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By trying to stop the government’s digital bots from taking over our lives, Mr. Assange would seem to be fighting on behalf of all mankind. He is Tom Cruise in “Minority Report,” Harrison Ford in “Blade Runner” and Matt Damon in “Elysium.” But Mr. Assange also echoes a less modern cinematic type, the lone wolves of paranoid ‘70s cinema. As a man on the run, he brings to mind the C.I.A. analyst Robert Redford played in “3 Days of the Condor” or the reeling Dustin Hoffman being chased through “Marathon Man.” You can go even further back and find an analogue in Frank Sinatra in “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Then again, Mr. Assange is fond of saying he will crush an opponent “like a bug.” Through that prism, he is closer to a Bond villain — stateless, vaguely Euro-ish, with stunt hair and a remarkably cool demeanor.
But to understand the appeal of a character like Mr. Assange in the current cultural context, the small screen might be a better place to look. He is an outlaw who lives by his own code, as was Tony Soprano, but his closest counterpart is probably Carrie Mathison, the C.I.A. operative on “Homeland,” skilled and omniscient but with a messianic zeal that tends to create a great deal of collateral damage.
Jasin Boland/Universal Studios
As a character, Mr. Assange contains traits of past screen figures who’ve worked outside the norm, like Matt Damon as Jason Bourne in “The Bourne Supremacy.”
On the big screen, the two movies cast Mr. Assange as a tragic and self-seeking figure, a leader of a cause that conflated his personal interests and the movement’s. Perhaps no one could shoulder the scrutiny that Mr. Assange has lived through, but he does not play the game of making nice with the media.
As I have written before , I once had lunch with Mr. Assange in the English countryside, and while he was enormously gracious, fun even, in showing me and my family around the farm where he was under house arrest, he was also reflexively provocative, somewhat hilariously insulting me and the place I work for.
In Mr. Assange’s paranoid worldview, large, multinational financial interests have had a secret handshake with governments, principally that of the United States, and have together prosecuted a war on privacy, freedom and economic fairness. The reason that paranoia is so appealing? He turned out to be mostly right.
Paramount Pictures
Robert Redford in »Three Days of the Condor.»
Every time you open up a news site, the government seems to get its hands farther and farther up your skirt. In that sense, we are not just the audience in these movies; we are part of a target-rich environment, and so we root Mr. Assange on in spite of his shortcomings.
Mr. Assange has made it clear that he hates both films, which comes as no surprise from a man who sees agendas and lies everywhere he looks. Mr. Gibney’s film may be a work of journalism, but its rise-and-fall narrative did not sit well with its subject.
WikiLeaks put out an annotation of a partial script that takes issue with practically everything in the film, beginning with the title, which is described as “irresponsible libel.” The memo adds, “Not even critics in the film say that WikiLeaks steals secrets.” Mr. Gibney is accused of selective editing, underappreciating the historic nature of the organization’s work and rendering Chelsea Manning (previously known as Pfc. Bradley Manning) as a caricature, among many, many other complaints.
Mr. Gibney, who has gone after many of the same targets that WikiLeaks has taken on, found himself dealing with incoming from its allies in the press and elsewhere. Chris Hedges, a former reporter for The New York Times who now blogs at TruthDig.com , accused him of making a work of “ agitprop for the security and surveillance state ,” intended to marginalize WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange. Mr. Gibney said he followed the facts and told the story they revealed, nothing more.
“The degree of vitriol has been amazing,” Mr. Gibney said. “He is a remarkable figure, narcissistic in the extreme and, as they say, beautiful from afar, but far from beautiful.”
Predictably, a work of drama purporting to depict real events has already picked up a great deal of withering reaction from Mr. Assange and his supporters.
In a quotation sent by a WikiLeaks staff member — Mr. Assange is, as behooves a star of his magnitude, surrounded by layers and difficult to access — he suggested that “The Fifth Estate,” apart from being wrong about himself and WikiLeaks, is doomed commercially.
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“Most people love our work and its ongoing David versus Goliath struggle,” he said. “These people form the backbone of the WikiLeaks cinema market. But rather than cater to this market, DreamWorks decided to cater to other interests. The result is a reactionary snoozefest that only the U.S. government could love. As a result the film has no audience and no promotion community. It will flop at the box office and deservedly so.”
In an e-mail, Kristinn Hrafnsson, a WikiLeaks spokesman, said, “I don’t recognize the Julian in these films, nor the fundamental essence of what we are doing.”
In a phone call, Mr. Condon made it clear he was proud of his film. A narrative feature requires license to pack vast amounts of history into a commercially viable length, and Mr. Condon said the film is true to its subject, including its depiction of his alleged hypocrisy around organizational information and WikiLeaks.
Kent Smith/Showtime
Claire Danes plays a character in “Homeland” with similarities to Mr. Assange.
“For a public figure, he is one of the most thin-skinned subjects I have ever seen,” Mr. Condon said. “He believes and advocates for transparency, except where he is concerned. He doesn’t realize it, but he has become the consummate tragic hero who sowed the seeds of his own demise.”
The chronic, multifront war is a fact of life at the off-screen version of WikiLeaks. Even people at odds with Mr. Assange don’t deny him his place in history.
“Julian was able to pull together the biggest news organizations on earth and get them to cooperate around a single leak, holding the story for three weeks,” said James Ball, a former WikiLeaks associate who now works at The Guardian. “That is an amazing feat.”
That Mr. Assange ended up in a dispute with Mr. Ball, his media partners and just about everyone else around him adds to the myth. What is he against? Whatever comes his way.
“Most people avoid confrontation, but Julian escalates every single time,” Mr. Ball said. “He has the guts, the arrogance and the insanity to take everyone on. I think part of the reason that there is so much interest in WikiLeaks is that people respond to that.”
Many of the great public debates show up in the movie house, so it should not be surprising to see a simulacrum of Mr. Assange on the big screen. And it’s even less surprising that the nature of what is on the screen is the beginning of yet another debate. History, in this instance, refuses to sit still. The first draft is a Web document, subject to endless annotation.
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“Most people love our work and its ongoing David versus Goliath struggle,” he said. “These people form the backbone of the WikiLeaks cinema market. But rather than cater to this market, DreamWorks decided to cater to other interests. The result is a reactionary snoozefest that only the U.S. government could love. As a result the film has no audience and no promotion community. It will flop at the box office and deservedly so.”
In an e-mail, Kristinn Hrafnsson, a WikiLeaks spokesman, said, “I don’t recognize the Julian in these films, nor the fundamental essence of what we are doing.”
In a phone call, Mr. Condon made it clear he was proud of his film. A narrative feature requires license to pack vast amounts of history into a commercially viable length, and Mr. Condon said the film is true to its subject, including its depiction of his alleged hypocrisy around organizational information and WikiLeaks.
Kent Smith/Showtime
Claire Danes plays a character in “Homeland” with similarities to Mr. Assange.
“For a public figure, he is one of the most thin-skinned subjects I have ever seen,” Mr. Condon said. “He believes and advocates for transparency, except where he is concerned. He doesn’t realize it, but he has become the consummate tragic hero who sowed the seeds of his own demise.”
The chronic, multifront war is a fact of life at the off-screen version of WikiLeaks. Even people at odds with Mr. Assange don’t deny him his place in history.
“Julian was able to pull together the biggest news organizations on earth and get them to cooperate around a single leak, holding the story for three weeks,” said James Ball, a former WikiLeaks associate who now works at The Guardian. “That is an amazing feat.”
That Mr. Assange ended up in a dispute with Mr. Ball, his media partners and just about everyone else around him adds to the myth. What is he against? Whatever comes his way.
“Most people avoid confrontation, but Julian escalates every single time,” Mr. Ball said. “He has the guts, the arrogance and the insanity to take everyone on. I think part of the reason that there is so much interest in WikiLeaks is that people respond to that.”
Many of the great public debates show up in the movie house, so it should not be surprising to see a simulacrum of Mr. Assange on the big screen. And it’s even less surprising that the nature of what is on the screen is the beginning of yet another debate. History, in this instance, refuses to sit still. The first draft is a Web document, subject to endless annotation.
«En la paranoica vision del mundo del Sr. Assange, los grandes
jugadores de las finanzas trasnacionales han acordado con algunos gobiernos
-principalmente con el de los Estados Unidos- para llevar adelante, de
manera conjunta, una guerra sobre la privacidad, la libertad, y la
justicia social. ¿Por qué su paranoia es tan sugestiva? Porque resultó
ser que tuvo en casi todo razón.»