Diegetic Spectators

When watching “The Conversation” and especially “Enemy of the State”, something I noticed numerous times was the presence of a “diegetic spectator”. In “Enemy of the State” the NSA watches Robert Dean and his family through various cameras in his house. During several of these scenes, we cut from the characters at home to the NSA agents watching them on screens. These agents sometimes comment on what they are watching (for example, Jack Black talking about the nanny’s legs) and often, they seemed more like reality TV spectators than sinister government agents. Their presence foregrounds the act of spectatorship and there seems to be a really interesting relationship between these agents and us, the film spectators. Through their monitors the agents are, in a sense, viewing a segment of the movie, thus mirroring our own situation. Furthermore, although we identify with Dean and the film encourages us to root for him in his struggle against the corrupt government officials, the camera allows us to also identify with the systems of surveillance and the surveillance agents themselves. The extra-diegetic camera through which we see the action unfold can be viewed as an omnipresent surveillance camera, and perhaps the film spectator could be considered the ultimate surveillance agent. Not only do we watch Dean, the object the government surveillance systems, but we also observe the diegetic surveillance agents in the act of surveillling. However, there is an important distinction between the spectatorial position and that of the surveillance agents.The act of surveillance is more active than the passive position of the film spectator. The surveillance agent must often watch large, unfiltered amounts of banal footage, looking for important details, actions or phrases with a specific intent (acquisition of information, capture of evidence, etc.). By contrast, the film spectator already has everything lain out for him/her. The film has been painstakingly constructed, edited, and timed to provide absolute clarity (unlike the often ambiguous surveillance image) and narrative flow.