'Snowden'

The Secret History Of Today

The Guardian had an advance screening of Oliver Stone's new film 'Snowden' so I got to tag along. I was hoping for somebody from the Production to turn up and talk about the film but the Q&A apparently turned out to be about whistleblowing and journalism. I didn't stay for it as I headed to a pub for a feed.

Of course protecting whistleblowers is important, but nobody really steps up to protect those people because they are in a sense, enemy of the state when they do that. The state, has long arms, even longer than the ones it's supposed to have by its own laws. And that's enough of a topic for Oliver Stone to be making this film.

As Oliver Stone films go, it's not as didactic as his other historically inspired films. It feels much like a docudrama, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance is a standout. Rhys Ifans turn as "O'Brien" was brought with accent issues. Nicolas Cage has an odd cameo-like role trying to restrain his Nicolas-Cage-Acting, and Zachary Quinto too is understated even by his standard of understated-ness.



What's Good About It

The film lays out who the guy was in the context of the US Security apparatus. We've been told by Barrack Obama he was a hacker. The Stone film begs to differ - and even subtracting from the myth-making for which Oliver Stone has a propensity - the man is not some low level hacker that glommed on to state secrets and absconded. No, he was implicitly and explicitly a careerist in the institutions of surveillance and espionage.

The film goes to great lengths to explain just how intrusive the government had gone through the use of its technology, and how enmeshed the military industrial complex has become in being able to prosecute a data wagon every individual on the planet. As an Oliver Stone film, it's relatively short on bombast and discursiveness, but the cerebral nature of the concern is undeniably Stone's work.

What's Bad About It

It's rather unclear about Snowden's own moral conversion to seeing the point of view where this kind of government surveillance was actually a public problem that had to be dealt with in the public sphere and debated. The motivation is weak - as far as cinematic and dramatic depictions are concerned. That being said, he might indeed have just had a eureka moment that made him do the whistle-blowing.

There's also a lot more to Ed Snowden getting to Russia on his way to Ecuador, which is glossed over with a montage towards the end. The film sort of starts telling that story but curtails that venture quickly and finishes off with a scene to do with Ed Snowden presenting his case in a public forum. The film was already long, but it could have done with the escape from Hong Kong.

What's Interesting About It

The rampant growth of the US Security apparatus came about in the wake of 9/11. It is often argued that the intelligence failure in preventing 9/11 led to this rampant growth, but the film argues that the terror threat is small potatoes next to the big issue of fighting a cyberspace war with China and Russia. Neither of those two states have any democratic shackles to put on their surveillance and espionage in cyberspace while American democracy affords itself restrictions, and thus you have agencies who lie to governments about what they do and how.

If this film were made prior to 9/11 describing an imaginary 2013, it would have been a science fiction-tinged action movie directed by the late great Tony Scott - probably starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. Yeah Tony Scott sure had this story down even before 9/11. As things stand, Stone's film is a very sombre film after the fact, about just how much the US surveillance system has grown and how paranoia may indeed be the most appropriate response to the increased surveillance. Essentially it confirms all of the paranoia from 'Enemy the State'. The sombreness is to be expected given that when you find out all the fantastically wild paranoia is legitimate, your world grows that much colder.

It's Not A Conspiracy Theory If They're Really Watching You

Just how invasive is the surveillance? We've been told by Edward Snowden, just how much infiltration and malware distribution and cyberspace intrusion goes on with not only other nations' leaders but also just about any person on the planet with an internet connection. It's a strange feeling to come to the realisation that these organs have been listening in all the time to everything and have everything indexed ("Hey, including this blog! Somebody's reading this site! Hooray!") and the notion that the world is totally transparent to those who watch creeps you out.

This stuff used to be the provenance of conspiracy theorists. If you talked about stuff like this, people would joke and tell you to go get your tin foil hat. Well, let's look at that "tin foil hat" for a moment.

The reason "tin foil hats" is a thing is because the tin foil hat represents an attempt to place a Faraday cage around one's head to stop electromagnetic scanning of the brains and thus block agencies from scanning one's thoughts. This far fetched notion that a government might be interested in one's private thoughts is pretty much the crux of the issue, and there are no tin foil hats to help us from the prying government. The government, it turns out need not scan the inner workings of your brain, they merely need to parse the output of your mind - all of it - in order to figure out what you are thinking.

At this point in history, we had better accept that the surveillance state is fully in motion, fully in operation and minimally supervised with negligible oversight. It goes so deep and wide, a faraday cage won't protect you.

Oliver Stone's Getting Sad

There used to be an animal gusto to Stone's films. Whether it was the bombast of 'Platoon' and the slow motion as Sgt. Elias buys it in a hail of bullets, or Al Pacino's marvellous speech about life being about "a game of inches" in 'Any Given Sunday', which crescendoes like an emotional volcano. The best bits of Oliver Stone's films had a stink, a skunk musk of animal spirits. This film was surprisingly short of that kind of blood-guts-and-glory. It's probably a better film for not going to the emotional bombast but at the same time I just want to note just how conspicuous by its absence of bombast this film is, in the annals of Oliver Stone movies.

Maybe Oliver Stone was feeling very dry about the topic because the film has an emotional dry quality to it, even when it touches upon the passion Snowden has for his girlfriend, and the emotional turmoil that is central to Snowden's decision to go public with the secret. I don't know if a dried up desiccated Oliver Stone is all that fun in the movie house. I kind of missed the swagger and full-throated declarations. Maybe he's getting more circumspect. He may even be getting sad. It was weird because I felt sad for him, and he's a very successful film maker. He shouldn't need my sympathy, but watching it, I felt sympathetic for him.

W.

A Fable Of Fallibility

In a most inopportune way, Oliver Stone came out with a biopic of the last POTUS in the last year of his office. And as much as Oliver Stone's pictures intrigue me for their bombast and over-reaching claims, I couldn't bring myself to put myself through this movie in the cinemas. Bottom line, the story of 2008 was Barack Obama, The GFC, and how the Neo-Con vision for the future all turned to shit, and everybody could see it - except the usual cabal of micro-cephalic right-wingers.

Bottom line for me as a paying audience was that I really didn't want to go over the GW Bush presidency all over again just to understand why it was such a faulty presidency. Nevertheless, Oliver Stone was making a film that was perhaps a little too soon, rather than a little too late.

What I'll talk about here is all under the caveat that Oliver Stone and his researchers have gotten their facts about 85% right. I am totally open to the possibility the accuracy is much lower, but in order to discuss the film, you sort of have to take on board the claims at face value.

What's Good About It

It's a film that helps us understand how we were in the grips of an idiot in the White House for 8 years. Eight Years! EIGHT FUCKING YEARS!

It's a bit like picking at a recently formed scab, where the itch is the worst. You come to realise the serious intellectual and conceptual limitations of the people involved. If George W Bush is an overly eager frat boy who simplified everything into silly little dichotomies, the people surrounding him seem equally maxed out on the Peter Principle scale.

There's nobody in the room smart enough to frame the issue properly. Collin Powell, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, are all insufficient to the proper task of combating the terror threat, as George W Bush eagerly marches into Iraq, convinced of the long term benefits. Worse still, Dubbya is making fundamental assumptions about people and faith and ignoring what is known in order to bring his vision to fruition.

He is so pathetic when it all unravels, you feel sorry for the guy - which is as Oliver Stone intended, whatever that is worth - and that is a weird feeling. Considering just how much he fucked up the world, it seems weird we feel sympathy for how much he fucked up his own presidency. And this is without considering the GFC.

The performances in this film are marvelous. Brolin's W., Cromwell's Bush Snr, Toby Jones' Karl Rove, Elizabeth Banks' Laura Bush are all great portrayals - especially considering the real figures are so fresh in our minds.

What's Bad About It

Some of the scenes where they discuss policy remain deeply unconvincing. We get the arguments and we get the direction of the rhetorical positions of Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld, but because they're telescoping the story down to the bare essentials, they sort of miss the nuanced, very subtly inflected polemic that was at the heart of the Iraq invasion.

I mean, I get the ideas and what Oliver Stone wants to tell us about Oil and Iran and geopolitics, but these scenes are so ham-fisted you think was the world really given to such nincompoops to drive into the ditch? Was this really the tenor of these meetings?

I guess I'm left incredulous and this is why I think this is a bad aspect of the film. But I can't offer how it might have really gone, so I don't really know; and in the absence of that knowledge, maybe Stone' version of it is as good as it can be. Shame it looks like a parody of the war room scene in 'Dr. Strangelove' - and heaven only knows we've seen a tonne of those over the years.

I don't want to be mean about it, but Thandie Newton's Condoleeza Rice was the second weakest portrayal next to the dude who played Tony Blair. The problem for Newton however is that you never stop seeing Newton enough to see Rice, whereas Brolin's Bush is so good, you see GW right there as we know him.

What's Interesting About It

The amount of importance attached to faith by the characters is noteworthy. The film spends a lot of time talking about Bush's faith and it's understandable that it does, given what a born-again Christian GWB was. The creepiest type of Christians are the most zealous ones, and we see that zealousness in abundance.

Then there is the depiction of Tony Blair as somebody who was motivated by his own conversion towards Catholicism which motivated his riding shotgun with GW Bush right into the Iraq fiasco.

There's also a argument to be made (and is hinted at in the film) that the world might have been a better place had GW Bush become Baseball Commissioner instead of Bud Selig. it might have fucked up MLB, but it would not have killed so many people.

Bud Selig's tenure has been *interesting* to say the least, but I can imagine GW Bush as commissioner being a bit more helpful, bit more decisive, bit more quick on the draw with respect to PEDs and what have you. And no war in Iraq.

The film also wastes no time on the 2000 election which may or may not have been stolen in Florida. That's an interesting choice given how dodgy GW Bush' ascension was in the first place; but it also frees the film up to investigate the actual agenda carried in to the White House by George W. Bush and how it went all awry.

Like a lot of Oliver Stone's films, this one is deeply thought-provoking and leaves a lasting impression. I have to say I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Dubya, Jeb And Dad

The singularly interesting thing about the dynamic between bush Snr and Jnr is the amount of disdain Dad has for his son. This is a disdain that seems to stem back decades and just might not be spent.I always assumed that the rise of GW Bush was a Bush family push to re-mount a second Bush term as such; but the film indicates that Bush Snr placed much more faith in Jeb and not W. Indeed,the Bush Snrs. try to talk W out from running for Governor of Texas, which is an interesting scene.

It's really hard to get a handle on George Snr.'s legacy because the man himself is strangely opaque. Interviews with the man yield remarkably banal observations, and his record essentially stands on war, whether it is his service during WWII or the war with Panama and the first Gulf War.He only went one term because his term was like an appendix to the Reagan administration - yet he was a very important President as time has shown.

The intractable Freudian struggle W. is forced to endure with George Bush Snr. thus may have been the greatest tragedy of our time. And I have to admit that I was largely unaware of how much of a gap existed between the two men. It may be the case that Jeb was always the better Presidential candidate but we may never get to find out thanks to W's legacy. There's something very strange about that dodged bullet.