Edward Snowden is a self-sacrificing idealist and a self-important paranoiac. We desperately need more people like him. We should lock him in prison.

All these statements feel true to me. Looking at Snowden's first messages to journalist Laura Poitras, I begin to understand why.

In advance of the theatrical release of Citizenfour, Poitras' documentary on the NSA wunderkind and his exposure of government secrets, Wired obtained copies of four of the earliest encrypted emails a then-anonymous Snowden sent to Poitras, seeking an understanding reporter who could bring his cache of intelligence to the American public. "They are a piece of history in themselves," Wired's Threat Level blog writes.

Navigate over there to read the full messages; I've grabbed a couple of excerpts that jumped out at me for reasons I'll explain:

Laura,

At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more. This will not be a waste of your time...

He was not wrong. He was quite flattering to Poitras, though—and had a flair for dramatizing the emailing duo's experience with the security state:

You ask why I picked you. I didn't. You did. The surveillance you've experienced means you've been selected, a term which will mean more to you as you learn about how the modern sigint system works.

From now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type, and packet you route, is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not. Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies. This is a story that few but you can tell.

Again, flattering, well-considered, and largely true, as we've seen from the information Snowden provided to Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. But his penchant for the dramatic, the hyperbolic, was also in full force, as when he declared that "[w]e are building the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of man":

I appreciate your concern for my safety, but I already know how this will end for me and I accept the risk. If I have luck, and you are careful, you will have everything you need. I ask only that you ensure this information makes it home to the American public.

Elsewhere, Snowden literally puts himself on that cross, telling Poitras she should give him up to protect his loved ones from danger: "You may be the only one who can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source."

The overall feel of the letters—captured brilliantly by Poitras in the Citizenfour trailer above—is theatricality, much the same as what you get when you ask most soldiers what their battle was like: "It was like a movie." The drama, in other words, is built in. For a soldier, it's action, mortality, courage under fire, patriotism; for Snowden, it's intrigue, high stakes, government secrecy, a man alone against the machine.

These tropes persist because we love them. They spur on our imaginations. They help us pick sides. That's what happens when we watch the show. But when we conceive of our lives as the show, we're giving ourselves a universal importance that may or may not be fair, or correct. There's no space for banality in a movie.

And that's precisely what troubles me about Snowden and his champions, just as surely as I'm troubled by the anti-Snowden crusaders and government-secrecy apologists: Their worlds are flattened landscapes of good and evil, and flatter us as the center of the frame, the potential victim—either our civil freedom is being siphoned from us, or our safety from anti-civilization attackers is. No space is permitted for both of these assertions to be a little true, or a little overblown.

That's not to say there's a moral equivalency between Snowden and the government. The most powerful nation in human history, possessed of the most sophisticated weaponry and surveillance technology ever known, always deserves a hairier eyeball than a smarmy libertarian programmer.

And anyway, even if one can quibble with how he gathered his information, and what importance he arrogated to himself in doing so (and in playing the sacrificing idealist), one cannot deny the value of what Snowden's leaks have revealed to us. He reminded us of how far government lies go. The least we can do is avoid lying to ourselves—about that government, and about Snowden himself.