Every now and then there is a reaction to a movie or other pop cultural phenomenon that makes me wonder whether everyone else saw a different version than I did, or whether I am insane, or whether I live in a society that is suffering from a case of mass delusion.
Everyone loves Kathryn Bigelow’s film “Zero Dark Thirty.” Great filmmaking, people say. Riveting. Important. One of the best films of the year. The movie has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including best screenplay.
There have been a few rumblings, namely by left-wing actors like Martin Sheen and Ed Asner, and by three senators including John McCain, that the film falsely and wrongfully implies that torture – or if you prefer the Orwellian term “enhanced interrogation techniques” – not only works, but specifically worked to extract the information that ultimately led to the raid on Pakistan in 2011. For those who were paying attention, i.e. those who read the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, it is common knowledge that the CIA never obtained any useful intelligence by waterboarding and otherwise abusing Muslim detainees. Mostly, however, the word on the street is that the movie makes torture look disgusting and that it doesn’t make any such implication. Bigelow has already denied in an article in the Los Angeles Times that her film endorses torture tacitly or otherwise.
Just saw the film. It isn’t very good.
First and foremost, a movie should be entertaining. At least three times during the two hour 40 minute running time, I checked my watch. The lead actress was so bad – she has been nominated as best actress – that I don’t feel she deserves any publicity whatsoever, not even the extremely minimal mention in this blog. Even the amazing James Gandolfini delivered a phone-it-in performance, his accent veering wildly between vague Southern white CIA boss and central New Jersey.
Not only was Bigelow apparently incapable of extracting strong performances from her cast, she apparently skipped a lot of moviemaking 101. There are countless scenes where you can see exactly what is coming. For example, when a female CIA operative waives basic security protocols at a forward operating base in Afghanistan in order to meet an Afghan she has been led to believe is an Al Qaeda mole, the camera keeps coming back to her increasingly silly and absurdly pleased face, as though she were waiting on a boyfriend instead of a jihadi in the middle of nowhere. You know she is going to get blown up. You know the dude is fake. He has to be. The only way to set up the scene in such a way for tension or surprise would be for nothing bad to happen. In another scene, the lead actress – an absurd asexual amalgamation because, you know, in Hollywood, you just have to have one character do everything – is asked to sit in the back of the room even though she did all of the hard work that led to finding Osama bin Laden’s lair. When the big boss shows up, you know she’s not going to be able to shut up, and of course she can’t. She has to pipe up and say something super macho, and you know that instead of just getting fired for disrespecting the boss, they’re going to find it amusing. Because that’s the way this sort of scene goes.
Most galling to me is the way Bigelow disrespects the history of an event that was well-documented and very recent. Don’t tell me this doesn’t matter. She is selling this as history. That’s why the very first scene of the movie informs us that this is based on true events.
First and foremost, we open with an audio montage of 911 calls from victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Everything that follows, therefore, is supposedly related to avenging 9/11. This movie was originally intended to be released before the November 2012 elections, and many Republicans accused Bigelow and the studio of trying to release a Democratic Party propaganda film to increase President Obama’s chances of reelection. Sounded silly at the time, but once you see it, it’s pretty clear that they were right. Everything here is done to make the president look great. We see him speaking one time, in the background, without comment, talking about how torture will no longer be condoned under his administration. No eye rolling, no hilarious comments about how they still do it. There’s another reference to him, in which a top CIA executive informs our fearless starlet that the president is a prudent and brilliant man and won’t execute any plan that is less than watertight.
There sure is a lot of torture. And it is mostly whitewashed. We know for a fact that detainees in CIA black sites were kept naked for days and weeks and months at a time, but that is not shown here. It’s brutal, to be sure, but not as brutal as it really was. Like the entire movie, the tone of the torture is flat. We just don’t really care. During the great dénouement in Osama bin Laden’s compound, the Seal six team that raided it are portrayed as professional, methodical and calm. The women and children are herded aside, even told to calm down in a quiet voice as their husbands and relatives are massacred. You know that that is not possibly how it was. These guys were trained, ruthless assassins. These women and children were pushed around and brutalized. Physically as well. They had to have been. They were in the way. It is so telling that Bigelow gets the sounds of the Third World right, dogs barking in the background all night long, yet tamps down the sobs and screams of the boys and girls whose parents are lying in a pool of blood.
So much of this is ahistorical. Bigelow depicts the machine gun attack against the Doha Towers complex, the bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad, and the bombing of a bus in London as events that were directly ordered by Osama bin Laden, when we know for a fact that that could not have been the case. By 2011, bin Laden was trying to keep abreast of events while keeping low. He was not directing them.
Unlike many other filmgoers, I was very skeptical of “The Hurt Locker.” I thought the tone was flat, the narrative was slow, the soundtrack manipulative. I really hated the fact that we never got to see anything from the standpoint of the Iraqis, only the military, and that the military that we saw was endlessly professional, competent and caring about the lives of the locals – something that we know simply wasn’t true. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, typical attitudes of US soldiers ranged from indifference to having fun slaughtering the locals. In some cases – not rare ones – troops drove around and just shot at people walking down the street. This wasn’t everybody, obviously, but it deserved to be documented in some way.
ZDT is yet another love letter to the US military. Once again, we never get to know anything about the locals. Bin Laden never gets a word in edge wise. Neither do many Afghans or Pakistanis. What is the motivation of radical Islam? We never find out. Yes, we see some of them as torturers, but they are torturers with a soul. They are regretful, they get a little bit sick. As for whether or not torture works, well, this movie is crystal clear – nothing else is shown that does work. First torture. Then a break. Then bin Laden gets killed. There are never any ethical quandaries. No doubts. What is this movie about? It’s about a stubborn woman who persists against bureaucratic indifference until, somehow, a brilliant president we never get to see has the insight and wisdom to greenlight her project. One has to wonder, is this about Bigelow herself?
Then there is the biggest whitewash of all, about exactly how bin Laden died. We know from the assassins – the special forces soldiers who were there – that bin Laden was taken alive. He was probably shot in the initial melee, but by most credible accounts was still breathing and in fact standing up in US custody, possibly wearing cuffs, for several minutes. Washington was informed. Then the order was given, possibly by the president himself but certainly by a top official, to execute him. This was a mob hit. That, not respect for Muslim sensibilities, is the best explanation for the fact that a photo of the course was never released.
Not much glory in any of this. To the contrary, even from a political point of view, the president missed a big opportunity by not taking the high road, dragging bin Laden back to New York to face trial. A fair trial. Represented by competent counsel. It would have sent a real message to the world. But that’s not the kind of political leadership we have. These guys are goons.
Hoo-rah. The only take away here is that the United States has Osama bin Laden’s scalp. Somehow this is supposed to make us feel good.
It’s just a movie, people will say, but that really isn’t true. In an era when very few people pay attention to the news or have a single clue about what is going on in any way about anything, popular movies often become the version of history that matters. For example, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan play fast and loose with history, and their version is the one that is widely accepted, even by journalists, today.
It’s not really a big deal that this movie sucks. But it is really weird that not everyone can see it.
14 Comments.
Is this the same Bigelow who did “Hurt Locker?” I saw that movie. I watched with full attention. I can barely recall the plot at all. None of the characters created any resonance or interest in me. What I can recall of the plot was that it wasn’t very interesting, and that there were portions where I kept saying, “Am I seriously expected to believe this?”
My suspicion is that Bigelow isn’t a very talented director at all, but one side supports her because they figure that with her “in the picture,” they can keep marginalizing the other women directors. (“Sorry, honey. We’ve already got a chick who does movies.)
The other side supports her because they realize she’s one of a very small number of women directors to get mainstream dramatic (not chick-flick dramatic) films, and if that’s ever going to change, they have to smile and smile and approve of whatever she does, no matter how crappy and incoherent.
Both groups want her to succeed, but for different reasons.
@Alex, Yes, Bigelow is the same director who did the hurt locker. I was exactly the same way. All I can really remember about the movie was that it was about PTSD, that war kind of sucks, especially for the killers, apparently. I agree, she really isn’t a very good director, she certainly can’t get very good performances out of her actors and she goes with really terrible scripts. The whole issue is, film is about telling a narrative story, and I don’t think she even understand how to do that.
When I was very young, I was the beneficiary of a positive cultural development that made an accurate depiction of the U.S. treatment of Native Americans the default worldview. As a result, I was always confused by westerns: how come the cowboys are the good guys? And once I had enough history to realize that the Civil War abutted, and even overlapped, this time period, I watched this media with even more confusion: how could white people be the good guys?
The answer was a bit longer coming: because those in power must be worshipped.
There’s nothing keeping you from making compelling narratives where the actual, historical bad guys are the bad guys, but if you did, not just “white people” or “cowboys” would be the bad guys — you can finesse that — but the United States would be the bad guy. Authoritarianism says that’s a no-go.
So, yeah, to the topic of the OP, the movie does nothing for non-authoritarians. It would naturally turn you off. It’s like watching a Road Runner cartoon and expressing dismay at the physics modeling: you’re not buying the conceit. The victims MUST be nothing. Even the 9/11 victims are nothing, mere justifications, for those who have the most power to unleash the most hurt.
And by the way: we know that the assassins treated the women in Bin Laden’s home brutally. The initial reports stated as much, before the revisions started kicking in. This is how you know that this is no accident; it is essential that the victims be supine and beneath They That Rule in every way, so even our assassins must be more admirable than their womenfolk.
Greenwald has some good comments on this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/08/zero-dark-thirty-torture-brennan
I was pretty shocked by how popular the film was, but I shouldn’t have been. When bin Laden was killed, my first thought was, “well, that means there’s no way we’re getting any intelligence out of him now so tons of terrorists just got away with it — fuck you, victims of terrorism.” Everyone else’s reaction was some variation of communal masturbation. No actual justice for the victims, just a revenge fantasy crafted by the people who created the cesspool of violence in the first place. The movie is just an encore of the same.
I watched this film and came away feeling a bit sickened and depressed. I also saw that the torturers themselves were degraded and sickened by their own actions. The following rest of the film is a whitewash of “action scenes” and standard crap with the finale of finally getting Obama, where the lead actress, who is now obviously mentally ill and worn down from her long, delerious focus on getting him, is finally moved to tears by the final success of her efforts. I would never recommend this film as entertainment – but instead, a pastiche of whitewashing, blurring, and outright disregard for ethics and humanity – even in this light, it is a poorly made film.
Thanks Ted. I will avoid ZDT. Based on this review I’m sure I would it would bored and annoy the crap out of me.
I thought Schindler’s list was a pretty good movie though. Yeah, it whitewashed things a lot but it would be impossible to portray nazi treatement of jews on the big screen. Nobody would be able to sit through it. The still photographs in the musuems around the world are enough to give you nightmares for weeks.
I think the only way to “accurately” portray something as terrifying as war is to do it metaphorically, like Apocalyse Now. Just curious, did you like that movie?
But to answer your question, yes, our nation is crazy. That’s the only explanation for half our countrymen thinking you can solve police problems with the military, while at the same time arguing that the second amendment is key to resist an oppressive government, and oh by the way the constitution is the word of God. Their logic is so contradictory they must be crazy, or stupid. Maybe they are just stupid. Anyway, I have no hope for a popular revolution when the populous is as illogical as ours.
@Andy, Yes, I loved Apocalypse now. Especially the directors cut. Just amazing. Even the making of documentary is well worth seeing.
The problem I had with Schindler’s list was that it actually made the Holocaust look less bad than it really was. For example, there was never a death camp where Jews could have been herded into the showers, expecting to be killed, and then had water come out of the showerheads instead. No, it really was a hopeless nightmare, hell on earth, and there weren’t any bright spots.
There wasn’t any picture of Bin Laden because he died back in 2001 of kidney failure. That’s a conspiracy theory, of course.
In regards to Bigelow. There is quite a bit of sexism in Hollywood, contrary to reports by conservatives who claim that it’s “librul”. If Ms. Bigelow wants to direct good stuff, she’s going to have to go independent, I’m afraid.
Perhaps the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will use this film to inaugurate a very special Leni Riefenstahl award?
I knew a so-called Marxist from university, and was exchanging e-mails with him until the Osama assassination. He said the White House report was the only authoritative account of what really happened. I stopped e-mailing him, and now suspect that he worked for the US government infiltrating Marxist organisations, since he always had plenty of money without gainful employment.
The White House announced that Osama was killed in a firefight, that he was living in a multi-million dollar mansion, that the Seals found lots of porn and a plot that would have killed far more Americans than 9/11 and was very close to execution, but was stopped by the Seals just in time. The official version is that the Seals were asked to capture Osama alive, but, as they broke down the doors inside the villa, Osama and the other jihadists, AFTER the Seals had broken down the doors, grabbed their weapons and tried to shoot the Seals, and so the Seals were forced to kill all the men and one woman, but they had far fewer collateral deaths than any other approach or any non-US team would have required. So a great deal of thanks go to President Obama and the Seals for their courageous elimination of the world’s greatest threat and their prevention of another attack that would have been far worse than 9/11. The various books published, and ZDT, must fit the official White House narrative, but are allowed to add such unofficial details as will be most marketable to a gullible public.
Bit by bit, we got contradictory information, all of which my so-called Marxist schoolmate rejects.
First, the ‘multi-million dollar mansion’ was worth less than $40,000. Next, the Pakistani investigators who investigated the scene found three dead male bodies that had been killed execution-style, not in a firefight. Next the New York Times reported (in an article far to the back) that when Pakistan gives sanctuary to a wanted Muslim, they insist that the compound must have no weapons of any kind. Then we learned that the White House had known of Osama’s location for at least a year, and had a large cadre of CIA agents surrounding the villa and watching to get a good idea of Osama’s typical movements.
That much is known. Beyond that must be conjecture, but relatively safe conjecture:
President Obama had a choice of drones or Seals, and knew any loss of American life would play very badly for the election. So he must have been quite sure that Osama was unarmed, so the Seal assassination team could go in with minimal risk to the Seals. Had the occupants of the villa actually been heavily armed, no one who knows anything about ‘firefights’ could believe that every single Seal somehow managed to avoid even the slightest injury, so President Obama would have used drones, followed by a team sent in to get DNA proof that Osama had been killed.
From this, one asks, ‘Was the porn real? Was the jihadist plot real? My personal guess is, of course, ‘No.’ But there’s no proof either way.
And to the question, ‘Was the information required to locate Osama obtained by the use of what, legally, must be called by the euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation’? The only answer that is logically consistent with the facts is, ‘Certainly not!’
So I’m not planning to go see this film.
michaelwme:
You forgot about the fake vaccine the U.S. used to get at bin Laden which will likely murder innocent people as well:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna
This is one of the harshest things about modern political reality. It takes very little information before you have little common ground with the common man on the base political narrative of the age. The U.S. murdered innocent people in order to assassinate a former U.S.-employee in order to help cover up the lack of pursuit of the murderers of hundreds of U.S. citizens because it would have been dangerous for political elites. This has nothing in common with the official story. There is no media outlet running this narrative. The most “liberal” programs on television either don’t know or (more likely) don’t care. The Saudis (and likely Egyptians) responsible for the September 11th attacks, and the U.S. officials who allowed them rather than take decisive action to stop them — all will go not merely unpunished, but completely unaccused — and the best you can hope for is Jon Stewart doing another victory lap over the graves of the victims.
Alienation doesn’t begin to cover it.
The one advantage of Zero Dark Thirty is that it becomes such a notorious piece of propaganda that it encourages viewers to dig out the truth in disgust. Be thankful for its lack of subtlety, if only for that.
Speaking of narratives that aren’t being discussed ….
I happened across a DVD the other day about the American GI resistance to the Vietnam War. I don’t recall ever hearing any of this stuff in high school or college. The documentary is called “Sir. No Sir.” Basically, it says that the reason the Vietnam War shifted to an aerial bombardment war was because the ground forces were refusing, in large enough numbers to be significant, to fight. We “lost” Vietnam because the soldiers started learning what we were actually doing and simply refused to continue.
alex:
Also: it was the fragging.
(“Fragging,” before gaming got a hold of the word, referred to the sudden corporeal dissolution of military officers due to grenades spontaneously leaping from the ammo depot, rolling randomly into the officer’s tent, then accidentally going off, harming no one but the fucker who just sent more boys to pointlessly die or murder innocent people. Due to this bizarre Vietnamese weather phenomenon, aerial strategies were preferred.)
IIRC, the big secret with air power is that the U.S. was falling behind on the air war, too, which was kept from the public for some time.
And by the way michaelwme — that was a good point about the “firefight.” Given Obama’s contempt for the lives of children and love of drone murders (and fear of losing soldiers), the assassination does sound more Jessica Lynch-ish.
Ms Bigelow was on the Colbert Report on Tuesday, where they pointed out that her film was based on ‘first person’ accounts, that it is an absolutely accurate dramatisation of the official White House version of what happened. Accusing the film of inaccuracies is accusing the White House of inaccuracies. And I would never believe the White House did not tell the American people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
It might not be Pakistanis sending drones to New York City. If Mr Rall ever becomes a serious threat to US security, the US President has every right to use a drone against him, or any of us, to keep America safe.