Tweet
Good read:
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film
chronicling the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, which
opened in select theaters December 19, has largely
received rave reviews and garnered a host of awards
and nominations as the year’s best movie. It is a
shameful work, and this reception says far more
about the state of the media and the popular culture
industry in the US than it does about the film itself.
With an emotionally exploitative opening of a dark
screen and a sound track of fire fighters’ radio calls
and frantic cries for help from the upper floors of the
Twin Towers on 9/11, the film cuts to a CIA “black
site,” where a detainee, his arms hung by ropes from
the ceiling and his face cut and battered, confronts an
American interrogator who promises “I will hurt you” if
he fails to provide the information demanded.
The juxtaposition of the 9/11 soundtrack and the
harrowing scenes of torture are presented as cause
and effect, with one justifying the other.
Assisting the interrogator (Jason Clarke) are other
individuals, their faces concealed by ski masks. With a
break in the torture session, one of these assistants
takes off her mask revealing Maya (Jessica Chastain),
a rookie agent deployed “in the field” for the first time.
Asked by the chief interrogator if she’d rather watch
the brutality on a monitor outside the torture chamber,
Maya instead insists that they go back in and resume
their grisly work.
This introduces the main thread of the drama, using
the term loosely, that is to follow, with Maya
conducting a single-minded pursuit of clues leading
to the whereabouts of bin Laden, while bravely
battling resistance from the entire male-dominated
leadership of the CIA until she finally prevails.
According to this improbable version of events, the
junior female analyst single-handedly brought about
the May 1, 2011 raid on the compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan that ended in the assassination of bin Laden
and the shooting of several other defenseless men,
women and children.
Bigelow provides a thin feminist overlay–some
reviewers have gone so far as to draw a parallel
between the protagonist and Bigelow herself, the first
woman to win an Oscar for best director-—for a semi-fascistic cinematic embrace of the US military-intelligence apparatus and its crimes.
At nearly two hours, the film is long, dark and boring.
Not a single character is developed, including Maya,
about whom we know no more at the end than we did
at the beginning. In an interview with Time magazine,
Bigelow defended her failure to give any of her
characters depth, declaring, “It pierces the
momentum.”
What “momentum” there is consists of the torture and
frequent ear-piercing explosions. The film manages to
include not only 9/11, but also the July 7, 2005
London bombings, the bomb attack on the Marriott
Hotel in Islamabad in 2008, the December 2009
suicide bombing by a Jordanian double agent that
killed seven CIA operatives at a base in Khost,
Afghanistan and the 2010 abortive Times Square car-bombing attempt.
Virtually all of these acts were perpetrated by
individuals who had no connection with bin Laden, but
had been radicalized by the slaughter of civilians in
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the abduction
and torture of Muslims at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib
and CIA “black sites.”
The controversy surrounding the film—no doubt
welcomed by the director and her screenwriter Mark
Boal—centers on its first 25 minutes and the scenes of
a helpless detainee being waterboarded, beaten,
sexually humiliated, dragged across the floor in a dog
collar and chain, forced-fed and sealed into a box
smaller than a coffin. According to CNN national
security analyst Peter Bergen, Bigelow and Boal had
to be persuaded to “tone down” the violence of the
script, which in its original version had the prisoner
beaten to a pulp.
The film clearly argues that the torture sessions
produced the key initial intelligence that led eight
years later to bin Laden, a claim made by some on the
Republican right and within the CIA itself that has
been thoroughly refuted, most recently in a 6,000-page report on the question approved last week by the
Senate Intelligence Committee.
Bigelow has denied that her film amounts to an
apology for, if not glorification of, torture. She is
noncommittal on the issue. “The film doesn’t have an
agenda, and it doesn’t judge,” she told the New
Yorker. “I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience.”
In the same interview, she claimed that she and Boal
had adopted “almost a journalistic approach to film.”
In another comment illustrating how deeply she has
wallowed in the culture of militarism, she proclaimed
herself a “delivery system for Mark’s content.”
Boal, who previously wrote for the Village Voice,
Rolling Stone and Playboy and was the screenwriter
on Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) , worked in Iraq
in 2004 as an “embedded” reporter with US troops.
Bigelow, who was given unprecedented access to CIA
officials and members of Seal Team Six, has emerged
as an “embedded director,” establishing the kind of
symbiotic relationship with the military and
intelligence apparatus that inevitably produces the
kind of propaganda the latter requires.
The distortion regarding the role played by torture is a
serious one, particularly given the claim at the
beginning of the film that it is based upon facts and
participants’ accounts. Boal has tried to gloss it over
by saying it showed the detainee, who was tortured at
the outset, giving information during a non-threatening session in which he eats lunch with his
interrogators.
This is disingenuous at best. The information is won
by Maya and the interrogator exploiting the detainee’s
memory loss resulting from torture. The film includes
multiple references to torture, with Maya surfing
through DVDs depicting detainees hung from the
ceiling, crouched in stress positions and recoiling in
fear that give up bits of information that she pieces
together. She interrogates one man by ordering a
Pakistani aide to beat him, while another tells her he
will talk because he doesn’t want to be tortured again.
Of course, the factual distortion and the debate over
whether “torture works” hardly begins to plumb the
depths of the fundamental issues surrounding CIA
torture: above all, that it is a war crime ordered by top
officials from the US president on down and
sanctioned by leading members of both major
political parties. Those who ordered and executed this
crime have been protected unconditionally by the
Obama administration.
The liberal indictment of the film on this score is
pathetically weak. Representative is a review by Slate
senior editor Emily Bazelon, who affirms that, while
Zero Dark Thirty “isn’t the movie the left wanted about
the death of Bin Laden… we can make the moral case
against torture—and even the cost-benefit case that
it’s not worth the trade-off in reputation, political
capital and honor—without resorting to the claim that
torture never accomplishes anything.”
And what of the film’s grand finale, the murder of bin
Laden and several others with him? If Bigelow and
Boal can claim that they are neutral on the question of
torture, they make no bones about glorifying the
exploits of Seal Team Six in what amounted to an
extra-legal state killing—in short, an assassination.
It had been widely predicted that Zero Dark Thirty
would be a vehicle for Barack Obama’s reelection
campaign, given the access provided by the
administration to Bigelow and Boal and the incumbent
president’s political exploitation of the bin Laden
killing to ward off any Republican attack on his record
as “commander-in-chief.”
.
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film
chronicling the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, which
opened in select theaters December 19, has largely
received rave reviews and garnered a host of awards
and nominations as the year’s best movie. It is a
shameful work, and this reception says far more
about the state of the media and the popular culture
industry in the US than it does about the film itself.
With an emotionally exploitative opening of a dark
screen and a sound track of fire fighters’ radio calls
and frantic cries for help from the upper floors of the
Twin Towers on 9/11, the film cuts to a CIA “black
site,” where a detainee, his arms hung by ropes from
the ceiling and his face cut and battered, confronts an
American interrogator who promises “I will hurt you” if
he fails to provide the information demanded.
The juxtaposition of the 9/11 soundtrack and the
harrowing scenes of torture are presented as cause
and effect, with one justifying the other.
Assisting the interrogator (Jason Clarke) are other
individuals, their faces concealed by ski masks. With a
break in the torture session, one of these assistants
takes off her mask revealing Maya (Jessica Chastain),
a rookie agent deployed “in the field” for the first time.
Asked by the chief interrogator if she’d rather watch
the brutality on a monitor outside the torture chamber,
Maya instead insists that they go back in and resume
their grisly work.
This introduces the main thread of the drama, using
the term loosely, that is to follow, with Maya
conducting a single-minded pursuit of clues leading
to the whereabouts of bin Laden, while bravely
battling resistance from the entire male-dominated
leadership of the CIA until she finally prevails.
According to this improbable version of events, the
junior female analyst single-handedly brought about
the May 1, 2011 raid on the compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan that ended in the assassination of bin Laden
and the shooting of several other defenseless men,
women and children.
Bigelow provides a thin feminist overlay–some
reviewers have gone so far as to draw a parallel
between the protagonist and Bigelow herself, the first
woman to win an Oscar for best director-—for a semi-fascistic cinematic embrace of the US military-intelligence apparatus and its crimes.
At nearly two hours, the film is long, dark and boring.
Not a single character is developed, including Maya,
about whom we know no more at the end than we did
at the beginning. In an interview with Time magazine,
Bigelow defended her failure to give any of her
characters depth, declaring, “It pierces the
momentum.”
What “momentum” there is consists of the torture and
frequent ear-piercing explosions. The film manages to
include not only 9/11, but also the July 7, 2005
London bombings, the bomb attack on the Marriott
Hotel in Islamabad in 2008, the December 2009
suicide bombing by a Jordanian double agent that
killed seven CIA operatives at a base in Khost,
Afghanistan and the 2010 abortive Times Square car-bombing attempt.
Virtually all of these acts were perpetrated by
individuals who had no connection with bin Laden, but
had been radicalized by the slaughter of civilians in
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the abduction
and torture of Muslims at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib
and CIA “black sites.”
The controversy surrounding the film—no doubt
welcomed by the director and her screenwriter Mark
Boal—centers on its first 25 minutes and the scenes of
a helpless detainee being waterboarded, beaten,
sexually humiliated, dragged across the floor in a dog
collar and chain, forced-fed and sealed into a box
smaller than a coffin. According to CNN national
security analyst Peter Bergen, Bigelow and Boal had
to be persuaded to “tone down” the violence of the
script, which in its original version had the prisoner
beaten to a pulp.
The film clearly argues that the torture sessions
produced the key initial intelligence that led eight
years later to bin Laden, a claim made by some on the
Republican right and within the CIA itself that has
been thoroughly refuted, most recently in a 6,000-page report on the question approved last week by the
Senate Intelligence Committee.
Bigelow has denied that her film amounts to an
apology for, if not glorification of, torture. She is
noncommittal on the issue. “The film doesn’t have an
agenda, and it doesn’t judge,” she told the New
Yorker. “I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience.”
In the same interview, she claimed that she and Boal
had adopted “almost a journalistic approach to film.”
In another comment illustrating how deeply she has
wallowed in the culture of militarism, she proclaimed
herself a “delivery system for Mark’s content.”
Boal, who previously wrote for the Village Voice,
Rolling Stone and Playboy and was the screenwriter
on Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) , worked in Iraq
in 2004 as an “embedded” reporter with US troops.
Bigelow, who was given unprecedented access to CIA
officials and members of Seal Team Six, has emerged
as an “embedded director,” establishing the kind of
symbiotic relationship with the military and
intelligence apparatus that inevitably produces the
kind of propaganda the latter requires.
The distortion regarding the role played by torture is a
serious one, particularly given the claim at the
beginning of the film that it is based upon facts and
participants’ accounts. Boal has tried to gloss it over
by saying it showed the detainee, who was tortured at
the outset, giving information during a non-threatening session in which he eats lunch with his
interrogators.
This is disingenuous at best. The information is won
by Maya and the interrogator exploiting the detainee’s
memory loss resulting from torture. The film includes
multiple references to torture, with Maya surfing
through DVDs depicting detainees hung from the
ceiling, crouched in stress positions and recoiling in
fear that give up bits of information that she pieces
together. She interrogates one man by ordering a
Pakistani aide to beat him, while another tells her he
will talk because he doesn’t want to be tortured again.
Of course, the factual distortion and the debate over
whether “torture works” hardly begins to plumb the
depths of the fundamental issues surrounding CIA
torture: above all, that it is a war crime ordered by top
officials from the US president on down and
sanctioned by leading members of both major
political parties. Those who ordered and executed this
crime have been protected unconditionally by the
Obama administration.
The liberal indictment of the film on this score is
pathetically weak. Representative is a review by Slate
senior editor Emily Bazelon, who affirms that, while
Zero Dark Thirty “isn’t the movie the left wanted about
the death of Bin Laden… we can make the moral case
against torture—and even the cost-benefit case that
it’s not worth the trade-off in reputation, political
capital and honor—without resorting to the claim that
torture never accomplishes anything.”
And what of the film’s grand finale, the murder of bin
Laden and several others with him? If Bigelow and
Boal can claim that they are neutral on the question of
torture, they make no bones about glorifying the
exploits of Seal Team Six in what amounted to an
extra-legal state killing—in short, an assassination.
It had been widely predicted that Zero Dark Thirty
would be a vehicle for Barack Obama’s reelection
campaign, given the access provided by the
administration to Bigelow and Boal and the incumbent
president’s political exploitation of the bin Laden
killing to ward off any Republican attack on his record
as “commander-in-chief.”
.
Comment