Coppola’s version of the surveillance state, for example, is one of terror and darkness, a descent into madness brought on by the panopticon. Lumet’s version is much, much lighter. He sees all of this collecting of audio and video as so much wasted manpower, so much squandered money, and so much ill-spent time. Six people in a room talking about a video tape and trying to gain information about what's happening between a 90-year-old man and his son when nothing at all is happening! Lumet’s movie thinks the police state is absurd—like Kafka but comic.
I think this comic quality is relatively hard to see from the perspective of 2025—and so Lumet's film feels weird from this vantage. We are used to thinking of surveillance as an evil, malicious, signifier of unstoppable state power. (The key 2025 example is, I suppose, Edgar Wright's The Running Man.) In The Anderson Tapes, though, all this recording is petty and stupid, and the agencies aren’t talking to one another, and no one knows anything about anything, even though everything is being recorded. The key to this is the truly insane sequence where the cops jump from roof to roof in act three, and the hilarious scene a bit later in which they try to talk to one another on walkie-talkies but can’t get a signal. The robbery is, of course, uncovered by a HAM radio—not any of the new surveillance devices from the 70s. In fact, even that discovery is nearly hampered by the bureaucracy at the telephone switchboard. (If you doubt my argument here look again at the film’s finale, in which all the agencies are obliged to erase their recordings.)
All of this is to say that The Anderson Tapes works as a thriller (I watched it as part of a Criterion Channel series called 70s Thrillers), but it’s more of a scathing satire than it is anything else: a mockery of the 1970s surveillance state and the grotesque waste it involves.
