(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)
Zero Dark Thirty is up for a lot of Oscars this weekend. It
is also one of the most controversial movies in years, and one I have
been mulling over a lot since I saw it. It is a powerful,
expertly-crafted piece of cinema, full of great performances and a
climactic sequence that will likely be remembered and clumsily imitated
for years to come. It is, without a doubt, a Great movie.
But being Great is different than being Good. Greatness speaks to
the magnitude of an achievement, whereas goodness speaks to the inherent
worthiness or nobility of that achievement. And there’s a nagging
possibility that
Zero Dark Thirty is, like Oz, Great and
Terrible. It is of course possible to be both – it’s pretty much
conventional wisdom at this point that movies like
Triumph Of The Will or
Birth Of A Nation were technical and innovative triumphs in service of repugnant themes.
Not that
ZDT is on the level of those movies; it’s far too
thoughtful and ambivalent about its own characters and content to be
placed in the same category as straight up nazi/KKK propaganda. I only
bring it up to clarify that acknowledging the film’s considerable
technical merits is a separate matter than judging it’s thematic
content. To sort out that whole mess, I’m going to need to talk through
my personal beliefs as they relate to torture, the debate surrounding
it, the manner in which movies affect public discourse, the
responsibilities of an artist to society at large, and how this movie
pits all of them against each other in some sort of moral-rhetorical
Thunderdome.
And spoiler alert, I’m like, fully liberal, so if you aren’t you may
want to take a quick drink and steel up your sensibilities, because the
next bits may produce mild chafing. The funny thing is, even if you
disagree with the political views I’m about to espouse, the later
sections are probably even more relevant to you, as you likely face the
same sort of issues
ZDT raised with me on some small or large
scale with most movies that come out of the Gomorrah of Southern
California each and every year.
ON THE MORALITY OF TORTURE
Torture is wrong. Full stop. And yes, waterboarding and other
“enhanced interrogation” techniques are torture. In the last 10-12
years we’ve pretended there is legitimate debate over this issue, when
in fact it has all been clearly decided for over a century – US soldiers
who waterboarded prisoners in the
Phillipines
were court martialed and the general who authorized it was dismissed
from the Army by Teddy Roosevelt, even before we spearheaded the Geneva
Conventions codifying torture as against international law, and before
we
executed Japanese soldiers who did it for war crimes following WWII, and before our generals
specifically designated it illegal again during Vietnam.
(note – This being an opinion piece and not an academic paper, a
couple links are far from the definitive word on the subject. I threw
them up solely to demonstrate that I’m not pulling this stuff directly
from my ass)
It has been a great moral failing on America’s part to have allowed
the use of these techniques to be defended as valid methods of
prosecuting the War On Terror. I understand the reasons it happened,
and there have been moments when I felt myself waffling on whether it
was maybe okay to do it a little bit to people who really, really
(probably) had it coming. But I don’t kid myself about my motivations
in those moments: it’s not because torture is a tricky grey area, or
because there are legitimate questions as to whether the types of abuse
depicted in
ZDT actually constitute torture. It’s because I was
scared. That’s it. I was scared shitless following 9/11 and I wanted to
be reassured that everything that could be done to stop it from
happening again was being done. I wanted to know that our protectors
were going to Great lengths, even if they were Terrible ones.
But as a nation, I think it is fair to say, America should always be
stronger than I am in my most cowardly moments. And I believe the true
measure of strength is in how we live or fail to live up to our
professed ideals, and not in the scale or severity of damage we are
capable of inflicting. For the entire lifetime of the majority of
Americans, we have possessed the power to destroy literally the entire
world several times over if that was what we wanted. We know no end of
ways to inflict agony upon a helpless person. We can do these things,
easily. It is the restraint not to do these things, even when
frightened or provoked, that makes us great.
Maybe that’s too high-minded. Perhaps it really boils down to this: the argument that we
have
to do these things to defeat this enemy strikes me as an admission of
weakness. I mean, motherfuckers came at us with box cutters. I’m not
saying shit isn’t serious, but if we’re so damaged by it that we don’t
know how to hit back without shredding the Bill of Rights and Geneva
Conventions, that to me tastes like admitting that we weren’t such hot
shit to begin with. It’s saying “look, we just aren’t strong enough to
handle this unless we do all that stuff we told everyone was
unacceptable to do no matter what the circumstances.” I think that’s
bullshit. And no excuse anyway. If your standards only apply when you
are not under pressure, then guess what, you don’t actually have any
standards.
I should really have just linked to
Seanbaby and Batman making the same points in much more concise, hilarious fashion.
ON THE ACTUAL TORTURE DEBATE
That’s all well and good. But while it’s all the reason I need to
oppose torture, I also recognize the fact of the matter is that most
Americans do not agree with me, or at least don’t feel very strongly
about it. So a great deal of the actual debate on the issue revolves
around the murkier area of whether torture actually works as an
interrogation technique. For my part, I believe that torture is
effective at getting you a lot of information, and fairly quickly. The
question is whether you get accurate information from it, which
(spoiler) in the movie it does.
ZDT, to be fair, actually does raise this issue in a brief
moment or two, such as when it is eventually revealed that the identity
of the courier Maya has been searching for has been in the CIA’s records
for a decade, but no one else had been able to parse its significance
amongst the flood of leads and info they gathered post-9/11. I don’t
think this is enough to introduce real ambiguity into the film’s
presentation of torture, though. If the sharpest critique of torture is
that it is
so effective that it’s difficult to manage the
surplus of information it produces, I think you came down pretty
squarely on one side of that issue.
There are other practical arguments against torture, of course. But
the film doesn’t touch at all on the effect a sanctioned torture program
has on our standing in international affairs, how disastrous it can be
when it produces bad intel (rather than
useless info like the
prisoner shouting random days of the week, which is a wash that leaves
our heroes where they began), how it encourages our enemies to fight to
the death rather than surrendering, or how even if only applied to
foreign “non-lawful enemy combatants”, it sets an example for domestic
law enforcement in how they might deal with especially difficult or
unsavory subjects (if that seems like a stretch, there are documented
cases of police departments using these techniques on citizens,
including waterboarding, stretching back to the 1930s and further).
That’s not really a fault of the film, though, as most of that stuff
lies well outside of the intently focused story it is telling. It does
not present a well-rounded overview of the torture debate because it is
not trying to be a movie about torture. And it isn’t, exactly, but it
is a movie that condones torture. I’ll return to that distinction and why it is significant in the next section.
The point is, while I hate that the argument over torture is based so
much around whether it works rather than whether it should be beneath
us as a people, I accept that as a practical reality. America is far
too accepting of torture in my view, and anything that makes it seem
more like a reliable method of intelligence gathering is only going to
exacerbate that problem.
Zero Dark Thirty does suggest that the
use of torture was effective. At the very least, it demonstrates that
interrogations “enhanced” by prior acts of torture led to the major
breakthroughs that led to Bin Laden. If you’re not apt to read between
the lines even that much, it presents torturing prisoners as point A and
a dead Bin Laden as point B, and the basic, inescapable logic of
narrative cinema suggests that what happens at the end of a movie is the
result of what happened in the beginning and middle.
This makes
ZDT a pro-torture movie, because it ends with Osama
Bin Laden dead. And as much as the film goes out of its way not to
sugarcoat the brutality of the operation (and somehow manages to make an
utterly gripping sequence out of it without resorting to blatantly
manipulative jingoism – don’t ask me how the hell they pulled that off)
it’s impossible to desensationalize these events. It is still the
triumphant culmination of the hero’s struggles throughout the film, even
if the final shots suggest that she feels somewhat hollowed out by
finally achieving it. If the intention there was to make the audience
question whether the lengths she/we went to in order to get Bin Laden
were worth it, I don’t think it succeeded in actually planting those
doubts in anyone’s mind.
And look, even my bleeding-heartiness has limits; I’m not suggesting
that this shouldn’t be in some way triumphant, or that the raid itself
was wrong. I’m against the execution of criminals without trial,
but…well, it’s not like the guy was proclaiming his innocence or
anything. When you publicly take credit for the mass murder of American
citizens and declare open war on the entire country, I’m totally cool
with the gloves coming off. Dude asked for a war, and that means less
trials and more Black Hawks.
Anyway, the point I was making is that by the movie’s and vast
majority of the audience’s estimation, killing Bin Laden = Good, so the
movie depicts torturing people as producing a good result. And the
majority of America, whether they think we should be using it currently,
does believe on some level that it’s use on Al Qaeda suspects was
justified. This is in no small part because the ends of those
particular means included the eventual death of Bin Laden.
Given all those givens, the movie is ultimately pro-torture. It may
be agnostic as to the morality of the enterprise, but it comes down
strongly on the side of its effectiveness, which realistically speaking
is the area that plays the largest role in shaping the opinions of the
general public.
SO WHAT? IT’S JUST A MOVIE
Okay, so let’s pretend that you agree with me that torturing people is bad
and that the movie encourages its acceptance as legitimate tool of intelligence gathering. The next question becomes so what?
So this creates a conundrum for me, the pinko movie geek. I’m
completely against censorship of any kind, but one of my biggest pet
peeves is people crying censorship when they are simply being
criticized. Here’s the important distinction: only the government can
really censor things. Nothing else is actually censorship; a network,
studio or publisher isn’t required to help anyone distribute their works
if they don’t want, and when people make fun of how stupid and terrible
your ideas are, they are not infringing on your right to free speech,
they are in fact exercising theirs. So for the love of God and my own
sanity, stop going online and whining “I thought we had free speech in
this country???” every time some politician or celebrity catches flack
over saying something idiotic. We do have it, idiot, which is why we’re
free to call idiots idiots when they’re being idiots.
This is not about censorship, it is about criticism, and while any
time you say “this is bad” it carries with it the implication “…and they
shouldn’t have made it,” that is very different from saying “they
should not have been
allowed to make it.” I am not saying that
Bigelow and Boal shouldn’t have the right to make the film they want,
I’m saying that I wish they wanted to make a different one, in
particular because they’re so goddamn good at it.
And I really don’t even want to do that, because part of my godless
liberal agenda is to allow artists to make whatever art they want. And I
am generally contemptuous of the pearl-clutching mindset that would
hold violent movies or video games to blame for whatever fresh horror
some lunatic has found a way to inflict on his fellow men. I don’t
believe that is true, or that depiction of horrible or disgusting acts
amounts to endorsing them. I’m not worried about a rash of kids
waterboarding their little brothers in the backyard, nor am I
particularly worried about anyone who opposed torture being persuaded by
the movie to switch their position. Hell, I don’t even think “torture
works!” is the primary theme of the movie, which tries pretty hard at
not having a discernible opinion about it.
But one thing that always feels a little off with me is that when us
fans of dark and violent entertainments sneer at the pearl-clutchers,
we’re can be so quick to dismiss their position as silly that we end up
denigrating the artform we love. In our eagerness to distance our
beloved slaughterfests from the actual slaughter of an Aurora or Newton,
we end up in essence saying “they’re just movies! They don’t actually
matter!”
Which is ridiculous. I don’t think movies implant violent urges in
otherwise peaceful people, but if they are really incapable of impacting
people in a significant way, then why do we spend so much time watching
and analyzing them? Boring friends, family and strangers at bars with
exhaustive diatribes about what a shitty script
Prometheus has or how
Jackie Brown is
actually Tarantino’s strongest film despite being his only flop? Spend
our free time writing 4000 word essays about them on websites that take
their name from schlocky horror flicks?
We wouldn’t, if we really believed that. But we don’t. We know
movies matter. Maybe not on the level that stuff like genocide, climate
change, your mother’s love or a double shot of tar heroin on a cold
Christmas morning matter, but we care about movies because they affect
us powerfully. And if something can affect us positively, it also has
the ability to affect us negatively. It
has to.
But the question is really about
how movies influence us. As I
said before, I don’t think they inspire acts of violence, and I don’t
think that most movies that set out to sway people’s opinion on a
specific subject really have much of an impact. “Message” movies don’t
change many minds, imo, not that
ZDT is a message movie. No, I
think that movies influence the public consciousness most powerfully not
by way of the conclusions the story draws at the end, but in terms of
what they take for granted while getting us there.
Let me give you a couple for instance-s. To use a very specific
example, I don’t think a ton of people are walking around fully
accepting the conspiracy theory that
JFK puts forward as the real
truth of the assassination. But I do think a lot of people have a
totally warped view of who Jim Garrison was due to Costner’s portrayal.
To use a very general example, I think movies have been very
influential in making overt racism more and more socially unacceptable
over the years. But I don’t think that is because so many racists saw
Driving Miss Daisy or
Crash and walked out thinking “man, that’s it, I’ve
got
to cut back on all this racisting.” Don’t get me wrong, maybe movies
like that did lead some people to examine their prejudices to some
degree, and that’s great. But I think that ultimately it wasn’t movies
that set out specifically to end racism that succeeded in shifting the
Overton Window, so much as a hundred other comedies and action movies
and whatever that started using racism as a casual shorthand for
establishing villains and assholes. Those less ambitious flicks
normalized the idea that racism = bad in a way that didn’t really brook
argument, because the movies weren’t trying to build up to that point,
they simply took it as a given and never stopped to let you think about
whether to accept or reject it.
Which, I worry, is what
ZDT will do for torture. Again, I
don’t think it’s going to change the mind of anyone who already agreed
with me, but there is a very large portion of the population that is not
enthusiastically pro-torture, but is sort of okay with it as long as
they don’t have to hear about it too much. A high profile movie
reinforcing the idea that these practices get major results is only
going to make it easier for those people to quietly tolerate it, even if
it never comes out and tells us that torture is great. In fact, it’s
to the film’s credit that it doesn’t
tell us anything about these highly charged real life scenarios.
But the most basic maxim of moviemaking, after all, is “show, don’t
tell.” And not for nothing; commentary of any sort raises our mental
guard. When a movie tells us something, we can choose to reject it.
But what they show us has a way of slipping past our defenses and
influencing us in subtle, surprising ways.
WHAT SHOULD THEY HAVE DONE INSTEAD?
Complicating this issue further is that I have no idea how Bigelow
and Boal, were they interested in catering to my personal political
views (while obviously having no obligation to do so), could’ve
addressed these issues while making essentially the same movie. Because
I take them at their word that they do not personally support torture,
and that their goal was to tell this story as truthfully and objectively
as possible. They didn’t set out to make an apologia for enhanced
interrogation techniques as a valid weapon in the War on Terror. They
actually wrote an entire script before anyone knew what Seal Team Six
was. They were about to start production under the title
Tora Bora,
with the climax being the failure to capture Bin Laden in the titular
valley a decade earlier, when Obama came on TV to tell us that we got
him.
And I don’t know what the hell you do with your movie at that point.
Sticking with the original version isn’t an option. Grafting a
different finale on a movie that was initially about the failure of
these tactics completely changes the thrust of the entire piece, and
brings up all the issues I’ve been going over. Scrapping it and coming
at it entirely from a new direction goes against your stated purpose of
telling a true story as objectively as possible. It would be admitting
that no matter how conscientious you are about getting the facts right,
you’re still manipulating the audience’s response to them by how you
present them, how you choose what to focus on and ignore or omit.
That’s a thorny issue even for documentarians who have to edit entirely
unmanipulated footage into a coherent narrative. But these two
especially seem intent on making highly realistic movies about hot
button political topics while retaining a staunchly apolitical pose. It
is just a pose, however; I don’t think you can engage meaningfully with
such charged political issues without taking some sort of stance on
them.
But it is important to note, I don’t think
Zero Dark Thirty in
its final form is factually inaccurate or even dishonest. It’s
probably much more accurate than most movies sporting the “based on a
true story” label are, and as it applies to the issue I’m focused on, it
does have the broad strokes correct. There was a program of systematic
torture in place within the intelligence community for several years,
and eventually that intelligence community was successful in finding and
killing Bin Laden.
That does not justify it; certainly not morally,
but even in terms of efficacy. It took over a decade to produce that
result, after all. Maybe the leads that led to the Abottabad compound
would never have been uncovered at all without torture. Maybe we
could’ve produced the same information with a cleaner interrogation
program, but it would’ve been slower coming. Maybe it would’ve been
faster. Maybe it would’ve been faster
and the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan wouldn’t have burned as hot and long as they did. We can’t
know any of it for sure, because history only happened one way, and what
it tells us is that abusing detainees didn’t
stop us from (eventually) getting to him.
The distinction between correlation and causation is something we can
debate in the real world. There is simply not room to parse out that
distinction in a narrative film depicting these events, however, because
as I went over before, that structure is built on basic, powerful
assumptions of cause and effect. The type of assumptions that bypass
our conscious critical faculties and appeal to our innate need to impose
order and linearity to the mess of information we process every minute
of every day. That need has served us well as a species, as constantly
looking for the cause to every effect has figuratively rocketed us to
the top of the food chain, literally rocketed us to the moon, and made
cheaper, more potent tar heroin available on cold Christmas mornings.
That need to make sense of things is also the basis for storytelling,
and the unspoken pact between the teller and the audience. What makes
something a “story” is that it is what happens to the characters (be
they real or fictional), but stripped down to the parts that
matter.
This goes as much for surrealists like David Lynch as for naturalists
like Bigelow. As allergic as the former can be to linearity in his
narratives, every shot in his movies is chosen for a purpose, because he
believes it has some relevance to the whole. And of course
ZDT
is not a surrealist piece. It’s a straightforward, focused story, and
if we are not to understand that the torture led to Bin Laden, then why
exactly
does it take up so much of the movie?
So in the end, we’re left with a movie that reinforces the dominate
narrative of the torture debate, that it might be messy but damn it, it
works.
Which is a message that I find to be genuinely harmful to our society.
So I wish it hadn’t been made. But I would never want to stop it from
being made. I don’t want to hate it, but I can’t make myself like it.
And round and round it goes.
That’s not much of a conclusion, though, so I’ll end by saying this
to anyone who loves the movie and thinks I’m an idiot for worrying about
this stuff: defend the movie, call me stupid, call my politics
dangerously naive, tell me none of my opinions matter because I have no
right to tell the filmmakers how to make their art. Just don’t tell me
that ZDT doesn’t have a stance on torture. And definitely don’t tell me
“it’s only a movie.” Because a movie, that’s a hell of a thing.
…
TL; DR version:
Great fucking movie. But kinda awful too.
