The Wall Street Journal reports that, just as was the case after the death of Osama bin Laden when movie projects on the subject became hot Hollywood currency, a number of studios are contemplating biopics about Julian Assange. The Wikileaks founder’s story is undoubtedly commercially compelling, whether someone’s looking to make a technological thriller with more realistic politics than Hackers, a movie about indefinite detention, given the consequences Bradley Manning has faced for giving documents to Assange, or a spy-ish picture that raises more intelligent questions about the impact and viability of government secrecy. Any and all of those movies would be fascinating things to see Hollywood try to attempt, though the results would inevitably vary.

But I’m honestly curious to see if any of the studios in contention here are going to focus on the sexual assault charges against Assange, and if so, how they’ll handle them. Assange has always seemed like a fascinating case for how powerful people prioritize the treatment of women and the abuse of them by powerful men when other issues they care about are at stake. If you support Assange’s work, as filmmakers like Michael Moore and Ken Loach, who put up bail money for him in his sexual assault case did, that does not mean he’s incapable of committing assault, that the charisma that won Assange supporters also rendered his negotiations of consent with women he had sex with clear and uncomplicated. Trying to balance the presumption of innocence and the idea that rape victims, who are particularly subject to discrediting and shaming when they come forward, deserve respect and the opportunity for a fair hearing is something that appears difficult enough for our society. A case like Assange’s, in which some of his famous supporters often couldn’t stop at asserting his right to a presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial, heightens that challenge, plays it out on an international scale. A movie that can even lay out those issues cogently, much less suggesting any sort of solution, would be a real accomplishment.

My main opinion of Bradley Manning is that it sounds like he has pretty serious emotional problems and turned out not to be a particularly effective whistleblower, the former probably having quite a bit to do with the latter. And while there almost certainly will be a live-action movie about WikiLeaks and Manning’s relationship with the organization, and with Adrian Lamo, who busted him, I’m actually much more intrigued by this short animated film, Bradley Manning Had Secrets (go to the site to watch it), by filmmaker Adam Butcher.

The dialogue will be familiar to anyone who’s followed the story at all, it’s drawn directly from Manning and Lamo’s chat logs. But it’s amazing how much it adds to see those words in motion, transmogrifying into a pile of supply boxes, an image of Manning in women’s clothes, and to hear them spoken, full of stress and wistfulness. I’d be curious to know if anyone’s studying text-based communication, like texting and instant messages, to see if we’re either misunderstanding each other more without tone of voice and facial expressions, or if we’re sharpening our skills of interpretation to catch nuance and tone in the written word. Because of who each man was, and because of Lamo’s decision to string Manning along, Manning and Lamo’s conversations seemed designed to allow for significant misinterpretation of both the specifics of what the other was saying, and what the conversations meant to the person on the receiving end of the messages. But even without stakes that high, the way we talk to each other can get fraught without us even knowing it.

I wrote back in May that I thought one of the core problems with Bones is that the show doesn’t know how to do a Big Bad — more specifically, the kind of Big Bad that would require the extended efforts and concentration of a bunch of highly trained and highly paid crime-fightin’ federal scientists who, as we know, actually have other day jobs. So I’m glad to see that the show is at least going to give that sort of effort another shot with a case that is set up to bring out big core emotions in everyone’s favorite ruggedly handsome teddy bear, Seeley Booth.

This season, the main target will be a hacker who, as a form of misguided activism, shuts down Defense Department communications systems, putting American troops deployed overseas in danger. Obviously this will make our good friend Booth apoplectic, particularly at a time when he’s coping with the stresses of being a new dad. But it also seems like a cleverer-than-usual way to strip some of the complications out of the Bradley Manning case so we can debate some of the issues suggested by it in more usefully abstract terms. We can, and should, and are having debates about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, detention conditions, and speedy trials all inspired by what we’ve learned of Manning and of how he’s been treated since he was caught leaking material to WikiLeaks.

But I think it’s worthwhile for pop culture to do some thinking about the circumstances under which we think it’s OK for people to break or bend the law, and I hope Bones will provide a scenario for discussing that by setting up a villain who is convinced what he’s doing is worth the collateral damage, and has clear malign intent. Our cop shows routinely condone the idea that it’s OK to use violence against suspects as long as the people who are employing violence as a tactic are a) officers of the court, b) have pure intentions, c) will feel bad about it afterwards. Bones spends a lot of time justifying Booth’s use of violence to protect Brennan and other members of the lab, usually when he has to kill a suspect or threaten someone who has made Brennan less safe. Our pop culture also suggests that we’re okay with aberrant and aberrational behavior if it’s in defense or service of family, and that we’re excited to sympathize with anti-heroes who employ violence fairly regularly as long as they’re quirky or relatable in some other way.

But mainstream shows and movies, not surprisingly, tend to treat people who betray the government or employ violence against state actors as if they’re insane, misguided as to the tactics that will be effective, or at minimum, totally deluded in their political beliefs. I’m not saying I sympathize with the decisions that Bill Ayers made when he joined the Weather Underground, or that U.S. should have ended the war in Vietnam on the grounds that Mark Rudd was outraged by it to the point of insensibility (the war was wrong for much sounder reasons) but I do think it’s a little strange that there’s a reluctance to acknowledge that the American government can make decisions can make people feel panicked and powerless and urgent. It would be worthwhile to have slightly more than zero television shows and movies that actually took the time to explore the root motivations of people who do powerfully anti-social things. And more than that, good storytelling should have villains actually test your resolve to side with the hero.

Alan Moore has the imprisoned WikiLeaks collaborator’s back, saying in a statement:

With any legitimate trial of whistleblower Bradley Manning still being at an unspecified date in the future, it would seem that what is presently on trial here is Western culture itself. When the persecution of an individual who has exposed an evil is pursued so ruthlessly and yet the evil itself is studiedly ignored, all of us know that there is something very wrong with the way that our society is conducting itself. And if we do not protest in the strongest terms about what is being done in our name, then we become complicit.

There is no third option. Bradley Manning and others like him everywhere are vital to our continued moral health and well-being as a people, and unless we offer them our full support in their often dire and isolated circumstances, it is we, as a people, who will end up the losers.

This isn’t particularly surprising. Alan Moore is not, shall we say, particularly inclined to place his faith in institutions*, so this sort of suspicion seems fairly natural. I agree with Yglesias that Manning shouldn’t be in solitary confinement, and I do wonder if the clock is ticking on his constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial. But I’m not particularly sympathetic to the idea that trying Manning and sending him to jail for a long time is unjust or a way of distracting ourselves from the rot of Western culture. Some good things, among them the Arab Spring, may have their roots in material Manning disclosed, but it remains to be seen what the full impact of those leaks will — or won’t — be. Unlike Moore, I’m comfortable with many, though by no means all of the ground rules and conventions that make up our society, so I don’t really think we should determine Manning’s treatment by the justice of the end results of his actions.

*Proposition for debate: Alan Moore is the inverse of Frank Miller.