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Patriots and Protesters, Mavericks and Manipulators: Assange, Snowden and the Politics of Surveillance Cinema
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2019
Abstract
In a world dizzyingly shifted on its axis since 9/11, nothing has aided understanding of the profound twenty-first-century geopolitical slippages more than the revelations from Julian Assange's WikiLeaks site and the actions of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Much has been written about the pair but little has investigated their persona and pronouncements onscreen. This article sets out to compare and contrast Snowden's and Assange's real as well as fictional cinematic portrayals, therefore. We find that their screen image conforms to notions of star celebrity but at the same time also challenges surveillance activism itself, on film as well as within wider political frames of reference. The movies about them may have deliberately foregrounded reactions towards the politics of surveillance, but that agenda has been conditioned by responses not only towards Assange and Snowden but also to the filmmakers producing these texts. We give resonance, in other words, to a wider discourse that goes beyond the cinematic in contemporary surveillance culture. There is an interlocutory discourse at play that sees cinema as not just a disruptive presence, but now more than ever as an active participant in mapping out the terrain under investigation. The challenge this presence brings to activism, we conclude, affects film's capacity to expose and contest contemporary state surveillance.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019
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