ABSTRACT
Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009) and Laura Poitras's Citizenfour (2014) approach the masculinity of the whistleblower from very different angles. The mixture of the codes of the romance and the political thriller allow Ehrlich and Goldsmith to display a remarkable admiration for Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND corporation employee who leaked to the American newspapers the secret report on Vietnam commissioned by Nixon's Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Their film emphasizes Ellsberg's manly attractive and his love story with his wife Patricia to narrate a moral transformation that was ultimately rewarded with a long career in critical political activism. In contrast, Poitras shows no fascination and only limited admiration for Edward Snowden, an NSA analyst whose revelations regarding massive international surveillance of all online activity cost him a permanent exile from the USA. Both men are equally heroic, yet Snowden's softer masculinity strands him in a sort of moral limbo from which neither the film nor the US authorities and citizens seem inclined to free him.
