by BILL VAN AUKEN
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film chronicling the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, which opened in select theaters December 19, has largely received rave reviews and garnered a host of awards and nominations as the year’s best movie. It is a shameful work, and this reception says far more about the state of the media and the popular culture industry in the US than it does about the film itself.
With an emotionally exploitative opening of a dark screen and a sound track of fire fighters’ radio calls and frantic cries for help from the upper floors of the Twin Towers on 9/11, the film cuts to a CIA “black site,” where a detainee, his arms hung by ropes from the ceiling and his face cut and battered, confronts an American interrogator who promises “I will hurt you” if he fails to provide the information demanded.
The juxtaposition of the 9/11 soundtrack and the harrowing scenes of torture are presented as cause and effect, with one justifying the other.
Assisting the interrogator (Jason Clarke) are other individuals, their faces concealed by ski masks. With a break in the torture session, one of these assistants takes off her mask revealing Maya (Jessica Chastain), a rookie agent deployed “in the field” for the first time. Asked by the chief interrogator if she’d rather watch the brutality on a monitor outside the torture chamber, Maya instead insists that they go back in and resume their grisly work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAtWcvCxPhc
This introduces the main thread of the drama, using the term loosely, that is to follow, with Maya conducting a single-minded pursuit of clues leading to the whereabouts of bin Laden, while bravely battling resistance from the entire male-dominated leadership of the CIA until she finally prevails.
According to this improbable version of events, the junior female analyst single-handedly brought about the May 1, 2011 raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan that ended in the assassination of bin Laden and the shooting of several other defenseless men, women and children.
Bigelow provides a thin feminist overlay–some reviewers have gone so far as to draw a parallel between the protagonist and Bigelow herself, the first woman to win an Oscar for best director-—for a semi-fascistic cinematic embrace of the US military-intelligence apparatus and its crimes.
At nearly two hours, the film is long, dark and boring. Not a single character is developed, including Maya, about whom we know no more at the end than we did at the beginning. In an interview with Time magazine, Bigelow defended her failure to give any of her characters depth, declaring, “It pierces the momentum.”
What “momentum” there is consists of the torture and frequent ear-piercing explosions. The film manages to include not only 9/11, but also the July 7, 2005 London bombings, the bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in 2008, the December 2009 suicide bombing by a Jordanian double agent that killed seven CIA operatives at a base in Khost, Afghanistan and the 2010 abortive Times Square car-bombing attempt.
Virtually all of these acts were perpetrated by individuals who had no connection with bin Laden, but had been radicalized by the slaughter of civilians in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the abduction and torture of Muslims at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and CIA “black sites.”
The controversy surrounding the film—no doubt welcomed by the director and her screenwriter Mark Boal—centers on its first 25 minutes and the scenes of a helpless detainee being waterboarded, beaten, sexually humiliated, dragged across the floor in a dog collar and chain, forced-fed and sealed into a box smaller than a coffin. According to CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, Bigelow and Boal had to be persuaded to “tone down” the violence of the script, which in its original version had the prisoner beaten to a pulp.
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