Masked men: hacktivism, celebrity and anonymity

Abstract

In her 1991 article ‘Signs of Melodrama’ Christine Gledhill provocatively claimed that the Hollywood star system descended from the stage melodrama’s ‘drive to realise in personal terms social and ethical forces’. The disguise is a melodramatic convention, concealing the true personality revealed in the narrative, as the melodrama reveals hidden moral truths. Approaching contemporary celebrity through this dramatic mode, this article considers the unmasking of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden in three recent films, We Steal Secrets, The Fifth Estate and Citizenfour. In true melodramatic style, the films’ presentation of state violence and surveillance is rapidly displaced by moral studies of these three ‘hacktivists’. Drawing on melodrama and genre studies as a methodological approach to studying these films, I trace the mask back to Alan Moore’s anti-melodrama V for Vendetta. This article proposes celebrity studies would be well served by paying closer attention to the political efficacy of celebrity’s opposite: anonymity.

Keywords:

• anonymity
• Julian Assange
• individualism
• Chelsea Manning
• melodrama
• Edward Snowden

Notes

1. Note Elisabeth Anker’s observation in Orgies of Feeling that, at its post-revolutionary origin, melodrama ‘performed a spectacle-laden unmasking of class privilege and absolutist power that had, until that point, structured social relations’ (2014, p. 69; emphasis added).

2. Based on Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name, The Man Who Laughs (1928) is a romantic melodrama with horror overtones in the Phantom of the Opera (1925) mode. Alan Moore himself would contribute to the Batman series with his graphic novel for DC Comics, Batman: the Killing Joke (Moore and Bolland 1998). Its 1988 publication date corresponds to the period in which Moore was also writing V for Vendetta for DC Comics.

3. As well as the final two Twilight films (2011, 2012), Condon directed the 1998 film about horror director James Whale, Gods and Monsters (1998) and Kinsey (2004).

4. The ‘earth zoom’ is created by animating satellite photographs from different altitudes into a single shot.

5. This concept can be traced back to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. I use it in the sense advanced by Antonio Negri (undated) in ‘Approximations: Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude’: ‘unrepresentable singularities rather than individual proprietors’. As the slogan goes, ‘Anonymous is not unanimous’.

6. ‘The Jason Bourne-like aspects of his story – the cinematic international manhunt for the hero who says he only wants the truth to be known – alone are enthralling’ (Andrews et al. 2014).

7. Snowden’s grandfather was a rear admiral in the US Coastguard and many of his close relatives have served in the US military or the government.

8. Unhindered by the constitutional protection of US citizens from unlawful search and seizure, Britain’s ‘GCHQ has probably the most invasive network intercept programme anywhere in the world’, Snowden declares in Citizenfour.

9. This includes Poitras, whose previous two documentaries are character studies: My Country, My Country follows a Sunni doctor who attempts to run for public office in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq. The Oath is filmed inside the Yemeni taxi of a former Bin Laden bodyguard as he talks to his passengers.

10. Snowden faces three charges under the US Espionage Act, for which he would be tried by a judge without a jury and which could result in jail for 30 years or more. There is no ‘public interest’ defence. American pressure has prevented 21 European countries from offering him asylum (see MacAskill 2015).

11. In an interview with the online news service Democracy Now!, Laura Poitras says that she asked Snowden this question in Moscow and he replied ‘Well, I’m not the first person who’s going to come forward and reveal information that the public should know, and I won’t be the last’ (Democracy Now! 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mandy Merck

Mandy Merck is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her books include Perversions: Deviant Readings, In Your Face: Nine Sexual Studies and Hollywood’s American Tragedies. Her latest is the edited collection The British Monarchy on Screen, published by Manchester University Press in 2016. This article is part of a project provisionally titled ‘The Melodrama of Celebrity’ and supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship.