ABSTRACT
Wim Wenders's film The End of Violence serves both as a good counterpoint to Enemy and as an extension of the critique of surveillance technology offered by The Conversation. Enemy of the State is a pop thriller starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. Films like Enemy fail as substantive accounts of the technology if they duplicate the neutrality thesis, intentionally or not. The narrative power of Enemy of the State as an argument about the dangers of surveillance technology comes most powerfully from its intertextual references to the earlier film, The Conversation. Enemy is a very crude film when compared with The Conversation, because it never considers the possible problems inherent in surveillance technology. In contrast, The Conversation arguably makes the case that the use of surveillance technologies corrupts its users and, at least in that sense, is substantive rather than neutral.
