Zero Dark ThirtyThe imminent release of Zero Dark Thirty, the new film from Kathryn Bigelow and Marc Boal, the Oscar-winning director and writer of The Hurt Locker, has unleashed a maelstrom of debate about America’s use of torture in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden. For some reason, any number of writers who have not actually seen the movie have felt qualified to denounce the film as morally unjustifiable, chief among them the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who wrote last week that “this film is [not] being so well-received despite its glorification of American torture. It’s more accurate to say it’s so admired because of this.” (He’s since seen the film, and he didn’t like it.)

America’s foreign policy, which has so dominated political discourse post-9/11, was barely relevant in this most recent election cycle: according to the Pew Research Center, only 7% of voters considered foreign policy the most important issue at stake in the election as of March 2012, and I seriously doubt that figure rose much between March and November. Mitt Romney and Fox News tried to make it a big issue — Benghazi, anyone? — but the simple fact of the matter is that we just don’t care much, anymore, about what happens in the Middle East, as long as it doesn’t directly affect us.

In the past few months, the cultural discourse has picked up the slack the political discourse offered on foreign policy. The most buzzed-about show on television and two of the most buzzed-about movies of the year all deal with America’s role in the Middle East. The discourse that has surrounded Homeland, Argo, and now Zero Dark Thirty reveals that if we don’t care much about what we’re actually doing in the Middle East, we care very deeply indeed about possessing the moral high ground when it comes to discussing it.

I have seen Zero Dark Thirty, and Greenwald is right in saying that it’s sort of ridiculous for Bigelow and Boal to argue that they have made an apolitical film. I’m sure that’s what they were, broadly speaking, trying to do, but the idea that a movie about the hunt for and subsequent murder of Osama bin Laden could avoid politics is fundamentally ludicrous. Many critics have described the movie as being documentary-like, but of course even documentaries are shot, and edited, by fallible human beings with opinions, like all the rest of us.

But unlike Greenwald, I believe that Zero Dark Thirty is a profound condemnation of what George W. Bush called the War on Terror, but it is a slippery, opaque movie that avoids espousing any one point of view for very long. The fact that it stubbornly refuses to make moral judgments about any of its characters works in its favor artistically, but probably has a lot to do with the fact that so many people are convinced that it endorses torture. Maya (Jessica Chastain), the CIA operative whose single goal in life is the elimination of bin Laden from the face of the earth, is certainly the movie’s protagonist; whether she can also be accurately described as its hero is a much murkier question. Even the man whose brutal torture of suspects at a CIA black site winds up being a sympathetic figure.

But Bigelow and Boal are not interested in the deep psychological nuances of the men and women conducting this manhunt. We find out almost nothing about Maya’s personal life — partially because she doesn’t really have one — and the other characters are equally obscure. The movie is not about them: it is about what they are doing, and the global and moral implications of their actions.

Though I would argue that the politics of Homeland are far more complex than an idle glance at the show would suggest, its basic stance is fairly straightforward: Vice President sends drone to kill terrorist, kills children; terrorist gets mad, retaliates; CIA stops terrorist because killing people is always bad (especially if they are Americans!). As a liberal American watching the show, you can therefore get self-righteously outraged about the immorality of drone strikes while simultaneously rooting for the good (white American) guys to get the bad (foreign Arab) guys — Damian Lewis’ (white, American) character may be a terrorist, but I’m pretty sure nobody in the audience wants him dead.

Meanwhile, Ben Affleck’s Argo makes Homeland look like a masterpiece of political ambiguity: as Eric Van Hoose wrote on this site last month, the movie is shockingly conservative underneath its glossy Hollywood surface. It may be masked as an action thriller — though I personally found the thrills cheap — but ultimately it glorifies the CIA without having a single damn thing to say about what the CIA actually does, or about our role in Iran and the rest of the Middle East.

Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t ever say that we should or shouldn’t be doing something. It makes no attempt to justify our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to condemn it. And yes, when Maya and her colleagues torture people, they get information out of them. But it would be a mistake to insist that simply depicting torture as effective is somehow an endorsement of the practice. It does not matter that these methods get results: it is so grossly morally indefensible that no information is worth it, and the movie makes this clear.

Though the film may say nothing explicitly, Bigelow speaks eloquently and at length with her camera, and her gaze is unsparing. The torture scenes are so brutal to watch, and filmed with such a sense of horror, that it is impossible for me to believe that she was not trying to convey her own horror at what she was staging. At one point, the camera passes over dozens and dozens of detainees in orange jumpsuits being held in wire cages like chickens ready to be killed. Later, once bin Laden’s body has been moved, it lingers on the smear of blood his corpse has left on the floor, while the children in the compound cower in the corner.

Bigelow and Boal do not condemn their characters; they condemn the entire system within which they operate. This is a movie about a global network of evil, and I’m not talking about al-Qaeda. We are supposed to be better than this, than them — and we’re not, right now. Whether we like it or not, we’re all complicit participants in what our country is doing out there, in those black sites that don’t officially exist, and that insight is why Zero Dark Thirty is an important film, and why it has drawn the ire of so many critics while Argo has sparked almost no political discussion whatsoever. Zero Dark Thirty does not make you proud to be an American, even a nobly dissenting one. It makes you sick, instead.


 
 
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