‘I plead guilty to journalism’, says the six billion dollar man
Daniel Nelson
If you think you know as much as you need about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, The Six Billion Dollar Man will prove you wrong. If you know nothing, it will inform and entertain you.
It’s a blistering, well-researched documentary driven by weird, awful and inspirational characters, spy camera footage, newsreels and revelatory documents.
It’s also a dramatic insight into journalism in the Internet age, and a love story.
The film covers a tempestuous 14 years, from WikiLeaks’ shocking visual exposure of US torture and murder in Iraq (“a window into the reality of war”), through the retaliatory hounding by the US government (“The US Government will follow me to the ends of the Earth and make my life hell”), allegations of sexual assault by Assange in Sweden, seven years’ refuge and surveillance in the Ecuadorisn embassy in the UK, a $6 billion Ecuador-US deal to seize and send him to the US, detention in Britain’s Strangeways prison, fatherhood and marriage, and an Australian-US political arrangement to allow him safe return to his homeland.
There are great quotes from a variety of talking heads, and director Eugene Jarecki never lets the speed drop. But it’s the videos, some previously unseen, from Assange’s incarceration in the Ecuadorian embassy that steal the show: haunting, fascinating evidence as an extraordinary moment in history plays out.
It’s an extraordinary story, dramatically told “It’s not really Julian Assange that’s on trial here. It’s the proposition that telling the truth is a crime.” It’s the positive version of Assange, of course. The version that pits him as a brilliant David against a reactionary Goliath (“The killers, the bullies, the thieves…”), an Internet-age journalist against secretive, ruthless governments (“It’s the most important human rights case in the world”).
As director Eugene Jarecki has said: “This is not a film about activism or martyrdom. It’s about what happens when someone threatens the centres of global power. Like him personally or not, that’s what Assange did.”
Despite the controversy over Assange and WikiLeaks all he and it have ever done is publish the truth, inconvenient though it may be to many. Most of those who criticise him, want to stop him, sometimes torture him, are wrongdoers, hiding the truth. The film is on the side of Assange and openness (“I plead guilty to journalism’), and so am I.