I’ve just watched CitizenFour for the first time, and one
thing I know for sure is that Laura Poitras deserved her Academy Award—she has
done nothing short of turning The Truman
Show on its head.
I.e., she has cast Edward Snowden as
himself, the ultimate whistleblower –or was it Snowden who actually cast her as Laura Poitras, muckraking
filmmaker? Or both? Every minute that he is onscreen has a surreal intensity, as
we realize that we are watching history as it was made 2 years ago. Poitras and
Snowden, by turning the camera on themselves, have simultaneously turned the
camera around on Big Brother…and on all of us. The little guy with ingenuity can
indeed change the spin of our world.
In an era in which mind-numbing,
moronic reality tv scores high ratings by appealing to the lowest denominator
of human schadenfreude, stupidity, and peeping-tomism, here we have a
documentary which makes us look in the mirror and ask if we have really taken
the time to determine what is right and what is wrong, about one of the most
difficult and most crucial moral issues of our time.
So this really is “must see” reality
television—or rather, surreality television—because it’s not just The Snowden
Show—Snowden was very careful NOT to encourage a cult of personality or
demonization to form around him as a person--the whole point of his lonely
Quixotic crusade—and I think he succeeded --- was to bring home to all of us,
dozing on sofas with remotes glued to our hands, that we are the “show”, but
there is only one viewer of our collective Truman Show, and it is Big Brother
(or Big Blue). Those are “ratings” we don’t want!
Beyond that, I don’t want to say
anything else about the film, as it deserves to be watched, and no synopsis by
myself can capture the experience of watching it. I will only add a “woo woo”
personal note re the way I came to watch CitizenFour
today. At 12:30 PST I turned on the TV to watch tennis at the Madrid Open, but
was bored by the match on air, and by the other live TV offerings, so I turned
instead to my cable provider for a movie to watch from among those I had
identified just the other day as available. The only one that was free to watch
at that moment was… CitizenFour, and so it was that random sequence that
led me to turn it on and start watching.
After watching for more than an
hour, surprised at how spellbound I was, I went to Twitter to check out the
Twitter feed from Glenn Greenwald (the reporter whom Snowden first contacted,
who is another “star” in the film), and what did I see? His Tweet, sent after I began watching the
film, which read: “James Clapper lied and denied the existence of a program
which a US appeals court said was illegal. Anyone arguing he should keep his
job?”
Illegal? I quickly learned what
those following the news cycle more closely than I, already knew—which is that
today turned out to be another milestone in the process that Snowden set in
motion 2 years ago.
What made me watch CitizenFour at the very moment that the US appeals court
decision was being handed down? Was I the proverbial 100th monkey? I
can’t say, but I am glad I finally took my head out of the sand, and decided it
was time to start watching myself being watched. If I induce a few of you to do
the same, then I’ll be glad. If Shakespeare and Jane Austen were alive today, perhaps
they would make something more of the deep absurdity of this spectacle. But while
we’re waiting for them to return, see CitizenFour.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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