If you’re looking for a Michael Moore style documentary where you know the good guys from the bad guys, then this movie is not for you. While the first fifteen minutes appeared to detail the heroism of Julian Assange against the misdeeds of the U.S. government, the following two hours depicted a far more complex reality in which people may do the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things with laudable goals in mind. Director Alex Gibney doesn’t give us a Moore fable or an Oliver Stone lesson in propaganda, but rather a complex study of an Icarus-themed Assange and a tortured but saint-like Private Bradley Manning.
When Assange dumped thousands of documents about the U.S.’s handling of the Afghanistan war without redacting the names of the locals who worked with the U.S. government, Assange went from hero to arrogant bastard. For him it was more important to get the word out regardless of whom it hurt or killed. Admittedly, Assange’s WikiLeaks turns out to be more a one-man organization than a dedicated band of Robin Hoods who steal from the U.S. government to give to the world. Did Assange care that people might die to facilitate the better free flow of information, or was he simply unable to redact the affected peoples names with a lack of staff and approaching deadlines for the release of information? We may never know.
As we delve into the personalities of Assange, and Private Manning who illegally downloaded hundreds of thousand of documents from the U.S. government, we find that both men are damaged goods. Assange was an unloved child whose mother divorced several times and who was shunted around more than thirty residences in Australia. Manning was a small, slightly effeminate gay who was bullied in school and not sure of his gender. From a divorced family with an alcoholic mother, he also felt himself very much alone. Whatever their environment and resultant personality failures, both were computer geniuses.
But overarching questions remain. When can the most powerful government in the world keep information hidden, and when must it release it? Is the embarrassment of inadvertently killing journalists in Iraq enough of a reason? Is potentially outing collaborators sufficient, and who decides and why and how?
In the Army, you’re supposed to follow orders, not your conscience. So, for Private Manning, it was a three-fer, not only was he a lonely homosexual with a stronger conscience because of what he had experienced, but he also felt that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body – and he had no one to turn to for help. The only surprise was how long it took him to unravel or to grow a pair – it all depends on your point of view.
So, if there is a hero in this mess, it’s probably not Julian Assange, whose dark side was more fitted to playing Darth Vader than Han Solo. Two damaged boys grow up to be damaged young men who want to get even with society, or, from a rosier point of view, men who want to change society and the U.S. government into something it isn’t. Beware of what you wish for: The consequences may be more severe than you imagined.
The New York Film Festival hosted the first three hours of Oliver Stone’s self-described “revisionist history” of World War II through the present, soon to be shown on Showtime. Those three episodes of Stone’s “Untold History of the United States” concerned World War II and its immediate aftermath.