Leary State of Play

In the movie, State of Play, it definitely shows how necessary privacy is for a democracy to grow. A democracy is supposed to be a government ruled by the people, for the people. Without privacy for the people, it wouldn’t be a democracy because it would be going against the people and what is best for the people. Privacy is something that we as citizens are entitled to and if we don’t get that privacy that we deserve then many things would go wrong and this democracy would fall apart.

One scene in the movie that really supports this idea is the scene towards the end of the movie when Collins is telling his side of the story to the reporters. It starts out with the tape recorder being turned on and a mirror image of Collins in the table. This is showing that they are about to record Collins’ side of the story which is a loss of privacy because they are in a way pressuring him to be recorded and to use his words for the world to know what he has done in his personal life. Next, Collins starts to tell the story while it zooms in on his face and there is a shadow casted across his face. This could represent the situation that Collins was in where there is both a dark and innocent side to his story. The dark side being where he was cheated on his wife, and the innocent side where he actually got played in the end by Sonya. The camera then goes around the whole table, zooming in on each individual face in order to get a sense of closeness to the characters and feel how each of them relate to Collins story. In the middle of his story, the camera cuts to a different scene where Robert Bingham is putting on his army uniform and assembling his gun. He does everything very slowly and makes sure everything is perfect. While you see him getting ready, Collins is still telling his story except now his sentences are getting cut off early. Each sentence he says is about how privacy was being violated with everything that has happened in this situation. I think this is a very important part in the scene because it shows that since so many people had their privacy taken away from them, information that was never suppose to be uncovered was found out and multiple people got killed or hurt throughout this. The only reason innocent people were killed was because there was a loss of privacy where if someone knew something then they had to be killed. This would have never happened if this story hadn’t of dragged on to the point that so much unknown information had to be uncovered to find out the truth.

This is why I think privacy is necessary for a democracy to flourish. If we had no privacy like how no one in this film had privacy, then our democracy would fall and many people would get killed, just like what also happened in this film. This is a great example of what could happen to us if we let our privacy be taken from us.