Indecent Exposures

Snowden is a political film insofar as its sympathetic portrayal of the whistleblower coincided with the launch of a public campaign requesting President Obama pardon him. But as with so much of the mainstream discourse on surveillance, th+C71e film approaches the government’s abuses as an abstract debate. Stone has his characters tally the pros and cons of trading security for liberty—all the while ignoring the thousands of Americans subject to state monitoring long before Snowden’s revelations. His Hollywood retelling of the Snowden saga ends up depicting surveillance as little more than an inconvenience that might threaten our sex lives. But insofar as Stone’s errors exemplify what we fail to talk about when we talk about surveillance, they are instructive.