Snowden vs. 'Snowden': Oliver Stone’s American Hero, and the Real Guy Who Told Us Things We Didn’t Want to Know

Edward Snowden is an individual with a personal story that is extraordinary in many ways and unexceptional in others, a combination captured well in Oliver Stone’s movie “Snowden.” But Snowden’s individuality was in danger of disappearing behind his symbolic importance even before he spent months holed up in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport as a stateless international fugitive, an event barely referenced in Stone’s movie. As a symbol, Snowden and his deeds — exposing the massive data collection and surveillance programs carried out worldwide by the CIA, the NSA and other intelligence agencies — mean too many things to too many people. Snowden is where the libertarian right and the anarchist left overlap. More important still, Snowden exposes the hypocrisy behind both mainstream conservatism and mainstream liberalism, whose leading representatives have demanded he be punished as a spy or a traitor.

Everyone tries to force Snowden and his story into a narrative that conforms to their view of the world; inescapably, I’m perpetrating my own version of that right now. Philosophers and psychologists may wish to point out that we all do that, all the time, about everything we perceive. Fair point. But this problem, sometimes described in social science as “confirmation bias” — meaning that we are strongly disposed to pay more attention to evidence that supports our existing views — is especially severe when it comes to politics, where it gets doubled in the hyper-partisan and hyper-stupid atmosphere of American politics, and then gets redoubled once we come to the ambiguous case of Ed Snowden.

So perhaps it is because I believe that the political traditions typically described as “liberal” and “conservative” have long since surrendered to idiocy that I think the Snowden case reveals their fundamental incoherence. Conservatives often accuse liberals of being overreliant on the state and deferring to bureaucracy, regulation and centralized power at every opportunity. Snowden’s revelations of the vast scope of government spying, under a Democratic president who had vowed to run the most transparent and most whistleblower-friendly administration in history, suggests that the right-wingers have a point. Liberals, on the other hand, accuse conservatives of being jingoistic authoritarians who talk about “freedom” but in practice favor endless war abroad and a police-state clampdown at home. Given all the right-wing talk-show hosts who called for Snowden to be drawn and quartered in public for revealing an extensive pattern of blatantly unconstitutional government overreach, it would seem that the left has a point too.

Oliver Stone can’t help trying to jam the real life of Edward Snowden into his personal narrative template, the same one Stone has followed since “Salvador” and “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July” — a tale of American heroism at first misguided and then redirected, a tale of masculine sin and masculine redemption. While the movie (written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald) is a compelling adventure, one of the better efforts of the director’s later career, I can only wish Stone’s underlying narrative structure were more varied or more interesting. Some people might suggest that a self-professed computer geek like Snowden, who flunked out of Army Special Forces training — because his spindly frame literally couldn’t take it — makes a strange avatar of American masculinity, but that’s not my point.

As portrayed by the method-actor mannerisms of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (highly effective in this case, playing a man whose friends described him as awkward and robotic), the Snowden of “Snowden” moves from post-9/11 George W. Bush patriotism to Barack Obama center-left idealism to the unexplored territory on the other side of disillusionment. That may be correct in some general way, or at least not completely unfair. But I’m pretty sure it leaves out the more complex undercurrents of Ed Snowden’s ideological odyssey: He had been interested in libertarian ideas long before he ever worked in intelligence, for example, and donated to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2008. That straightforward right-to-left trajectory has more to do, I suspect, with a young man from Long Island named Oliver Stone who went to Vietnam as a rah-rah Republican and came home with his faith in America shattered.

Although “Snowden” offers an exciting story of intrigue, along with a useful introduction to the alarming things Snowden learned about government spying — yes, they really can use the webcam on your laptop to watch you get undressed — you will certainly learn more about who Edward Snowden is, and why he did what he did, from Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary “Citizenfour.” I found the areas of overlap between that film and “Snowden” somewhat disorienting, as in the scenes in a Hong Kong hotel room where Snowden first meets Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), who then worked for the Guardian, and shortly before that had been a columnist for Salon. (That may be personal: I know both Greenwald and Poitras, and while Leo is playing a more generic “documentary filmmaker” character, Quinto’s impersonation of Greenwald is eerily accurate.)