<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Esquire.com will be filing regular dispatches and interviews from the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Read all our coverage here. The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off last night with the premiere of The Fifth Estate \u2014 aka The Assange Movie, aka Wikileaks: The Movie \u2014 trying to prove its importance in an increasingly competitive early fall, with the Venice and Telluride festivals happening slightly earlier. Where and when exactly each movie in the season opens is, of course, pure inside baseball, but the Toronto festival still represents a kind of moneyed and international spirit of inclusion that makes it the perfect place for The Fifth Estate to premiere. The Fifth Estate is the latest in a series of films \u2014 preceded by The Social Network and Jobs \u2014 to confront the Information Age and what kind of men it produces. In all of these movies, there is an inherent contradiction. The men at their centers produce great things. They generate &amp;quot;the future.&amp;quot; But they can only do so at the cost of being assholes. The question looms over the action: Is this a hero or a monster? The Fifth Estate offers what is probably the most illuminating and revealing answer given so far: Both and neither.  There are still many people who believe that Julian Assange is some kind of martyr. The man is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, under threat of extradition. He once claimed that he had never met the Swedish women whom he is alleged to have sexually assaulted, but then he did admit to sleeping with them. Assange continues to argue, naturally, that it&amp;#039;s all a conspiracy in retaliation for the disclosures of Wikileaks. Slavoj \u017Di\u017Eek, the once-great cultural critic, gives a fawning, old-school Marxist reading of the new breed of whistleblowers over at The Guardian this week , which includes Assange:  His acts provided a factual foundation to our suspicions of being monitored and controlled \u2013 their lesson is global, reaching far beyond the standard US-bashing. We didn&amp;#039;t really learn from Snowden (or Manning) anything we didn&amp;#039;t already presume to be true. But it is one thing to know it in general, another to get concrete data. It is a little like knowing that one&amp;#039;s sexual partner is playing around \u2013 one can accept the abstract knowledge, but pain arises when one gets the steamy details, pictures of what they were doing \u2026 This is exactly the kind of tenured professorial nonsense, steeped in Boomer philosophical anachronisms and phony revolutionary aesthetics, which inspires men like Assange. They desperately want to be seen as forces for social justice, exposing the structures of power, although they rarely prove more than that those power structures exist and are inhabited by flawed human beings. They really want power for themselves and not others. Our relationship to information, and the power that emanates from information, has never been more complex. The ethics of the whistleblowers is vastly too simplistic to deal with this new complexity.  The Fifth Estate has the problem of that moral oversimplification at its heart. Benedict Cumberbatch&amp;#039;s impersonation of Assange is pretty terrific in all the party-trick kinds of ways we&amp;#039;ve become used to in these biopics, but more than that, he manages to exude the spectrum-autism megalomania that so obviously motivates the character. Assange hates lies. He has set up the Wikileaks network to expose government lying. And yet he himself lies all the time, to journalists, to his colleagues, to himself. He claims a mission of public justice of the most serious nature, a mission that demands sacrifice, yet works himself into a fury when one of his co-Wikileakers is given slightly too much credit in a Wired profile. He despises intrusions into his own private life yet spends his time exposing other people&amp;#039;s. And so on. More important than these merely personal flaws is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the whole Wikileaks project: They insist on privacy for the individual and what they call transparency in government. But why should a random citizen be given no exposure when they go on the Internet, but classified documents \u2014 whose secrecy has been assured throughout the history of countries with freedom of speech \u2014 be utterly revealed? They are not journalists because all they do is reveal. They do not edit or redact. Which seems purer than journalism but is, in practice, simply indifferent to human suffering. Worse, their standards for what should be private and what should not have no rational basis. They are motivated entirely by a sense of who has power and who doesn&amp;#039;t. But democratic states exist to negotiate such relationships of power when they emerge. Assange, and \u017Di\u017Eek, too, apparently, have no interest in any actual negotiations. They have a much simpler idea: take the power away from the current power structures and put it in the hands of themselves. The Fifth Estate doesn&amp;#039;t shirk from showing what the consequences are: diplomatic chaos and extreme danger for American allies. Possible death for people who took principled stands against the Colonel Gaddafis of the world. There are of course no leakers in China or Russia. They&amp;#039;re just dead. They don&amp;#039;t get to ask to be called Chelsea.  After spending most of its time tearing down the legends that Wikileaks has dressed itself in, The Fifth Estate goes into a long airy piece of oratory about the glorious history of journalism, about how the free flow of information will take down tyranny around the world. (A poor week to offer such an argument, given the Syrian electronic army&amp;#039;s activities and the turmoil in Egypt.) But their broader point remains made: Assange is not a hero or a monster, really. He&amp;#039;s just pure will to power. His will to power coincided with a moment when technological opportunity gave clever men and women with no institutional connections the ability to inflate themselves to heroic status in their own minds. Assange is really a force of nature, like a tiger in the jungle. If you see him at a distance, glinting between the trees, he may look beautiful. Not if he&amp;#039;s in your village. TORONTO: Read Coverage Live from the Festival &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; PLUS: Read More Stephen Marche on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a24642/the-fifth-estate-toronto-review/>