Snowden: Nothing to hide, everything to fear

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.”

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.

Gordon-Levitt, Woodley, and Stone

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.

Edward Snowden

“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.’”

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary

Director Rory Kennedy's Last Days in Vietnam is among the Oscar nominees for Best Documentary.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Documentary

The nominees are:

Citizenfour

Finding Vivian Maier

Last Days in Vietnam

The Salt of the Earth

Virunga

The Oscars rarely get political. For its advertisers’ sake, the Academy generally tries to make its show as entertaining as possible to the widest possible range of viewers without offending anyone. Whether it succeeds on that front is a debate for another time – namely, immediately after the show – but as a rule, hosts and presenters try to keep the atmosphere light and breezy and avoid kicking off a firestorm by offering any politically volatile commentary.

The one place the Academy often cannot help but get political, though, is Best Documentary. Some of the great controversial political moments in Academy Awards ceremony history have been the result or a side effect of the Documentary category. Michael Moore’s tirade against then-President George Bush and the Iraq War when accepting his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine jumps immediately to mind, as does Vanessa Redgrave using her Supporting Actress acceptance speech to shout down “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums” who stood outside the ceremony protesting Redgrave’s involvement with the documentary The Palestinian.

There are others, but you get the idea, and it is possible we will have another such moment this year should the frontrunner for the award take the stage. The category is ripe for a surprise, either with who wins or what the winner will say for an acceptance speech, and at the Academy Awards, surprises spell fun.

Citizenfour (directed by Laura Poitras) – No more important film came out this year. The story of Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency domestic spying scandal is a story about all of us. There is not one person in America who is unaffected by the U.S. government surveillance program, not necessarily because we all are being watched but because any one of us could be. The freedom of the individual is what the citizens of this nation have always valued – even if we have not always done our best to see this ideal through – and any encroachment on privacy is an encroachment on freedom.

Poitras’ film has taken hits in some unexpected areas for not being cinematic enough, for being an important story told badly. I could not disagree more. Citizenfour has the look and feel of a modern Hollywood thriller. From the receipt of the first encrypted communiques, the clock is ticking, counting down to the moment when Snowden and his confidantes break this scandal wide open. It is a potboiler of the highest order, watching these people navigate their lives with the weight of an ungrateful world on their shoulders.

Perhaps the most important thing Citizenfour accomplishes is to humanize the infamous Snowden. If you have followed reliable news sources, then you know much of the story of the NSA leaks, but when the news media dug their claws in, they ripped out the substance of the scandal. Politicians spun and “journalists” played their role, turning the story around on the supposed traitor Snowden rather than focusing on the government that betrayed all of us. Poitras’ film reminds us that Snowden is just a man who saw a wrong and tried to right it. By making him the story, Citizenfour shows us how much bigger the real story is.

Last Days in Vietnam (directed by Rory Kennedy) – The history of the war in Vietnam has been written in fits and starts. Documents are declassified, witnesses come forward, and new stories come out of places we might never have imagined. American filmmakers from Oliver Stone with Platoon to Francis Ford Coppola with Apocalypse Now have covered the experience of the U.S. ground forces in Vietnam. The victory at the end of almost every Vietnam War film is when the American soldier makes it home, but we cannot forget America lost, and South Vietnam fell to the communists.

Last Days in Vietnam tells the story not of the American soldiers who made it home but of the South Vietnamese fleeing the country. Using archival footage and present-day interviews, Kennedy reconstructs the mass exodus of citizens trying to escape South Vietnam as the last Americans got out. It is a thrilling tale of denial, false bravado, and true heroism that paints the story of the end of the Vietnam conflict in a rarely considered light. Kennedy spends the first half of the film setting the stage, then uses the back half to explore in detail the retrieval and evacuation efforts of several different American military units.

This is a more traditional documentary than Citizenfour, featuring the classic talking-head interviews, old news footage, and animated reconstructions of some events. It is an incredibly accomplished film on a technical level, particularly the editing, and editor Don Kleszy’s name appears first in the opening credits. The subject of the film is fascinating, and Kennedy’s storytelling is riveting. While perhaps not as topical as Citizenfour, Last Days in Vietnam would certainly make a more handsome winner than most others.

Virunga (directed by Orlando von Einsiedel) – The accomplishments of von Einsiedel and crew to bring this story to public attention belong in the annals of war reporting. This is a different kind of battlefield – a nature preserve where the last of the world’s mountain gorillas dwell. Showing patience and diligence in the face of great danger, von Einsiedel slowly unravels the corporate and governmental conspiracy that threatens to destroy Virunga National Park, located on the eastern edges of Congo.

Congo was a nation already overrun by rebel violence and various separatist factions attempting to take control of the country. When oil is discovered under Virunga National Park, the site becomes the battleground for the preservation of the beauty and natural resources of Congo, which without protection will fall to multinational energy corporations and local militias looking to profit off the newly discovered resources.

Von Einsiedel and his crew put themselves on the front lines with the park rangers who risk death to protect the gorillas and other wild inhabitants of the park. They encounter rebels and take gunfire, and some even lose their lives, but the rangers never shrink from their duty, and the filmmakers never pull out of the conflict. Virunga tells a complex story in a simple but engaging way and represents a tremendous feat by a remarkable group of documentary makers.

Finding Vivian Maier (directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel) – Vivian Maier’s story is intriguing, as would any similar mystery be, but I found myself irritated by the baldly self-serving nature of this film. Maier was a nanny who almost to the point of obsession took photographs of people she saw on the street. None of her charges knew of her hobby, and she never publicly displayed her work. After she died, Maloof purchased some of her negatives on a whim. Upon discovering the quality of the photographs, he set out to obtain as many of Maier’s negatives as he could and to share her work with the world.

Here is where it gets murky. I have no doubt Maloof thinks Maier is a talented artist who never got her due in life for any of various reasons. Uncovering these reasons could make for a fascinating documentary, but as told by Maloof – the sole owner of Maier’s work and the person who stands to profit most from increasing its value – the film plays like a stock market scam. Maloof is trying to inflate artificially the value of his stock (the photographs) so he can sell high and get out before the market crashes. A good business decision? Sure. A quality documentary? Not even close.

The Salt of the Earth (directed by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders) – This is the one nominee in this category I have not seen because it has not been released yet. The trailer came out recently, though. Let’s enjoy it together:

It is interesting to me that the documentary branch of the Academy would go for two admittedly very different films about photographers in the same year, but Wenders is a fantastic filmmaker, and the movie seems absolutely gorgeous to look at, so I cannot wait to see it.

The final analysis

Citizenfour has won basically every early award leading up to the Oscars, and most industry pundits have it down as a lock for the Academy Award, but I am less certain. Since Inside Job won in 2010, Academy members have shied away from overtly political documentaries, awarding a sports film and two music documentaries. Critics are quick to call the Academy a “liberal” organization, but the history only somewhat bears this out, and if such a bias were truly so all consuming, films such as American Sniper would never be considered for the top award.

Last Days in Vietnam may be a viable alternative for members who do not want to award a movie about Snowden because the wounds of his actions are still too fresh. Everyone can agree on the tragic mistake that was the Vietnam War, so that may be the safe “liberal” pick. Virunga will benefit from the added exposure of being on Netflix, and it has a touching and important storyline, but based on everything that has happened up to now, it would be unwise to predict anything but Citizenfour.

Will win: Citizenfour

Should win: Citizenfour

Wish it had been here: Life Itself

New movie review: Citizenfour

Edward Snowden (left) speaks with journalist Glenn Greenwald in Citizenfour.

Every breath you take

Every move you make

Every bond you break

Every step you take

I’ll be watching you

– “Every Breath You Take,” by The Police

Every time you write. Every message you type. Every post you like. Everything you write. They are watching you. An accurate message, fittingly originated by The Police, translated to 2014, when it is no longer just a vaguely creepy wedding song but a disturbing reality of life in the digital age. The whole world is online, and whoever you are on the Internet, for all intents and purposes, is who you are.

When you click on a link or visit a site, you are logging information about who you are, who you will be, and who you wish you were. To have access to that information would be to have power – the ability to control all the versions of you that exist. We already know this on some intuitive level, and it is the tradeoff we make to enjoy the convenience of the online world.

Of course Google knows everything for which we have ever searched. Of course dating websites know intimate details about the ways we love. Of course Facebook is an experiment in culture on a scale the likes of which social scientists could never have dreamed. These are acceptable risks. We bury them and move on. But, where is the line?

We now know that the U.S. government and the National Security Agency in particular have had access to all of it – our phones, our computers, our lives – since at least Sept. 11, 2001. Out of fear, we agreed to allow those who protect us nearly unlimited power to find the monsters, but instead of checking for bogeymen under the bed, they were lifting our covers to see if we were the threat. If we cannot draw a line there, then maybe we do not believe in lines.

The new documentary from Laura Poitras, Citizenfour, explores the extent of the government’s spy programs through the eyes of the man who brought it all to light – Edward Snowden. He is infamous now. Snowden is a traitor, a hero, a pariah, a patriot. He is the man we saw dissected on the news while the real story passed by us. He is the beating heart at the center of Poitras’ dense political thriller, which tells a story that would be implausible if we did not already know that it is true.

Poitras is the director behind two great Iraq War documentaries, the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country and The Oath, which landed her on the government’s watchlist. She moved to Berlin and began work on a film about American surveillance programs. Then, she began receiving the emails. Cryptic, mostly coded messages with the promise of blowing the lid off U.S. post-9/11 spying, they were signed “Citizenfour.” Snowden was contacting her.

Working through the paranoia and around the surveillance under which they would both live, Poitras and Snowden met in Hong Kong. For more than a week, they sat in a hotel room, and she filmed Snowden covering everything from his past and his hopes for the future to the staggering scope of the U.S. government’s intrusion into citizens’ lives.

These interviews make up the bulk of the film’s runtime, but rather than bogging down the proceedings as talking-head sequences so often do, they play as the riveting confessionals of an unknown man who knows he is about to become public enemy No. 1. Sitting in with Poitras are the journalists who would get credit for breaking one of the biggest stories of our time. They are Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill.

Snowden is clearly putting himself and his family at tremendous risk by releasing his privileged information, but so are those documenting his journey and telling his story. As a journalist, it is hard not to sit in awe of the murderer’s row of investigative reporters assembled for this movie. For me, this is what the best reporting is about: digging deeper than anyone has cared to look and uncovering the things no one wanted to see.

Greenwald is a particularly impressive man, whom Snowden recommended Poitras bring on board. Dedicated to comprehending the full weight of what Snowden is revealing, Greenwald becomes a stand-in for the audience – as any good journalist should. Snowden has lived with these facts of life for a long time, but these revelations are mostly new to Greenwald and to us. His shock is our shock.

Your viewing of this film and your ultimate feelings toward it will probably depend on what you think of Snowden and his actions. Poitras knows this, and despite her subject’s protestations that he is not the story, she goes to great lengths to put Snowden’s whistleblowing in the context of his own life and struggles as much as the world at large.

Indeed, some of the film’s most powerful images are of Snowden sitting in his hotel room and watching the fallout of what we now call the “NSA leak.” More powerful still are the silent moments of Snowden staring out the window of his room. Here is a man who has brought the whole world down on himself. When he stares at an adjacent building, every window on every floor poses a threat, as do each passing car and every unknown face. Paranoia is a life sentence.

At the end of the day, though, this film is not about Snowden or Greenwald or Poitras. It is about all of us. The end of privacy is the end of liberty. Consider the Arab Spring of a few years back. Using the social media tools at their disposal to organize, they gathered in the streets and gave a voice to an opposition movement so long forced underground and into silence. The world watched. The government’s response was to shut down the Internet to try to prevent future demonstrations.

It would be hard to invent two more diametrically opposed ideologies: the people freely exchanging ideas and exercising their right to gather and a brutal, dictatorial regime trying to deny the rights of those people. Some have suggested such things could never happen here, and to an extent, they are right. But, the final question of Citizenfour is: If the U.S. government knows where you gather, who was with you, and what you said, is it any better?

The first one through the wall always gets bloody, but Snowden did what he did because this is not the America he signed up to protect. His hope is that others will follow him through the wall. Liberal, conservative, or independent, when the elected no longer bow to the will of the voters, that is a government that has outlived its usefulness. Maybe, despite this, you still think the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, or perhaps you think American exceptionalism is a crumbling myth. Either way, we should all be better than this.

See it? Yes.