The film showed the toll that bearing difficult secrets took not only on Snowden's life but on the lives of his friends. Snowden's girlfriend at one point complained that he hadn't touched her in months, a result of Snowden's acute awareness of how every breath could be heard, every action seen or recorded unless extraordinary precautions were taken.
The real Edward Snowden, after noting how hard it was to watch himself portrayed in this scene to the world as the "worst boyfriend ever," waxed eloquent on that subject during a live Q&A following a special screening of the film:
"Privacy isn't about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. 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. [Saying 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."
Stone's film artfully weaves in a number of real-world examples of things people might wish to hide. No one will go to bed after viewing this without putting a piece of tape over their laptop camera, for instance, and I expect a surge in microwave sales among security professionals.
The actors do excellent jobs portraying the real-life characters we have come to know through news broadcasts and documentaries. Edward Snowden is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt so well that at a screening in New York, the real Edward Snowden's parents came up and thanked him for giving them the "essence" of their son.
I don't know if actress Shailene Woodley did an accurate portrayal of Lindsay Mills, but the Bernie Sanders surrogate and anti-Dakota Access Pipeline activist was charming, smart, vulnerable and the perfect complement to the more serious, introverted Snowden, as played by Gordon-Levitt.
One of the things I hadn't learned from the initial coverage of the real-life Snowden in the early media stories was how genius-level bright he is. That point is well made in the film and was equally evident in his articulate responses to the questions posed in the live Q&A session after the screening. The real Snowden made a powerful statement about privacy in his attempt to illuminate the crux of the issue with government spying:
I only wish Snowden had pointed out that one of the most terrible parts of government spying is how it provides blackmail material on those who would attempt to rein in the excesses of the National Security State. How can elected officials ever get the CIA or NSA to stop doing illegal things when the agencies hold all the darkest secrets of those same officials?
Longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rose to power in the previous century largely because he either knew or pretended to know the dirt on many politicians. Now, there is the prospect of U.S. intelligence insiders possessing extensive records of everyone's electronic conversations and photographs, meaning that any misstep or personal foible becomes part of each person's permanent record, available to an intelligence agency wanting to misuse it.
The implications of that troubling reality is one reason why this special film will stay with you, haunting you with its implications, long after you've left the darkness of the theater and returned to the privacy -- or not -- of your home. And if you want to know who the CIA's assets are in the media, just pay attention to who gives this film a bad review. The CIA and NSA really do not want you to see it.
But let me give you one last reason to see "Snowden." It belongs to an increasingly rare genre, a well-made film about a topic that matters. Over the years and decades, Hollywood has turned more and more to escapist movies with minimal attention to the great issues of the day. If we want to see more movies that are intelligent and relevant, we need to support films like this one.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
