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| Moderator Matt Zoller Seitz (left to right), stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley, and director Oliver Stone at a screening of Snowden on Wednesday night in Manhattan. |
The story was never supposed to be Edward Snowden. The story
should have been the National Security Agency, domestic spying, the
circumvention of due process, and the end of privacy as we thought we knew it.
For a while – a few days maybe – it was, but the complexity of the issue and
the overwhelming scope of the offense made for a tale that was less Aesop and
more Tolstoy. Put simply, the media could not sell it. The story of an ex-CIA
spy going on the run after revealing secrets of national security, however, was
one they could sell.
When the public grabs hold of your story, it ceases to
become your own. The narrative builds on itself. People choose to believe the
parts that fit their argument and disregard the rest. No one has the full
picture, nor could they comprehend it if they did. If it ever was, this is no
longer a culture that can digest complex issues. It is a culture of soundbites
and snippets, headlines and clicks, tweets and shares. Arouse anger. Fuel
suspicion. Light a match and hope there is profit in the flame. All of which is
a roundabout way of saying: None of us knows Snowden well enough to judge him,
and none of us is in a position to judge anyway.
On Wednesday night, in the Loews Theatre at the AMC Lincoln
Square in Manhattan, Oliver Stone, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Shailene Woodley
sat and spoke with author and critic Matt Zoller Seitz after a screening of
their new film, Snowden, which seeks
to explore the man behind the mythos. They were joined, via satellite feed from
Moscow, by Snowden, who is among the most impressive people I have ever had the
chance to see speak. Their 45-minute discussion, which was broadcast across the
country to more than 700 theaters, covered everything from the weather in
Moscow to the importance of privacy, even in a world dominated by social media.
“It’s easy for the media to spin a story and to portray a
certain narrative,” said Woodley. “Something that fascinated me about this
screenplay to begin with was a lot of us know who Edward Snowden is, or we
thought we knew who he was, and a lot of people have a lot of strong judgments
about Edward Snowden, and I feel like until this movie, none of us actually
knew the story of Ed the human. We knew the story that mainstream media had put
out, we knew the story that the government had released, but we didn’t know his
story.”
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| Gordon-Levitt |
Snowden’s story, as Seitz addressed and Stone acknowledged,
has many parallels to another Stone protagonist, Ron Kovic, the real-life hero
portrayed by Tom Cruise in Born on the
Fourth of July. Both men loved their country and made immense personal
sacrifices for its protection. Both men then were disheartened and
disillusioned by what their fights proved in the service of – Kovic’s fight the
war in Vietnam and Snowden’s the global cyberwar, which turned out to be a
massive civilian spying program. Finally, both men were ostracized and
demonized for speaking out against the corruption and moral decay they witnessed.
What is easy to forget – or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say, what is convenient to forget – about people like Snowden,
Kovic or anyone else who speaks out against the government is this: They are
patriots, more so than any one of us who says nothing or follows blindly the
edicts of the ruling class. To speak out against the U.S., you must love it. To
criticize your nation’s actions, you must believe it is capable of better. To
question its motives, you must care deeply about its direction.
The benefit of telling the story of Snowden’s life leading
up to the reveal of the NSA’s domestic spying program is to understand the kind
of person he was and the kind of circumstances that would drive him to such
dramatic action. When he chose to go public with what he knew, Snowden was a
29-year-old government employee with a beautiful, supportive girlfriend living
in Hawaii and making a fortune. His life was, for lack of a better term,
idyllic. It serves us then to question what could be so morally repugnant, so
clearly offensive to basic humanity, as to make a person give that up.
“Silence is the biggest weapon that’s used against us,”
Snowden said. “We don’t want to be weird. We don’t want to be different. We don’t
want to say anything at all. But that kind of thing is de-mobilizing. That’s
the kind of thing that makes people think we don’t care. That’s the kind of
thing that makes government officials think they can get away with anything. …
Whistleblowing – whistleblowers are elected by circumstance. It’s not about
where you went to school. It’s not about who you know. It’s about what you see.
“If you see something and you have feelings about it, share
them. Try to do something about it. That’s not to say burn your life to the
ground and try to be a martyr. We don’t need martyrs. What we need are people
who care and say something about it and try to do something in an effective
way. Don’t destroy your life for nothing, but if you see an opportunity to
share the reality of what’s actually going on in our world, particularly behind
closed doors, recognize that that may be an opportunity to make the world a
better place.”
At this, the audience burst into applause. There was much
cheering for Snowden’s words and those of the assembled filmmakers who brought
his story to life. While the feed from Moscow was being set up, one audience
member shouted out, calling Stone a hero, a plaudit the three-time Academy
Award winner politely demurred. Much as the evening was a forum for a serious
discussion about global security and the right to privacy, it was also a
celebration of an impressively mounted, elegantly conceived Hollywood film.
Snowden is the
kind of smart political thriller the industry has little patience for these
days, preferring instead stories where the president is taken hostage by
terrorists and must blast his way to safety. Stone makes this film with the
belief his audience is intelligent and attentive, and viewers are rewarded with
a film that neither dumbs down the complex nature of its story nor weaves a
tale so byzantine it proves impossible to follow. It finds balance in ways few
big-budget, star-driven vehicles do.
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Gordon-Levitt, Woodley, and Stone
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To that end, leads Gordon-Levitt and Woodley deliver wonderful
performances, with Gordon-Levitt effectively disappearing into the role of
Snowden and Woodley, as Snowden’s longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills, providing
a sturdy anchor to keep the audience moored amid the ever-choppier waters of
the story. Some will argue the love story is a distraction from the more
pressing matters at hand in the film, but his relationship with Mills is among
the things that makes Snowden so human, so relatable.
“If you’re going to do a character, I like characters who
change or undergo tremendous difficulty or adversity and either keep their
character or change it. Depends on the circumstance,” Stone said. “It always
comes back to a drama, comes back to a person, persons, and that fascinates me.
People will make this thing go. As much scientific technology as there is in a
movie, especially this one, it comes down to the faces who are looking at the
computers. Unless you feel what Joe’s feeling or Shailene is feeling, you’re
not going to follow the computer story.”
Those parallel narratives – the human story and the computer
story – are both magnificently executed by Stone and his team, in particular
cinematographer Anthony Dodd Mantle, who captures several perfect moments and
images within the film’s largely frenetic pace. One beautifully rendered
sequence in particular stands out as Snowden lays out for documentary filmmaker
Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), who directed Oscar winner Citizenfour, the scope of the NSA’s spy program.
If the government looks at all the people one person knows
and all the people those people know, and so on, by the fourth level out, the
privacy of millions is being invaded for no reason other than a tenuous
connection to a connection to a connection. Stone conceives the scene visually
as a cascading map of human interconnectedness in which we are eventually all
connected and all of our personal information funnels into the black hole of
the government’s prying eye.
Perhaps none of this moves you. There is a strong likelihood
you are not a terrorist nor affiliated with anyone remotely linked to
terrorism. Perhaps you do not steal. You do not cheat. You do not lie. You
think, for all intents and purposes, you have nothing to hide and, thus,
nothing to fear. It is the common line of argument among supporters of the
domestic spying program. I cannot refute this more strongly or eloquently than
Snowden himself, so here he is:
“One of the most important things – and I think we all have
a duty collectively in society to remember this – is to think about when we’re
being manipulated, when we’re being told to think a certain way and accept a
certain argument reflexively without actually tackling it,” said Snowden. “The
common argument that we have – if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to
fear – the origins of that are literally Nazi propaganda. This is not to equate
the actions of our current government to the Nazis … but that is literally the
origin of that quote. It’s from the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
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Edward Snowden
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“So when we hear modern politicians, when we hear modern
people repeating that reflexively, without confronting its origins, without
confronting what it really says, I think that’s harmful. And if we actually
think about it, it doesn’t really make sense because privacy isn’t about
something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect, and that’s who you
are, that’s what you believe in, that’s who you want to become. Privacy is the
right to the self. Privacy is what gives you the ability to share with the
world who you are on your own terms, for them to understand what you’re trying
to be, and to protect for yourself the parts of you that you’re not sure about,
that you’re still experimenting with.
“If we don’t have privacy, what we’re losing is the ability
to make mistakes. We’re losing the ability to be ourselves. Privacy is the
fountainhead of all other rights. Freedom of speech doesn’t have a lot of
meaning if you can’t have a quiet space, a space within yourself, within your
mind, within your community, your friends, your home, to decide what it is that
you actually want to say. Freedom of religion doesn’t actually mean that much
if you can’t figure out what you actually believe without being influenced by
the criticisms and outside direction and peer pressure of others. And it goes
on and on and on.
“Privacy is baked into our language, our core concept of
government itself in every way. It’s why we call it private property. Without
privacy, you don’t have anything for yourself. So when people say that to me, I
say back, ‘Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing
to hide is like arguing that you don’t care about free speech because you have
nothing to say.’”
