Documentary Goes Inside Julian Assange's Paranoid World
BY NINA BURLEIGH ON 5/2/17 AT 9:42 AM
The opening scene in the new documentary about Julian Assange sets up the two themes of Laura Poitras’s film. The year is 2011, the setting a posh English country house where the WikiLeaks founder was bivouacked. Assange is trying to get Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the phone so he can warn her that a journalist has released hundreds of thousands of unredacted State Department cables that had been in WikiLeaks’ possession, potentially putting at risk secret agents worldwide. But Assange—silvery, feline, with a charming overbite—isn’t looking up the number himself, nor is he making the call. Rather, he is directing a pretty young woman, a journalist and acolyte named Sarah Harrison, on who to call and what to say to State Department operators, while he sits across the table smirking.
[link:http://www.newsweek.com/director-laura-poitras-discusses-film-julian-assange-593039|Related: Director Laura Poitras discusses new film on Julian Assange
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Here is Surveillance State David versus Goliath. Here, too, are the punk Don Draper and Millennial Megan. That gender power imbalance—and the abuses of it that have, arguably, confined Assange to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for almost five years—is the subtext of Poitras’s film.
Human frailty and foibles, from vanity to anxiety—all sometimes in extreme closeup—suffuse this film with unexpected pathos. Its anti-heroes are brilliant smug jerks who don’t know how to work with females. They are weird IT assholes, arrogant and dismissive about women, schooled on the internet kink that addles the feelings of unsentimental men. They are worse even than Donald Trump in their own way, because we expect more of them if for no other reason than they are younger and are Fighting the Man.
Poitras is the great chronicler of post-9/11 American military-intelligence activity, including the creation of the global surveillance system. She has won numerous awards and was considered such a threat that she was stopped and searched 60 times at U.S. borders before the government gave up.
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http://www.newsweek.com/documentary-inside-julian-assange-world-593037
