documentary, and commentators reached for Enemy of the State as the nearest popular image of what PRISM actually was. A Bruckheimer blockbuster had accidentally written a speculative technical brief. Watch it again and you'll feel the doubling — entertainment and prophecy in the same frame, the grain that meant 'fiction' in 1998 now reading as 'feed.' That's the gift Scott leaves you: better eyes for the cameras you can no longer see.