ARTS JULY 5, 2017
Julian Assange in Risk © Praxis Films Bullets of truth CHASE MADAR
RISK Various cinemas The Julian Assange of Westminster and Pentagon imaginings is a pale Mephistopheles; the real Assange, however, turns out to be as awkward and painfully unsuited to media scrutiny as most of us. In Risk, Laura Poitras’s unflattering new documentary film portrait, Assange often comes off less like a satanic or saintly genius (take your pick) than like David Brent, with the camera’s confiding close-ups revealing indignant sexism comically free of self-awareness. It plays like lo-fi sketch comedy when Assange and a WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison call up the US State Department in 2011 to announce the impending online publication of a few hundred thousand unredacted State Department cables . “Hello, can I please speak to Hillary Clinton?” asks Harrison. Risk is in many ways a counterpart to Citizenfour, Poitras’s Oscar-winning portrait of Edward Snowden. But whereas that effort was a stylish heroic bust, with clear exposition of what her subject did and why he did it, told by a variety of talking heads, none more articulate than Snowden himself, this is something at best ambivalent. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story”, says Poitras in her raspy, unemphatic voiceover. The film is short, only ninety minutes – nowhere near enough time to digest the enormous issues at play here but long enough to tell a few tragic stories.
Poitras herself is one of the most eminent documentarians working today, and a formally sophisticated and deeply committed artist. Unbeknown to her, she was spotted by the US military filming on a rooftop in Baghdad in 2004, on the same day as a nearby ambush of American servicemen. After this she endured several years of border-crossing interrogations, FBI investigation and even a grand jury probe. (She turned documents from her copious FBI files, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, into part of an installation piece at her one-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year.) Not for nothing did Snowden single her out to receive his secret tidings.
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Poitras has been filming Assange for more than six years, from his press conferences to his (elective) confinement in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, after Interpol put out a warrant to question him on sexual assault charges in Sweden. She has turned from in-house videographer to critical journalist who has fallen out with Assange (though as she tells it in her voiceover, he asks her not to say that they have fallen out). Poitras has now been attacked by Assange’s lawyers for not allowing their client to review the final cut and for putting him at additional risk by bringing the raw footage to the United States where it might be subpoenaed.
The main narrative arc is how Assange went from being an icon of the global Left to becoming – temporarily, and surreally – the saviour of the American Right. “I love WikiLeaks!”, candidate Donald J. Trump grinned at a campaign rally last October when reading from the emails that some hacker had stolen from the Democratic National Committee and passed on to the website. (Trump mentioned or quoted Wikileaks’s Clinton leaks some 160 times in the last month of his campaign.) Assange, once the scourge of the American nationalist Right for publishing classified logs from the Afghan and Iraq wars as well as a quarter of a million classified State Department cables, suddenly became, in eye-rubbingly oneiric scenes, the bosom ally of Fox News media figures such as Sean Hannity.
Assange’s flirtation with the American Right didn’t stop there. His Twitter feed passed on the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was running a paedophilia ring in the basement of a Washington, DC pizzeria and he oxygenated rumours that Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee intern who was murdered in an apparent botched robbery, had been the source of the DNC leaks – and paid for it with his life. This was eagerly taken up and, despite explicit entreaties to stop spreading the rumour from Rich’s grieving family who had to fend off the vigilante “help” of conspiracy loons, the “story” continued. The story of Julian Assange is in some ways a depressing study in how quickly Enlightenment heroes can turn into conspiracy-freak sideshow acts.
How significant were WikiLeaks’s October revelations about Hillary Clinton and her circle in the DNC? Certainly the US media class feasted on the backbiting and palace intrigue, but it’s doubtful that the rest of the country found them that noteworthy. Given that Trump’s margin of victory was so razor-thin, however – just 80,000 votes spread over three states – everything mattered, and there is no avoiding the fact that Assange helped to elect Trump. Perhaps it was a decision made with the comforting assumption that Hillary Clinton would inevitably win; that was, after all, what nearly every poll showed.
And so Julian Assange ended up casting his lot in with the most reactionary forces in the US, who have already cracked down on press freedom – banning cameras from press briefings, assailing the mainstream media as “fake news” at every opportunity, describing journalists as virtual enemies of the republic, with one journalist rounded up alongside a group of alleged rioters at the inauguration now slapped with a felony indictment. Nor has Team Trump felt obliged to pay back Assange any favours, with Trump’s director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, announcing in April that WikiLeaks would now be treated as a nonstate intelligence service hostile to US interests, along with renewed rumblings from the Department of Justice that a federal prosecution of Assange would be a top priority. Trump has remained silent about WikiLeaks itself after his earlier lovefest but he has thundered against unauthorized disclosures as a security threat, even accusing James Comey, the former FBI director whom he controversially dismissed, of being a “leaker”.
Following WikiLeaks’s decision in 2009 to publish hacked emails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (a move that pleased climate-science deniers, or “sceptics” as they call themselves), Assange justified the move in revealing terms: “What we want people to do is fight with the truth. If people shoot truth at each other, then after the bodies are cleared away all that remains are the bullets of truth and the historical record, then we can get somewhere”. What this misses is that truth is usually the first thing to perish in such combat, always a plaything of political power – not vice versa, as Assange seems to believe.
Leaking political information will never be neutral in the way that publishing research in the Journal of Organic Chemistry is. Leaks inevitably carry a political edge moving along a political vector. And Assange, despite his precocious hacking skills – he was first arrested at the age of fourteen for breaking into an Australian telecom company’s system – never seems to have possessed any political vision or judgement beyond the most naive proceduralism, devoid of any sense of how power really works.
Despite Assange’s confinement over the past five years, Poitras’s film is anything but claustrophobic, zipping around frenetically with establishing shots locating us in London, Norfolk, Cairo, Tunis, Berlin, Washington and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning was confined.And Risk has no shortage of true-life operatic contrivances: Assange dying his hair red and putting in coloured contact lenses to flee incognito on a motorcycle to the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge, Lady Gaga dressed like the Wicked Witch of the West lounging at the embassy and interviewing him inanely. (“What’s your favourite kind of food?” “Do you ever feel like fucking crying?”)
One wishes there were more time to ruminate on larger themes. The major theme of manipulative sexism and misogyny does get full treatment, not only from its close-up on Assange. Jacob Appelbaum, a former WikiLeaks technologist and journalist, is featured throughout: dressing down Egyptian telecom executives for acquiescing to the Mubarak regime’s orders to shut down various websites and training Tunisian activists in how to use Tor, a platform for purportedly hack-proof communication. It was abruptly announced in June 2016 that Appelbaum had left the Tor project after a series of allegations of sexual bullying and misconduct. No criminal charges were brought against him – so much awful behaviour does not meet criminal standards – but the manipulativeness of both Assange and Appelbaum stands in for ongoing sexism in the tech industry in general.
Alas, Poitras does not have time in this too-short film to ruminate on the true roles of secrecy and technology in political life. How important, really, was the choice of communication medium in the now-long-ago Arab Spring – and was it the lack of secure networks that allowed the Egyptian junta to sweep away the elected Muslim Brotherhood government? How much emancipatory power can new technology have when old political and social conflicts are inflamed? How much does it matter, as the journalist Yasha Levine has pointed out, that the Tor project is mostly funded by the US Department of Defense?
While secret information and new gadgets make for great MacGuffins in film and paperback thrillers, the real-life impact of intel and new tech is often perverse or hard to detect. Like a nerve cell firing away energetically into a weak or nonexistent muscle, revelations about (for instance) US foreign policy are of little consequence unless there is organized political force ready to make use of them. Knowledge is a much weaker catalyst than intellectuals often like to admit. When I attended the annual conference of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations last year, WikiLeaks revelations were in nearly every bibliography dealing with the recent past – yet no one expected any major changes in US foreign policy. As one depressed-seeming younger scholar of US relations with Saudi Arabia told his fellow panellists: “the more I know, the less relevant I am”. You Might Also Like
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