XY Chelsea

Life comes at you fast, as the the hack­neyed old social media adage goes. By the time you’ve hun­kered down to watch XY Chelsea, a straight-arrow doc­u­men­tary pro­file of the mid-tier mil­i­tary ana­lyst turned leak­er of mil­i­tary secrets, Chelsea Man­ning, the sto­ry may have devel­oped a fair few twists and turns.

At time of writ­ing, Man­ning has been sent back to deten­tion for a sec­ond time for refus­ing to tes­ti­fy before a grand jury, appar­ent­ly now will­ing to risk life and limb before she would ever cow-tow to the nefar­i­ous demands of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment. Tim Tra­vers Hawkins’ film attach­es itself to the still-rolling zeit­geist rather than focus­ing on a sin­gle, round­ed aspect of its subject’s event­ful, often trag­ic life, and so it’s almost as if we’re hear­ing a sto­ry that’s still in vio­lent flux.

That’s not to say that Man­ning isn’t wor­thy of such treat­ment, and the inter­est here is in the moral imper­a­tives behind her deci­sion to send a vast pay­load of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments to Julian Assange (c/​o Wik­ileaks), which result­ed in a sev­en year stretch before her sen­tence was com­mut­ed by Bar­rack Oba­ma as one of his final ges­tures as POTUS. When the ques­tion is posed to her, she has lit­tle more to say than, ​“it was the right thing to do,” which is a stance that makes a lot of sense when view­ing drone footage which lays trig­ger hap­py US grunts dead to rights. But isn’t the stuff of meaty and insight­ful film documentary.

It opens on footage of Manning’s lawyers learn­ing that she’s going to be released from prison, and the first big top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion is what cos­tume should she wear for her first big press con­fer­ence. The title of the film ref­er­ences Manning’s Twit­ter han­dle, and much of the sec­ond half show­cas­es her nat­ur­al flare as a lib­er­al media per­son­al­i­ty with a very sol­id line in troll-bait­ing sass. When a ran­do wingnut tells her she should be shot for trea­son, her response is that, instead, she’s being shot for Vogue – and the film segues into a lav­ish fash­ion shoot sequence on a beach.

If any­thing, XY Chelsea works best as a cau­tion­ary tale about the pre­car­i­ous life of a high-rolling social media per­son­al­i­ty. By using these plat­forms as a means to pro­mote her activism, Man­ning is also held under intense scruti­ny by peo­ple who feel they’ve earned the right to mould her polit­i­cal out­look. She adver­tis­es the fact that she is attend­ing a gath­er­ing of alt right joy boys with the aim of cre­at­ing a dia­logue with them, and is lam­bast­ed by her fol­low­ers for even attempt­ing to extend an olive branch across the polit­i­cal chasm. It’s an exam­ple of the mas­sive­ly restrict­ed and con­text free nature of mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and the immense amounts of per­son­al suf­fer­ing it can cause away from the glare of the com­put­er screen. Still, it has lit­tle to do with Manning’s cen­tral plight.

For­mal­ly speak­ing, this one goes through the motions of mag­ic hour sky­lines and tran­cy ambi­ent music. The espi­onage aspect of Manning’s crime is dealt with in flashy mon­tages, as if it’s too com­plex to explore in any real­ly detail. She says that her tran­si­tion from male to female didn’t real­ly have any effect on oth­er activ­i­ties and choic­es, though it def­i­nite­ly made her time behind bars much more challenging.

Man­ning comes across as some­one who either refus­es or finds it tough to attach rea­son to her actions – in one on-stage Q&A with a New York­er jour­nal­ist, she near­ly falls to pieces under the pres­sure of a mod­er­ate grilling. XY Chelsea is a work which feels like it’s tak­en to the stage in a glit­tery gar­ment before it has prop­er­ly artic­u­lat­ed its thoughts.