Being Julian Assange

A curious juxtaposition between an oddball megalomaniac and a difficult piece of cinema got me thinking about character and the impossibility of separating it from what you do with your life.  My thoughts on Julian Assange and Synecdoche, New York. 

If you haven't yet read Andrew O'Hagan's piece on ghost-writing Julian Assange's aborted autobiography in the London Review of Books, I urge you to give it a go. And if you haven't yet braved – an apt word - Charlie Kaufman's directing debut, Synecdoche, New York, I recommend that you watch it immediately after reading the Assange piece. Whilst the latter will remain difficult – and will certainly demand a second, a third, or even a fourth viewing – it will stay with you, haunting your working day. Not least because of its preoccupations with death and the recent fatal overdose of its star Philip Seymour Hoffman, but also because of O'Hagan's portrayal of his time spent attempting to ghost Assange's autobiography, a man, who like Caden Cotard in Kaufman's film, feels it is possible to exert some form of control over legions of people in the service of what seems to be a higher ideal. 

Even before reading O'Hagan's story, I'd had Assange pegged as an ego-fuelled hypocrite, creepily narcissistic, and totally detached from any moral agenda or high-mindedness that might have set the Wikileaks project in motion. After reading though, my jaw was on the floor. This man, who had garnered much support – most of which seems to have fallen by the wayside, or rather been alienated by Assange's behaviour and personality - comes across as an absolute monster. Even with O'Hagan refusing to reveal the finer details in order to try and 'protect' Assange, it is still startling. O'Hagan talks of transcripts still existing 'in which he'd uttered … many casual libels, many sexist or anti-Semitic remarks, and where he spoke freely about every aspect of his life. There was little security consciousness at work in those interviews, and I calmed them down when preparing the manuscript and removed things that were said in the heat of the moment or that were too much or too jocular or just banter .… I have those tapes still and they can be shocking.'  

Despite the repugnant personality traits of its subject, O'Hagan's story is riveting on other levels. Indeed, it is Assange's arrogant single-mindedness and his inability to see others as individuals or the key-stakeholders in their own existence that I found most fascinating. On the people who initially stood by him, and the people, such as O'Hagan, who were still listening and sympathetic (let's not forget, this purports to be no hatchet job, and O'Hagan still maintains a kind of apologetic ambivalence):  

Julian Assange

'When he was working with those fellows from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, he allowed himself to forget that they were journalists with decades of experience and their own fund of beliefs. To him they were just conduits and possible disciples: he is still reeling, even today, from the shock that they were their own men and women. My discussions with him would go on, in private, long after the idea of ‘collaboration’ was over. But he consistently forgot that I am foremost a writer and an independent person. Julian is an actor who believes all the lines in the play are there to feed his lines; that none of the other lives is substantial in itself.'

Journalists, writers and sureties are not pawns to be shuttled around a chess board, serving and defending a largely immobile white King (an analogy too delicious to ignore). They demand their own autonomy. They will not be controlled, even if at first they appear to be or are onside. Assange, seeing himself as the director and star of his own play, clearly thinks otherwise.     

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York

Which brings me on to Synecdoche, New York. Whilst watching this film, the expressions 'trying to nail jelly to a wall' or 'as futile as herding cats' spring to mind. But then why would you nail jelly to a wall, or go herding cats anyway? Better just switch on and let the film wash surreally over you and save sense-making for afterwards. Although, if you do insist on a loose synopsis, it's the story of theatre director Caden Cotard, who after being giving an art grant decides to use the money to produce an incredibly ambitious play that serves as an analogue to his own life. Building actual city sized sets amid a New York warehouse, he casts others as his friends and family, and then casts others to play the ones he's casting. Trust me though, that won't help much, certainly on a first viewing.  Roger Ebert, the late film critic, adored it, but even he needed to watch it quite a few times. And in attempting to pin down the essence, an essence which perhaps states that life cannot be pinned down in order to distil any essence, Ebert writes:

'Synecdoche, New York is not a film about the theatre, although it looks like one. A theatre director is an ideal character for representing the role Kaufman thinks we all play. The magnificent sets, which stack independent rooms on top of one another, are the compartments we assign to our life's enterprises. The actors are the people in roles we cast from our point of view. Some of them play doubles assigned to do what there's not world enough and time for. They have a way of acting independently, in violation of instructions. They try to control their own projections. Meanwhile, the source of all this activity grows older and tired, sick and despairing.'

It's here that the connection with Assange began to beat me over the head. Not just because other people 'have a way of acting independently, in violation of instructions' – always Assange's biggest bugbear - but also in that magnificent set – a theatre the size of New York, compressed into a large warehouse, an unreal representation that attempts to bears all the hallmarks of the real. Rather like Assange's twilight hacking existence? Again, O'Hagan fleshes out Assange's preoccupations: 'In our overnight conversations, he told me about the mind-set of the expert hacker. He described how, as a teenager, he'd wandered through the virtual corridors of Nasa, Bank of America, the Melbourne transport system or the Pentagon.'  Caden, escaping from his own reality, into a non-reality that becomes just as unbearable and hated as what he's left behind? Is this too what fuels the hacker narcissist?  '[Assange] hates systems of belief, hates all systems, wants indeed to be a ghost in the machine, walking through the corridors of power and switching off the lights …. "When you're a hacker you're interested in masks within masks." Or perhaps, to put it another way, Assange or Cottard are just not interested in reality at all. The wish to escape into their own worlds – either an easier to control facsimile of reality, or a blue-light virtual existence that exposes reality -  worlds that on the surface appear to be their occupier's ideal environments, but ones which ultimately explode and are even harder to control than what went before.   

In a reaction to the O'Hagan piece, and in defending Assange, Colin Robinson, author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, a collaboration with the Wikileaks founder that did actually get published, says that 'I don't know much about what he is like as a person but I am acutely aware of his achievements, which seem to me to be both substantial and generally on the side of justice.'  Notwithstanding that Robinson is working on another book with Assange and therefore may be compromised, is he right to actually forgo any kind of character assessment in reaching a conclusion on the man? Of course not. We cannot simply remove character from a person's deeds, no matter how worthy or independent the larger message. Assange's flaws simply undermine what he is trying to achieve. Analogously, Cottard cannot direct and be part of his own play without consequences. They are too intertwined. He cannot merely be a character – the one that he would love to see himself as, happily married, healthy, and a successful artist. His actual character traits will defeat that, and even if they don't the people who come into contact with him certainly will.