What a week for Edward Snowden. You know Snowden, the man who risked his life to expose the federal government’s illegal, immoral spying programs? Who exchanged his home and family and future in the government for ignominy, abuse and a house in Russia?
Well if you forgot about Snowden, you have a chance to remember the man this week as Snowden featured in two movie trailers.
The first was a toss-off line in the Jason Bourne trailer. “We’ve just been hacked,” says Government Official in Suit. “It could be worse than Snowden.”
Worse that Snowden. You hear that? Jason Bourne worse than Edward Snowden!
This is a interesting use of the Snowden name. Bourne is the good guy in his movie series; the government is the villain. Does declaring Bourne’s hack worse than Snowden’s align Snowden with the heroic action hero? Jason Bourne director Paul Greengrass has embraced mixing political controversy with his action films. Implicating the government in his sci-fi action punch-em-up would be Greengrass fashion.
There is of course another reason to mention Edward Snowden in Jason Bourne‘s trailer. The movie looks stupid, and feels totally unnecessary. A little contemporary politics might bring an extra buck at the box-office.
Which takes us to the Edward Snowden main course: Oliver Stone’s Snowden. The director of JFK, Nixon, and World Trade Center now adds another political film to his roster. What must it be like to see your own life in the Oliver Stone grand, paranoid, dramatic cinematic vision? Edward Snowden is only thirty two years old, and already he’s getting Oliver Stone’d.
Snowden continues a trend in the US film industry of rushing our political controversies to the big screen. It will be just over three years between Snowden’s release of classified documents and the release dramatized movie-version of events this September. By comparison, the Warren Commission reported its findings to Congress on the assassination of JFK in 1964; twenty-seven years passed before JFK told that story.
It’s hard to get a sense of history and significance in three years. Watching Nic Cage prattle on in an Oliver Stone directed biopic about one of the most significant actions of an American civilian this century doesn’t lend much gravitas (sorry Nic Cage. It’s just true).
But there’s hope for Snowden to have some effect, if audiences are in the mood for such a film. Stone met with Edward Snowden in Moscow several times before production of the film; he shot Snowden in Germany, saying he didn’t feel comfortable in the U.S. The trailer leaves little doubt as to Stone’s opinion of Snowden, highlighting his military service and crisis of conscience over the government spying he uncovered.
It may be only three years since Snowden dumped classified NSA docs on the world, but already the man is as much a twitter personality as a whistleblower, folk hero, or public enemy. Jason Bourne and Snowden if nothing else, can remind audiences about what he did, and why it matters.
That case needs making, especially given that a sizable majority of Americans have a negative view of Snowden’s leak (at least according to opinion polls I have seen, none of which have been conducted in the past year).
More important than opinions about Snowden, though, are opinions about what he revealed. The case against the government for its spying programs and disregard of civil liberties is essentially unimpeachable. That is in large part thanks to Edward Snowden.
But now that the government exposed, the question has changed to ‘who cares?’ And the unfortunate answer in the US is: not that many people. According to a December AP-NORC report, only 28% of Americans oppose government surveillance of internet activity without a warrant. More broadly 54% of Americans think it’s “necessary for the government to sacrifice freedoms to fight terrorism.”
That, might friends, is worse than Edward Snowden.
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