'Snowden' Isn't Really About Snowden

The first thing that's disorienting about Oliver Stone's new film, “Snowden,” a kind of dystopian thriller, is that it is based, in part, on a documentary released just two years ago, which is itself a true story that sometimes feels like science fiction. Now that Oliver Stone has arrived at the story, we're holding a matryoshka doll of ideas, themes, and questions, a kind of copy of a copy of reality, which, it turns out, is itself stranger than any fiction.

The question is how to tell such a strange story in a way that’s familiar enough, in the span of two hours, to an audience that won’t roll its eyes or close them, but hopefully open them a little more. "The truth is, I was worried the whole time that this thing was going to turn into a bore," Stone said at a preview screening in Brooklyn, alongside Ben Wizner, an attorney at the ACLU and a laywer for Snowden. "How do you make this movie move?"

On this week's Radio Motherboard, we think about how Stone answered that question and other "Snowden" things, with help from Ben Wizner and the director himself. (During the making of the movie, the two reportedly disagreed, according to Irina Aleksander's New York Times Magazine behind-the-scenes feature. “It was really a horrible experience in every way,” Stone is quoted as telling an audience.)

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Stone, who directed and co-wrote the movie, is like a hacker, in that sense, trying to figure out how to Trojan horse the real Snowden story into a story that looks a lot like the Snowden story—just more fast-paced, fun to look at, and perhaps easier to grasp. Like most hacks, of course, not everything in this version is to be taken at face value.

At times the movie favors the raw, hacker-thriller aesthetic of Blackhat, with a thick soundtrack of subtle, ominous music and hisses and skips; at other times it tries to be more like Citizenfour, with many of its references to NSA programs and plot points lifted from the torrent of reporting that emerged from Snowden's leaks. This being a movie, there are also missing pieces and inventions, like the character that Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Snowden encounters in a CIA basement who is played by Nicolas Cage, and is meant to stand in for the real-life government whistleblowers who proceeded him, like Bill Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake. (Chelsea Manning is curiously not mentioned once in the movie; Wikileaks is mentioned once, in a voice-over during Snowden's escape from Hong Kong.)

As for the more controversial details about what he did, Stone said that Snowden, whom he met three times in Moscow, never told him exactly how he smuggled data out of the NSA or exactly how exactly he left Hong Kong, but he did make helpful suggestions about the plot. "He's still under indictment" under the Espionage Act, Stone pointed out. "Ed would say, 'I can't discuss this. We have to find a parallel way of getting there.'" (In the movie, for instance, the whistleblower quickly downloads files onto a memory card that he tucks into a Rubix Cube; in real life, according to the NSA, Snowden took documents over months, using some of his colleagues' passwords, and a USB drive. Snowden has called the NSA's account "simply wrong.")

"There are two deep truths at the center of this story and the center of this movie," Wizner said. One of them is about a person who revealed wrongdoing "with sincerity, courage, conviction, patriotism, love of country, and I think that's... accurately depicted." Conveying that truth is presumably what motivated everyone involved—not least Snowden and his supporters, who last week began advocating in earnest for a Presidential pardon.

Stone doesn't attempt to make any argument to the contrary. Snowden the movie character is a heroic, nearly hagiographic cartoon of the real Snowden, the one we can only intimate from Citizenfour. Not everyone will come away from Snowden with such conviction about Snowden's character and integrity. "I'd love to see what Michael Hayden has to say," Stone chuckled, nervously.

A story about how the internet works now

But the argument for Snowden's pardon isn't just about Snowden, of course, and the movie isn't either: it's about the other deep "truth" here, about the impact and motivation for his actions, which even Obama's former attorney general has acknowledged were a "public service." In a broad sense, "Snowden" is, like two recent documentaries, Alex Gibney's Zero Days or Herzog's Lo And Behold, a story about how the internet works. It's about what happens when technical capabilities (ie, hacking) help humans overstep serious boundaries (ethics, laws, human freedoms); about a set of programs that have invited countless hidden abuses, now and in the future; a costly system that many have complained has meant outsized benefits to private industry and that in some cases has been ineffective at stopping the terrorism it's trying to prevent.

The details of this story are not controversial, even if the questions it raises certainly are. At the screening, Stone and Wizner pointed out another crucial meta-problem with all of this: that Snowden was able to walk out with so much data demonstrates a serious flaw at the heart of such a gargantuan and risky enterprise: a variation on, if you have all the data you could lose all the data.

"They still have no idea how many documents were taken or provided to journalists," said Wizner, "which makes you wonder, how many people may have walked out the door not to meet with the Guardian or the Washington Post?" Added Stone, "they have the ability to make mistakes because no one's watching their back."

The system has also come under legal scrutiny and the start of political reform. How political and legal change will continue isn't clear, though. Apart from the story of Snowden the man—a story Snowden himself worried would detract from the bigger issues—the broader issues of privacy, surveillance, and freedom may be fading into the background again, drowned out by fears over terrorism, and undiscussed in the current Presidential election. (For a thermometer of Americans' current attitude about privacy, see Pew's recent report.)

Stone works hard at making these issues concrete again. There are eye opening depictions of software like XKEYSCORE and systems like PRISM, which are illustrated in one eye-popping four minute computer-animated sequence showing how the entire internet gets scooped up in the government’s database. But Snowden’s paranoia (and ours) gets really nudged up a notch by an argument far more personal, and far less abstract, than that usually heard: his girlfriend Lindsey’s extroverted use of social media, and the realization that her computer and webcam may well be pwned by hackers, foreign or domestic. Part of the larger argument about digital security is that it doesn’t matter who’s spying on you—a security flaw to a US hacker is a security flaw to a Russian hacker too—and it's not clear. But Snowden becomes alarmed, and at his most vulnerable moment no less: Snowden spots Lindsey's laptop open on the desk, facing them while they're having sex.

It’s the Snowden version of John Oliver’s “dick pic” question: would you want the government to have a photo of your private parts? (Too late, really, but that depends upon legalistic definition of "have" or "collect.") Snowden tapes up the webcam with a Band-Aid and castigates Lindsey for keeping her nude photos on her hard drive. ("I have nothing to hide," she tells him, echoing a majority sentiment, at least one more of us used to have in the pre-Snowden days.) And so Stone’s rapid-fire version of Snowden’s conversion kicks into high gear, as he moves from government contractor to skeptic to protester, a path that takes him from Geneva to Tokyo to Oahu to Hong Kong and on to Moscow.

Stone filmed in these places, adding yet more sumptuous realism to a movie that again is also definitely not a documentary. The documentary, Citizenfour, did a fantastic, shocking job of telling this story, and showed how, compared with Stone’s information-dense, fast-paced treatment, less is actually more. Armed with Snowden’s suggestions and revelations from the documents and poetic license, Stone goes in the maximalist direction. To show the threat of spying and convey Snowden’s personal motivations, he gets imaginative at times and depicts one of Snowden’s bosses as an Orwellian character: he’s named O’Brian (a nod to O'Brien, the bad guy in 1984) and his last communication with Snowden is via his head projected on a giant screen, hinting that he has been spying upon Snowden’s girlfriend.

If it feels outlandish, perhaps that’s part of Stone’s fearful point: this could happen, technically speaking—and things like it did, see the so-called practice of LOVEINT. But in telling Snowden’s story—a complicated and controversial one, ultimately about a far more complicated and controversial government program—the outlandishness is also a liability. On a larger social level, the success of Snowden, like that of a lot of the reporting that came out of his leaks, won’t depend so much upon how fun the story is or how heroic its protagonist looks. It's social impact will depend upon how well it can communicate the real life effect of something as outlandish-sounding, something as uncanny, as your own government spying on you.

Even if Stone’s semi-fictionalized two hours can’t settle specific questions about Snowden the man and how he did what he did, “Snowden” paints a broad argument as to the why. The movie isn't completely accurate but it's generally true. And it will, hopefully, send audiences home with thoughts and questions about larger issues than Edward Snowden himself: about the scope of surveillance and data collection, the idea that loving one’s country and criticizing it aren’t contradictory but complementary, the the importance of privacy, what the real life Snowden calls "the fountainhead of all of our rights." President Obama may never see it, and if he did, it probably wouldn't lead him to pardon Snowden. But it would likely convince him to finally tape up that webcam.

Of course, if a little tape job on the laptop is the most action the movie inspires in people then Snowden and defenders of privacy and all of us really could use more efforts to tell the story of surveillance and privacy in new ways, to new audiences. And given how quickly Stone’s fuzzy history has emerged, it may not be long, as my colleague Jason Koebler suggests in this week's episode of Radio Motherboard, before we get a full-on Broadway rap musical sensation treatment--a Snowden! maybe?

from 'Snowden' Isn't Really About Snowden