To learn more about and join Slate’s Conspiracy Thrillers Movie Club, visit Slate.com/thrillers.
In the third episode of Slate’s Conspiracy Thrillers Movie Club, Sam Adams and writer and theater director Isaac Butler talk about Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and its unofficial sequel, Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State. They discuss how both films portrayed the paranoia of being watched, and how the concept of surveillance had to be explained to a naïve pre-9/11 audience.
Some supplementary links mentioned in the episode:
- Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
- Roger Ebert’s 2001 Great Movie review of The Conversation
- BuzzFeed on the NSA hating Enemy of the State
