“SNOWDEN”: The Darkness Gathers[1]
The perspective I bring to this “review” requires a particular discipline. I view the movie as an art form and a dream. It is self-styled as a biographical political thriller based on real events:
The film follows Edward Snowden, an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency to The Guardian in June 2013. Among other things, the classified information revealed extensive illegal cyber-snooping on millions of unsuspecting American citizens, which was unknown to even Congress at the time. (Wikipedia)
For me, cultural phenomena such as movies can open up to those “background” or psychic movements that are shaping all of our cultural productions in the first place. These implicit movements are most often unknown to the artist who considers only his or her conscious intentions (exceptions include the kind of art that “allows” accidents). By reading a movie, or art piece, or political event, as dream texts, we can get hints of the implicit background movements reflected in those texts, and thus give voice to them, or shape them, as a way of welcoming the unknown future. I therefore approach movies or other cultural phenomena as dreams, presented in the garb of familiar imagery, and at the same time bearing hints of an unknown future implicit in unexpected dream details that may appear within the familiar imagery.
And so I was most unexpectedly struck by the movie’s presentation of human beings in the world of the CIA-driven cyber war. They were shown as no longer being human, in the way we once understood “human”. They were, for example, able to direct drone attacks from across the world, safe at their computer terminals, and to initiate the most horrific destruction on other human beings. The mood in the “game” room after a successful attack was one of jubilance, as one might feel during a video game. Their victims were not regarded as human beings who suffer. Real human beings have become images on a screen that go satisfyingly “poof” suddenly, and quietly. While the real human victims in the Middle East undoubtedly live in a sustained mood of sheer terror, never knowing when or where the next attack would come, our intrepid computer hacks laughed, slapped one another’s backs and then went to enjoy some pizza.
Yet, as the movie unfolded, a much darker mood began to prevail at CIA headquarters. We followed the protagonist, Snowden, as he uncovered this darkness, little by little. I began to sense the fearful darkness, along with Snowden, threatening to swallow him up completely. The darkness began to reveal itself when Snowden, still being guided by ordinary ethics, resisted its seductions. In one scene he was ordered to entrap a man who the CIA wanted to exploit and he refused to do so. He was protected from immediate recrimination only by his mentor who recognized his talents and simply wanted to exploit him further, taking Snowden ever more deeply into the darkness.
The mood of this darkness is also one of sheer terror, leading to cover ups, subterfuge, covert operations, and secrecy.
Two kinds of terror are operating in the world! On the empirical level, human beings are subject to sudden and deadly attacks from drones and missiles seemingly operating themselves with no human aspect to them, no human caring. And another form of terror, operating at the level of the mind, is in play—appearing as the rhetoric of paranoid ideas, or ideology and threatening to take over the minds of human beings.[2] Many succumb and surrender to this terror, going along with its movements, enjoying material comforts, and treating other human beings in an inhuman manner, having become inhuman themselves. Snowden felt this danger as a loss of love—the love of his girlfriend. He resisted as long as he could and then he leaped—the kind of leap that existentialism knows. Snowden caught a glimpse of an entire world as his anxiety and despair rose to a peak. This world of the Cyber-Military Complex rose up before him and he could no longer function within it. He abandoned it and leaped. He copied top-secret documents and released them to the public, affording the general public a glimpse of this dark paranoid world and at the same time he entered a new world of the wandering homeless.
What does this terrifying world reveal to us from within its appearances (CIA, terrorism, etc.)? The American public have learned that privacy is a thing of the past, that ordinary citizens are surveilled as a matter of course, their private lives now being a matter of public scrutiny. WikiLeaks is performing the same function today by releasing governmental documents that normally do not see the light of day. The institutional reaction is as harsh as it was for Snowden, with calls for Assange’s arrest or even assassination from top Governmental figures. And the stability of an entire culture is now threatened. This is the dark world that Snowden discovered! As the movie script says, the next World War Three is taking place in cyberspace. We were shown instances of the USA hacking into foreign infrastructures, for example, so that entire cities could be shut down.
In regarding this movie as a dream, I do not ask whether any of the “dream facts” are empirically true or simply good fiction. There is a truth lying within the presentation of this art form and we must stay faithful to the imagery to get hints of this truth. The most striking “dream fact” is that of an entire world under threat, the dark world that Snowden discovered. All the efforts of the CIA operatives spring from a terror that this world is going under. The “government” wants to preserve the status quo while threats to its stability multiply (hacking, terrorism, infiltration, spies, etc.) and it is doing so by becoming more and more like the adversary (engaging in the above activities for example), and so hastening the “end”.
And note well! This current terror’s field of play is now the “mind”, concretized as cyber-space. WW III is a war of the mind! So we must now turn to the “mind” or the psychic background to the appearances in order to gain some hints of the unknown future.
The stability of an entire way of being, culminating in our modern institutions, has rested on a logical foundation that has now shifted or transformed. Appearances have been stable as long as public persona and private reality are kept apart. In its most fundamental logical form, we could say that as long as inner and outer remain disjunctive, our society can remain stable.[3] This logical disjunction has now collapsed and the world that is based on their disjunction is wobbling into chaos. We can see this happening in the recent Presidential election where the most intimate details of human lives are wrenched up into the public sphere. No one knows what to do because a stable world is collapsing. The hidden background that supports all appearances no longer supports the current appearances, i.e. the way things appear in the world. And we are falling into chaos.
Institutions like the Cyber-Military Complex constitute a powerful attempt to maintain the old binary of inner/outer as disjunction, by an ever-increasing paranoid structure, becoming more and more secretive and murderous. But this disjunction is no longer supported by reality. A new reality seems to be looming up behind the paranoia—one that is still to be languaged but it seems that the appearances will be transformed from the present ones to some future form in the following way: today we conceive of the things as being surface only having no depth of meaning beyond that surface (what you see is what you get—signature of the paranoid structure). In our present world we can only conceive of reality in terms of finite things physically positioned in an infinite depth of positivized space. In other words, the surface of things and infinite depth are disjunctive (another way of saying the inner/outer disjunction).
This disjunction is now collapsing and (to make a long story short) the new appearances will be such that the things will each have their own (negative) depth (of meaning). The outer object will also become a window to infinite depths of being. As Heidegger teaches us:
The relation of human beings to language is undergoing a transformation, the consequences of which we’re not yet ready to face. … it is going on in the profoundest silence. Evidently, we have to state, that language in everyday life appears as a vehicle for understanding and will be used as such a vehicle but there are other relations to language than the common ones. Goethe calls these other relations the “deeper” ones and says of language: “In normal life we make language work in a provisional way, because we signify just superficial relations. As soon as we speak of deeper relationships, There comes up suddenly another language, that of the poetical.”
[1] Oliver Stone, Dir: 2016
[2] See my book, The Peril of Thinking for an examination of this process. Available at Amazon.
[3] There are many inflections of this fundamental binary: fact/fiction; spirit/matter; secular/sacred; mind/body; self/other; public/private—all in the logical form of a disjunction that is now collapsing.
