I swear I’m not a bad liberal. I support gay marriage and universal
health care—hell, I’ve donated to the Obama campaign on a regular
basis since early 2007. Secrecy, a documentary about the United
States government’s proclivities toward confidentiality, is the very
definition of good old-fashioned liberal informational oat bran: It’s
good for you and packed with all kinds of healthy factoids. Too bad
it’s so fucking boring. All kinds of experts give testimony on
terrible things the government does, like detain people in
Guantánamo Bay or spy on civilians. Just about everyone in
Seattle knows these are terrible things. But an hour and a half of
wall-to-wall talking heads is way too much to swallow in one
sitting.
Peter Galison and Robb Moss try to cut things up a little as the
experts drone on about civil liberties: There is some abstract
animation involving snakes and ghostly shapes and… more ghostly
shapes. There are lots of clips of pieces of paper falling into a void.
These visual tricks only distract from the monotonous chatter about law
and history and some other stuff that I’m sure I missed.
You wish the filmmakers would realize that there’s a perfect,
preexisting technology for transmitting this kind of information-dense
material; using this technology, interested parties can work through
the material at their own speed and go back through parts they maybe
didn’t initially absorb with maximum efficiency. It’s called a
book, and there are quite a few good ones—including a
recent one titled The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight
over Presidential Power—on this subject already. Good
liberals are advised to skip the movie and buy the book instead. 