Zero Thirty Darkness

I've seen Zero Dark Thirty. The first and last 45 minutes were intensely involving for all the wrong reasons. As for the rest, it was actually fairly dull, showing that real police work doesn't necessarily translate into an interesting movie.

I come down squarely on the side of those who believe the film takes the position that torture was effective in gathering the information that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, and the screenwriter, David Boal, argue that the film does not support or endorse torture. They claim to be merely presenting the facts, and that it is up to viewers to draw their own conclusions. Boal says, “It doesn't surprise me that people bring political agendas to the film but it doesn't actually have a political agenda. It's agenda is to tell these people's stories in the most honest and factual way we know how . . .”

First of all, the film doesn't report everything that happened during those ten years. It is necessarily selective. One of the things it completely leaves out is any debate over either the efficacy or morality of torture. (You could argue that an even more significant omission is it failure to present events that occurred before 9/11, which would reveal bin Laden and al-Qaeda to be “blowback” from previous CIA activities in Afghanistan.)

But let's stick to what is in the film. As filmmakers, Bigelow and Boal should be well aware of the basic elements of the cinematic code. A film is a visual argument. Montage—that part of the film that takes place during editing, the arrangement of successive shots—can suggest relationships between people and events that may or may not exist in reality. As Russian director and teacher Lev Kulashov pointed out, A + B can equal something entirely different. Kulashov showed viewers an identical shot of a man's face and asked them to describe his emotional state. When intercut with shots of a plate of soup, a woman in a coffin and a little girl playing, his emotion was described as hunger, sadness and joy, respectively.

Zero Dark Thirty contains a scene in which a prisoner, Ammar, is having lunch with two CIA agents, Dan and Maya. He gives them valuable information that eventually leads to bin Laden's courier and bin Laden himself. Prior to this, we saw scenes in which Ammar was brutally tortured—waterboarded, hung by ropes, and locked in a small box—by Dan as Maya watched. It is virtually automatic that an experienced media consumer will to draw a causal connection between the two scenes—that Ammar gave them the information because of the torture, and to avoid further torture. In fact, Dan reminds him that he could be tortured again. (Boal claims that a scene of Maya in her research room shows that all the important information was already available from detainees who were not tortured, but I would suggest that this scene is not very salient and its meaning is unclear.)

Another Russian filmmaker, V. I. Pudovkin, said montage is “the method which controls the 'psychological guidance' of the spectator.” It is possible, if you have the necessary information, to counterargue with this natural tendency—to tell yourself that the filmmaker's implication that torture is effective is false. However, it is unrealistic to expect very many viewers to draw this conclusion. The film could impact public opinion, as some would argue the fictional television drama already 24 has. Although the reasons are unclear, the percentage of Americans who say torture is rarely or never justified has shown a small but steady decline, from 53% in 2004 to 42% in 2011.

Filmmaker Michael Moore defends Zero Dark Thirty, arguing that the average viewer “will be repulsed” by the torture scenes: “After watching the brutal behavior of CIA agents for the first 45 minutes of the film, I can't believe anyone of conscience would conclude that this is morally NOT right.” But Moore is ignoring the possibility that we have already been desensitized to torture scenes by years of fictional programming. He is also making the egocentric assumption that other people will have the same reaction to the film as he did. But the torture scenes are embedded in a narrative in which the torturers are the heroes and their goal of killing bin Laden is one of which the audience strongly approves. To make things worse, the heroine, Maya, who the film suggests may have been responsible for the death of one prisoner, is is ignored and patronized by her CIA colleagues, making her ultimate triumph a victory for feminism as well.

Below is a discussion of some of these issues that appeared on the PBS News Hour.  

There has been little comment about last 45 minutes in which the Navy Seals fly by helicopter to bin Laden's compound, break into the buildings, and kill bin Laden and several other people. Here again, the problem is omission. No one raises the question of whether the U.S. government had the right to execute bin Laden and several others suspected of lesser crimes without due process of law. Zero Dark Thirty implies, however, that the alternative of bring him back alive for trial was never seriously considered.

Glenn Greenwald maintains that Zero Dark Thirty is U. S. government propaganda directed at American citizens. Peter Maass refers to it as “a troubling new frontier of government-embedded film-making.” Unlike other branches of government, the CIA is forbidden to distribute propaganda in this country. However, this is nothing new for the Defense Department. As David Robb argues in Operation Hollwood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, film studios usually require military cooperation in order to produce technically realistic-looking war movies. In exchange, the Pentagon is given script approval—veto power over points it disagrees with and the right to insert its own ideology into the films. The predictable result is films that arguably distort history, i.e., Blackhawk Down, or function as recruiting videos for the services, i.e., Top Gun.

But Zero Dark Thirty takes this process a step further. The opening title claims that the film is “based on first hand accounts of actual events.” That is, they received privileged access to classified information of the type that the CIA usually prosecutes people for revealing. But the CIA's claim that torture was instrumental in the hunt for bin Laden is at odds with conclusions drawn by other branches of government, such as the FBI and Congress, and may conflict with the views of a minority of CIA employees. We are getting not the government's point-of-view, but that of a subgroup within the government. The effect is to empower the most brutal and reactionary ideology within the “defense” establishment—the Cheney-Rumsfeld plan for fighting terrorism. The film propagandizes the American people in an effort to get them to accept war crimes by their own government.