The 'Zero Dark Thirty' controversy

second take

It’s frustrating that the wide release of Zero Dark Thirty in theatres has been delayed further. It doesn’t give any of us — audience, journalists, critics — a chance to see for ourselves why this movie by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden has become so controversial.

Some are even urging the public to boycott the movie. It began with journalists and documentarians (Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian called it “CIA hagiography” and filmmaker Alex Gibney pointing out that the movie felt alarmingly like it was pro-torture). According to them, one comes away from the movie, with the firm impression that CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Technique, especially waterboarding of detainees, led to crucial information about Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Soon after, politicians joined the outcry, writing to the studio, Sony, stating that this link between torture and information — ‘no waterboarding, no Bin Laden’ — was erroneous and that the studio should consider cutting those scenes. Salon’s film critic Andrew O’Hehir wrote that this seemed like politicians from the Bush administration are protecting themselves by distancing themselves from the movie. It is a well known fact that when Zero Dark Thirty was in production, some of its information sources on how intelligence gathering was done came from insiders in the government and the intelligence community. However, now, apparently, even the CIA has denied that the film is completely accurate, and has cited discrepancies in the portrayal of the incident in the film.

Director Bigelow and screenwriter Boal have countered the allegations with that old defence — it’s a movie, not a documentary. But as Gibney and many others have pointed out, this seems irresponsible of them to weasel their way out because Zero Dark Thirty begins stating that this is a firsthand journalistic account of events. In a Huffington blog post, culture critic Roger Denson draws our attention to the intelligence community’s statements to the press, soon after the Abbottabad raid in May 2011, saying that while multiple intelligence gathering sources were used, Enhanced Interrogation Technique was also a key source. Denson goes on to ask, “Fast forward to December 2012, why would the Intelligence community and the Senate Intelligence Committee now change its story? One of the possibilities is that the intelligence community could have realised that an overt admission about waterboarding or other internationally illegal means of procuring information about Bin Laden’s whereabouts could also make the action that the US took against the terror mastermind illegal.”

What interests me particularly in all this is how all those critics who lavished praise on the film (and that’s nearly every big film critic, from Dargis at NYT to Rich at The Guardian) must now also be left bewildered and shaken at the moral outrage over Zero Dark Thirty.
None of them in reviewing the film in its early days (at advance press screenings) anticipated such outcry and protest. Or, for that matter, did any of them (except for the two critics, Armond White and Peter Rainer) really question this aspect of the film. They were so carried away, it would seem, by what a brilliant spy procedural it was that they dismissed the scenes of torture as necessary and valid. Emily Bazelon at Slate confesses, “At the end of the interrogation scenes, I felt shaken but not morally repulsed, because the movie had successfully led me to adopt, if only temporarily, Maya’s point of view — this treatment is a legitimate way of securing information vital to US interests.” And now, some of these critics are writing follow-up reviews and think pieces to justify why they still continue to believe it is a great movie. O’Hehir defends the movie as being more ambivalent; that it is not pro-torture or anti-torture. As a work of art, it doesn’t take sides. There’s enough in the film, he says, for it to be read in different ways.

That may well be (and that’s also the frustrating part, not being able to see this for yourself until the movie releases in mid January), but what bothers me is that Zero Dark Thirty, by all accounts, seems another jingoist Hollywood action thriller, albeit a cinematically more sophisticated one. We all know how an audience, whether American or in some other part of the world, responds to a well-made Hollywood revenge thriller — with applause and cheers. How would they not be rooting for the heroine here, CIA agent Maya, played by Jessica Chastain a la Jodie Foster/Clarice Starling? Why go so far as the audience to confirm this, a highly respected and admired film critic like David Edelstein in his New York Magazine review speaks of how welcome it feels when the filmmakers cut to a torture scene right after we hear voices of the Twin Tower victims as the movie opens.

I was shocked and dismayed to read him say this. He can see that the narrative arc is not different from a “boneheaded right-wing revenge picture, but the vibe is cool”. It is also an “America, F-K Yeah! picture” and “as a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic”. It also borders on “the politically and morally reprehensible”, yet he can’t help admiring it because, as cinema, it is “an unholy masterwork”. There are even a few things in his review that sound pretty incendiary and hateful. So confident was he that all the torture and the “America, F-K Yeah!” attitude in the movie will seem just and necessary and be neutrally embraced, that he wrote, “Nor will anyone on the basis of Zero Dark Thirty alone feel compelled to decry ‘enhanced interrogation’.” Wonder what he has to say now?