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.