It is nearly impossible to follow the details of Enemies of the State, a documentary about an apparent case of espionage at the heart of the American homeland. That isn’t a criticism, by the way, but an observation that director Sonia Kennebeck’s film is purposely communicating the confusion of its story by weaving in and out of its convoluted timeline and barely pausing for the audience to keep up. Eventually, a clear picture is offered of the many injustices laid upon Matt DeHart, a veteran of the United States Air National Guard who spent more than seven years in prison on charges he believed to be fabricated.
From what can be gathered from the evidence here, the gist of the story is that DeHart was imprisoned while on the run from institutions within the American government for what he may or may not have known or disseminated through his job as an intelligence analyst, which he held for a little more than a year from 2008 to 2009. By February of 2010, he was charged for activities related to espionage and sent to prison, from which he was released on bond in 2012. His account of this first stint details what can only be described as torture, from a lack of any way of relieving himself of bodily fluids or waste to being denied clothing and having water splashed on him in cold temperatures.
It’s an utterly dehumanizing and infuriating story that begins Kennebeck’s documentary, which interpolates these passages with the typical biographical information that one expects of such a documentary: DeHart’s parents, Paul and Leann, were also in the military, so that, when their son earned a security clearance, they knew not to ask what any given workday had looked like. From early on, then, the signs that he might join the military were fairly obvious. He had an interest in the innerworkings of the United States government, perhaps through his affiliation with the “hacktivist” group Anonymous and the whistleblowing practices of Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks.
They certainly had a bearing on his ultimate fate, which was to be accused of whistleblowing himself, despite the fact that he did not have access to the material (never shown to him, at any rate) that he was alleged to have exposed. It wasn’t as if DeHart had taken an interest in Anonymous and Assange by way of his government occupation, but then his alleged “info dump” came contemporaneously with Chelsea Manning’s exposure of the bombing practices of our droning program and Edward Snowden’s revelations about the country’s surveillance controversies. In a way, then, the United States government was covering its own posterior region by arresting DeHart. That, of course, isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
This is how DeHart’s story begins, but then it twists toward the genuinely infuriating and altogether even more convoluted, to the point that revealing any specifics feels like an impossibility, given the murky marshes of misinformation from every angle, and a disservice to the surprises in store for the audience. Without revealing anything, it seems that the apparent act of whistleblowing placed a target on DeHart’s back from the beginning – perhaps because of the timing, perhaps because of his correspondence with a certain group of people through the chat functions of the video game World of Warcraft, perhaps for any reason they could find to arrest a “turncoat” who had joined the military.
Whatever the reasons, the film works, both as a spy thriller with the approach of fiction and the sting of truth and as an exercise in style driving content. The real interviews and interrogations are heard, but further than simply that, they are performed in the style of verbatim theater, with actors lip-syncing what their real-life counterparts said. The deliberate nature of Kennebeck’s construction of this material is occasionally frustrating in how it delays certain revelations for a “third act” surprise. Enemies of the State, though, is still a strange and involving documentary.
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