Enemy of the State

So Enemy of the State, the mostly forgettable 1998 government-conspiracy action/thriller starring Will Smith, was ABC's Monday Night Movie last night, and my relationship with my significant other is now seemingly on the rocks because of it.

The argument centers around an exchange that Robert Dean, Smith's character, has with his wife Carla early in the movie as she's watching CNN (transcript stolen from Kelvin Lam, original script by David Marconi; I took out some stage directions and a couple of extraneous lines to a nanny, and the italics are mine):

CARLA: Well there goes the fourth ammendment...
CARLA is watching a CNN interview to CONGRESSMAN ALBERT.
CARLA: Listen to this fascist gasbag!
ROBERT DEAN takes off his jacket.
ROBERT DEAN: Uhhh.. Ohhh!
The camera switches to CONGRESSMAN ALBERT on the TV.
ALBERT: ... and freedom have always existed in a very percurious balance. And when buildings start blowing up, people's priorities tend to change...
ROBERT DEAN: He's got a point there, sweetie!
CARLA: Bobby!!!
ROBERT DEAN: I mean, who is this idiot?
CARLA: He's talking about ending personal privacy.
ROBERT DEAN heads to the fridge.
CARLA: (cont'd) Do you want your phone tapped?
ROBERT DEAN: I'm not planning on blowing up the country.
ROBERT DEAN opens the fridge and takes out a bag of sealed berries and a jug of juice.
CARLA: How do we know until we've heard all of your dirty little secrets.
ROBERT DEAN: You're just gonna have to trust me!
ROBERT DEAN kisses CARLA.
CARLA: Ohh... I know, we'll just tap the criminals, we'll won't suspend the civil rights of the good people.
ROBERT DEAN: Right!
CARLA: Then who decides which is which?
ROBERT DEAN empties the berries into a blender.
ROBERT DEAN: Honey, I think you should!
CARLA: No, I think you should take this more seriously.
ROBERT DEAN: Honey, I think you're taking it seriously enough for both of us and half the people on the block.
ROBERT DEAN pours orange juice into the blender and starts the blender. CONGRESSMAN ALBERT is still on the TV.
ALBERT: Tens of millions of foreign nationals living within our borders and many consider the United States their enemy and they see acts of terrorism.....

Wow! I hadn't really been paying attention up to this point, but it suddenly occurred to me that even though this movie is only five years old, Hollywood would never dare put that on the big screen these days. Carla's line about how we tell the criminals from the innocents basically sums up the whole premise of the movie: if we turn over that kind of decision-making power to the government, there is the distinct possibility that our rights could be violated in the name of someone else's power trip. And this is of course what befalls our hero: Robert Dean, the innocent, ends up getting bugged, spied on, and blackmailed by government spooks, all in the name of covering up some corrupt official's misdeeds. He of course triumphs and clears his name in the end, yada yada yada, but this got me thinking - in today's climate, this would be a completely different movie. The Will Smith character would be on the other side - probably an agent with some glorified investigative arm of the government - the conspirators would be anti-government forces plotting some terrorist misdeed, and whatever abuses of power Smith might end up committing in his pursuit of the criminals would be forgiven by his audience in the name of hunting down the evildoers.

So I told my love interest that I thought this was so revealing of the general shift in our culture and how Hollywood's views of what is acceptable have changed after 9/11. This kind of open government critique would be labeled as paranoid leftist behavior these days, but in the late 90s it sold pretty well: popular movies like Men in Black, The Fugitive, Conspiracy Theory, and TV shows like X-Files, and The Pretender, although perhaps not the most high-minded artistic fare, all featured the perilous struggles of individuals as they battled against government and establishment abuses and conspiracies. These days our TV heroes are part of the establishment: the police and officials on CSI, Law & Order, JAG, and the awful new Navy NCIS all hunt tirelessly for the bogeymen who hide within our borders - although my favorites have to be the Homeland Security agents depicted on Threat Matrix, who in one episode valiantly fend off the Department of Justice, which keeps sending annoying representatives complaining about something as inconsequential as the civil rights of detainees, which of course only hampers the agents' attempts to catch the bad guys, and why should terrorists have rights?? Even if they're only suspected terrorists?

Anyway, my love of loves suggested that the movie was "dated"; his argument was of course that something can become dated in the course of a week, if what has happened during that week was momentous enough to cause a cultural shift of the magnitude that we seemed to have experienced over the last couple of years. And indeed, it could be argued that even though the movie is still pretty recent, by September 12th, 2001, things had changed so much that this film was already dated. I didn't like that word; I preferred "anachronistic", which comes from the Greek ana, meaning "backwards", and khronos, meaning "time", and refers more to something that is out-of-place in a certain time period, like an Elizabethan holding a cell phone, or an old Victorian house in a street full of high-rise apartment buildings. I liked that a little better, because it didn't really have the implication of "old" or "old-fashioned" that "dated" does. So we went back and forth, with me trying to explain why I felt my word was infinitely more subtle, and with my heart of hearts telling me that the world changed so fast now that being "dated" no longer meant being old... and neither of us really backed down, so the conversation ended bitterly, with a hollow "fine, I'll talk to you later."

The problem is, as with most of our petty arguments, we're both wrong. Both "dated" and "anachronistic" imply a certain amount of irrelevance. And no matter how much the wooden acting and vast plot holes tend to garble the message of Enemy of the State, the point that it almost inadvertently makes about government abuses of power is still very relevant, especially after things like 9/11, the Patriot Act, and everyone's favorite crusader for justice, John Ashcroft. In fact, the film, or at least the scene transcribed above, is actually more a propos now than it ever was in 1998. It is neither dated nor anachronistic; it is unwittingly apt. I wonder if the programming execs at ABC knew what they were doing...

So, my love: I'm a jerk, and I'm sorry.