Liberalism in Balaclavas: The East

*Contains spoilers*

Last night, I went to see The East, a new film directed by Zat Batmanglij and co-written by and starring Brit Marling. The film follows Sarah, an investigator for an elite private intelligence firm which specialises in protecting American corporations from protestors and terrorists. Sarah is charged with infiltrating an eco-protest group called The East, which has been targeting the CEOs of companies responsible for causing pollution. As she spends more time with the group, she falls for the charismatic Benji (played by Alexander Skarsgard) and begins to empathise with their aims, although she is still shocked by their ethos of violent retaliation; eventually she is forced to choose between her employers and her ethics.

The story is very timely, chiming with the on-going revelations about police infiltration into direct action groups in the UK over the past couple of decades, not least the case of Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer who started affairs with women in environmental protest groups and eventually going to court to provide crucial evidence to defend members of the group he had infiltrated. The idea of an information war between protestors and corporations is also relevant, with the ongoing sagas of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden filling the newspapers. What’s interesting, though, is the way that the story borrows from The Edukators, a 2004 German film, whilst subtly inverting the film’s meaning, and cleaning it up for mass-market appeal.

The Edukators is a genuinely subversive film, in which a group of young anti-capitalists break into mansions, rearrange furniture and leave unsettling messages (‘Your days of plenty are numbered’, ‘the heart is a revolutionary cell’). During one raid which goes wrong, they kidnap a businessman. Over the next few days, they discuss their aims with him, and he comes to sympathise with them, revealing that he had been a revolutionary in the Seventies. Eventually, the businessman shields the group from the police, facilitating their escape to Spain.

Like The Edukators, The East target their enemies in their own homes – the opening credits show masked activists breaking into a CEO’s mansion as revenge for an oil spill caused by his company. They share a taste for situationist style slogans (‘we are the night you couldn’t sleep’, ‘spy on us and we’ll spy on you’) which they disseminate through youtube videos. We are encouraged to empathise with the activists. Several members of the group reveal the reasons for their militancy in sentimental conversations with Sarah, whilst the controversial anti-capitalism of The Edukators has been replaced with environmentalism – a much easier cause for people to identify with in principle, even if not to the point of agreeing with the group’s actions. 

In the first half of the film, we see The East operate a number of ‘jams’ with some level of success; they infiltrate a party held by a biotech firm, and spike the drinks with an unsafe antibiotic the company is promoting. This gains the group a lot of media attention, but the side effects are less dramatic then they hoped for. A follow-up action, in which a group member is shot by a security guard, marks a turning point for the group, and we see the forces of law and order closing in on them. The film fetishises the technology open to the private investigators; from the smallest pieces of information, they can track down details of all the group members. There are several lingering shots of BlackBerry handsets, and sim cards are transported around in dental floss holders or hidden in hollowed out Birkenstocks. When the moment comes, the group does not even attempt to defend itself against the superior firepower of the FBI, instead hiding and giving up one member as a sacrificial offering.

The most jarring aspect of the film, though, comes in Sarah’s conversion. Benji has worked out that she is a double agent, and drives her to her employer’s headquarters, giving her the option of either turning him in, or getting him the details of all the other undercover agents they are using. Sarah obeys him, but is horrified that he plans to publish their details online, putting their lives at risk. Instead, she allows him to flee across the border whilst she follows her own plan, turning herself into a high-end freelance lobbyist, visiting the agents one-by-one and persuading them that they should ‘turn’ and support the activists they are supposed to be spying on. The film ends with a montage of newspaper headlines along the lines of ‘redwood trees saved from loggers’ to show how successful she was.

Whereas The Edukators located the heart within the businessman, The East shows a group abandoning its programme of direct action and behaving like a business. The message is that protest movements are doomed to failure (the second half of the film could have been sponsored by a biotech firm), and that what they really need is a good advocacy firm to persuade people within the oil and logging industries that what they are doing is wrong. This is exactly the sort of woolly thinking favoured by the likes of Bono, where the important thing is to get close to big businesses and ask them nicely to behave a bit better. 

In their 1944 essay The Culture Industry, the critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer examined the way in which culture can be used to encourage passivity among consumers. Central to this process is the way producers of mass culture appropriate the styles of ‘authentic’ means of expression and then neuter them for mass appeal. This is exactly what The East does with the message of The Edukators. The latter’s harsh anti-capitalist ideology is watered down to a sentimental environmental theme; the police are upgraded from bunglers who turn up at the wrong address to an all-seeing, all-powerful force; and the explicit message of the finale is that lobbying is more effective than direct action as a tool of change. The idea is that people will be persuaded by information and reasoned argument rather than confrontation – more Bradley Manning than Che Guevara. But how has US policy been changed by the actions of information activists like Manning and Snowden, compared to the successes of the Arab Spring? Where is Joseph Kony now? Even this interpretation of the film, Sarah as embodiment of Wikileaks, is flawed as she approaches high-powered individuals instead of making her information available for mass consumption.

Ultimately, while The East is a competent enough thriller, it lacks heart or courage in its convictions; this isn’t anarchism, it is liberalism in balaclavas.