We Steal Secrets. (15.)
Directed by Alex Gibney. Featuring Julian Assange, Nick Davies, Adrian Lamo. 130 mins.
Truth, there’s a lot of it about. This age of information has plunged us into a new Dark Age where popular discourse is conducted through a hysterical straw-clutching haze of mysticism, hoodoo, arcane symbolism and shadowy secret societies. So if I say that the latest film from Alex Gibney - whose previous documentaries have covered the use of torture by the US military and the Catholic church covering up child abuse – is a very thorough and balanced account of the Wikileaks story no doubt you will tell me that that is just what the Illuminati want me to think and that Gibney is obviously a CIA stooge.
His film certainly does a job on Assange, but maybe no more than he did on himself. It moves chronologically through the story of his early hacktivism, the creation of Wikileaks, Bradley Manning’s unhappy early life, the growth of the Wikileaks and the background to the Swedish sexual assault claims. Everybody except Manning (obviously) and Assange (wanted $1 million for an interview) get their say. It is a reassuringly old fashioned, occasionally plodding piece of film making that makes a great effort to be seen to be just presenting the facts neutrally but still ends up as a character assassination of Assange.
One of the film’s main themes is how cunningly selective the US response to the publishing of all those military and diplomatic secrets was. Carefully sidestepping the New York Times, Guardian and der Spiegel who published them and addressing the content of leaks, they simply create a hate-figure to be a focus for US anger, a role which Assange, a computer nerd trapped in the preening, self-enchanted persona of the lead singer of 80s New Romantic outfit, was uniquely suited for. The film becomes another tale of a self-destructive quest for fame and stardom.
What the film does well is to put Wikileaks in the context of the hacker ethos. The hacker community is presented as a misfit group with an evangelical belief in freedom of information no matter the cost; it’s no surprise that when that world got to lay down with the world of journalism it soon fell apart.
This is a deeply depressing film. Previous generations took comfort in the figure of the Crusading Investigative Journalist who would protect them from the excesses of government but that kind of journalism is withering away as papers cut down on budgets and the whole idea of paying people to write. Instead we will be left with citizen bloggers and the oddball activists of the internet whose goals and values are unlikely to be those of society.
There is a jaw dropping moment when Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned in Manning, uses a Star Trek analogy to describe the moral quandary he was in. Manning himself cuts a desperate figure, an effeminate computer obsessive who wanted to become a woman and somehow ends, possibly on some self-destructive urge, ends up in a camp in Iraq. What they share with Assange is a burning desire to be noticed, to have the world’s attention. Ultimately Wikileaks is another tale of desperate wannabes.
Directed by Alex Gibney. Featuring Julian Assange, Nick Davies, Adrian Lamo. 130 mins.
Truth, there’s a lot of it about. This age of information has plunged us into a new Dark Age where popular discourse is conducted through a hysterical straw-clutching haze of mysticism, hoodoo, arcane symbolism and shadowy secret societies. So if I say that the latest film from Alex Gibney - whose previous documentaries have covered the use of torture by the US military and the Catholic church covering up child abuse – is a very thorough and balanced account of the Wikileaks story no doubt you will tell me that that is just what the Illuminati want me to think and that Gibney is obviously a CIA stooge.
His film certainly does a job on Assange, but maybe no more than he did on himself. It moves chronologically through the story of his early hacktivism, the creation of Wikileaks, Bradley Manning’s unhappy early life, the growth of the Wikileaks and the background to the Swedish sexual assault claims. Everybody except Manning (obviously) and Assange (wanted $1 million for an interview) get their say. It is a reassuringly old fashioned, occasionally plodding piece of film making that makes a great effort to be seen to be just presenting the facts neutrally but still ends up as a character assassination of Assange.
One of the film’s main themes is how cunningly selective the US response to the publishing of all those military and diplomatic secrets was. Carefully sidestepping the New York Times, Guardian and der Spiegel who published them and addressing the content of leaks, they simply create a hate-figure to be a focus for US anger, a role which Assange, a computer nerd trapped in the preening, self-enchanted persona of the lead singer of 80s New Romantic outfit, was uniquely suited for. The film becomes another tale of a self-destructive quest for fame and stardom.
What the film does well is to put Wikileaks in the context of the hacker ethos. The hacker community is presented as a misfit group with an evangelical belief in freedom of information no matter the cost; it’s no surprise that when that world got to lay down with the world of journalism it soon fell apart.
This is a deeply depressing film. Previous generations took comfort in the figure of the Crusading Investigative Journalist who would protect them from the excesses of government but that kind of journalism is withering away as papers cut down on budgets and the whole idea of paying people to write. Instead we will be left with citizen bloggers and the oddball activists of the internet whose goals and values are unlikely to be those of society.
There is a jaw dropping moment when Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned in Manning, uses a Star Trek analogy to describe the moral quandary he was in. Manning himself cuts a desperate figure, an effeminate computer obsessive who wanted to become a woman and somehow ends, possibly on some self-destructive urge, ends up in a camp in Iraq. What they share with Assange is a burning desire to be noticed, to have the world’s attention. Ultimately Wikileaks is another tale of desperate wannabes.
