Life Beyond Fictions
——Film Review for Citizen Four
Written by Bunker
This movie presented a good example on how to transform a documentary into a dystopia sci-fi. Not only did it reminded us that those future world that merely exists in our imaginations have already become true unnoticeably, but it also pointed out that out of all those future speculated by science fiction writers, we might pick up the most dystopian one, with “Big brother is watching you.” written all over it.
Taking 1984 as comparison directly of making doomsday anouncement maybe too much to be real, since even the end draws near, there may not be any suffering and pain, instead, people will die in their sweet dreams. Still, the delicate posibility hinted in thie documentary is quite a shock. Once more, it revealed an obvious yet dim fact——reality can often get less possible and less logical than literature.
There are many incidents that can make you ask “how could this happen?” or “that’s goes even beyond fictions”. My own life experience is a vivid proof of such. Have a walk, and you will realize that every people you witness have their own storyline, each presenting a different yet meaningful plot. What is fascinating is that these stories didn’t stand alone. Instead, they tangle themselves with other stories, constructing a extremely complicated union, whose content is far deeper, far more complex and far more brilliant than any literary work ever.
Maybe the only difference between these real-life stories and made-up ones lies in that most of them don’t have a specific theme. People don’t live for themes or concepts. They live for life, live for something more complex than life. They persue, they give up, they let themselves drift with the current, but no matter how corrupt they become, they will never live as tags of concepts. That’s why a life can go beyond fiction. A fiction has to express, which becomes a burden, restricting its subject, characters and plot. The stuff an author is trying to convey put every character he/she created in shackles, forcing them to follow what the author’s order. That’s why a fiction has protagonists and costars, peaks and troughs, as well as comedies and tragedies. As for life? Life never make such presumptions, so it has countless strings that no one can grasp. Therefore, they can only blame the absence of purpose for their failure after a long and hard sought.
Back to the movie, it’s astonishing that it filmed so much first-hand intel instead of gathering collections of second-hand guesses extracted from interviews. The film didn’t try to sacrifice the protagonist for their own attitude(which happened in the film The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz). Instead, it allowed Snowden to stand out, speaking directly to the audience, sharing his opinions directly with them. They simply didn’t need to perform——even with the most plain tongue, Snowden’s story is appealing enough.
Snowden also mentioned that the Internet was a fair place for anyone ‘at first’, but it seems that we can only wave goodbye to that golden age and face the music no matter we like it or not.
And that is what this movie is striking to me.
The exposed Prism Project is an undoubted booster for such degeneration, unnatural yet effective.
In this sense, whether Snowden achieved his initial goal this way remains a question.