The Reflection of Power & Knowledge from "Enemy Of The State"

Knowledge is skills, an experience, an information about something or anything, and power is executing that idea or the knowledge to the desire. Power and knowledge are right onto each other, they are technically linked and dependent. There’s no power without having the knowledge. That’s the idea I’ve got from watching the blockbuster, action-thriller movie “Enemy of the State”.

In the movie, a team of skilled NSA (National Security Agency) surveillance operatives has the overpowering knowledge of ultrahigh technologies which became their power. A very sensitive video tape of murdering a congressman by the NSA officers lead by another congressman Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight) is the curse. Which somehow been given to an attorney named Robert Dean (Will Smith) without his knowledge. The NSA officials want to retrieve that tape from Dean. They started to use their knowledge of technology by bugging Robert Dean totally, starting from his house, his car, cell phone, suite, watch even his pen. They planted surveillance chip onto Dean’s stuff so that they keep trace of him all the time, here the sense of applying the technology becomes power. They have been tracing Dean by a high-tech satellite which is about 155 miles above the earth, now that’s what I call power which totally converted from the knowledge.

Robert Dean was completely clueless about what is happening to him, why a team of NSA is turning his and his family’s life hell.Then came to the rescue a former NSA communication analyst Edward Lyle a.k.a Brill (Gene Hackman). Brill was aware of all the NSA intelligence as he was one of them once. When Robert meets Brill, then the power of knowledge switched into their side and they goes for the counter attack against their enemy using the same method of surveillance technology. Point is.. Brill has the knowledge of technology but not the power of law and enforcement like the NSA, still when Robert & Brill applies that technology it started to work as a power, which absolutely proves that knowledge is power.

Knowledge and power are two convertible elements, both rely on each other in different manners. It clears me the point why Michel Foucault finds relation between those two words. Its obvious that power and knowledge are mutually reinforcing relation in between. That’s why Foucault titled it “power/knowledge”.

This is how the “Enemy of the State” reflects the idea of power and knowledge.