Watched: Zero Dark Thirty
This film impressed me, then enraged me, then made me pensive. I was watching this long after the post-release controversy had died down, and as a result I was afforded a view that was a little more sober than a million supposed journalists screeching about how Kathryn Bigelow is the new Riefenstahl.
Discussing whether or not this film is pro-torture requires unpacking a few levels. The first (and most obvious) one would be its attitude regarding torture as an end in itself - is it depicted through a lens that glorifies it in any way? I don’t think so - some of the hardest sequences to watch in this film involve the American torture of detainees at black sites, and involve levels of degradation you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, filmed uncompromisingly. That almost goes without saying, though.
The furore, I think, focused on the idea of the efficacy of torture. You get the strong sense, watching this film, that information gleaned from the torture of detainees was instrumental in bringing about the death of Osama Bin Laden. When I think about it, though, this seems like a filmmaking oversight - there are, in fact, plenty of scenes where valuable information is gathered by other means, but because they don’t pack the same visual punch as showing a man being waterboarded or shoved into a tiny wooden box, they’re quieter beats.
This, I think, shows the irresponsibility by Bigelow and writer Mark Boal in saying that they’re just “telling the truth” - when the truth is sometimes banal and sometimes horrific, the horrific when dramatised will develop a weight that artificially imbalances the story. I can’t claim to know whether or not torture did lead to the death of Osama Bin Laden; if wrong, this film commits a graver moral error, given that the idea is stated and restated that without debasing other human beings, he couldn’t have been found.
There’s an additional level that I don’t think most film critics have explored, though - regardless of its efficacy, whether or not the capture or death of Osama Bin Laden was a valuable end in itself. I suspect this was skimmed over by most critics because they believe either a) yeah, duh, of course it is or b) no, ugh, it isn’t but all of you people seem to think it was; that is, conceiving of a world where Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal wouldn’t want to portray the death of OBL as an uncomplicated victory is more or less impossible.
Maya, the determined CIA agent (played masterfully, regardless of ethical quandaries, by Jessica Chastain - thank goodness she took this rather than Rooney Mara) says little, and reacts less. When she does, it’s rarely with a smile - she bristles with rage when someone who was as close to a friend as she could get dies in a suicide bombing, she acts scathingly towards her stubborn superiors, and her cool demeanour impresses the Navy SEALs tasked to taking OBL down. When Bin Laden dies, she looks expressionless, mouth slightly ajar, seemingly aware of the history being made but not passing judgment. And later, when she flies away, she starts silently weeping.
You could take any number of interpretations from that breakdown. No doubt a lot of enraged bloggers took it to mean that she was experiencing a moment of catharsis after achieving a goal she worked over a decade to achieve. That would be tidy, I suppose. But it doesn’t fit - when she identifies the body, she looks shellshocked, not jubilant. My takeaway was more of a denouement - that the product of over ten years of determination looked strangely like the corpse of one man, and that seeing one dead man didn’t bring with it the grand sense of accomplishment she’d come to expect. After thousands of deaths, her grand finale was just more death.
But I might be wrong. And this movie does sweep you along - the raid on the compound in Abbottabad is filmed spectacularly, thrilling from beat to beat, and almost making you forget that it’s practically shown in real time from the moment they land. It’s a curious artifact, difficult to separate from the real-world events that accompanied them, and it’ll be interesting to see how this film is seen in another decade’s time. But I don’t think it makes Bigelow the 21st century’s answer to a Nazi propagandist. Stop embarrassing yourself, Naomi Wolf.