by Jefferson Robbins Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is politically abhorrent, an ideologue’s digest of how torture “works” on behalf of democratic governments seeking to defend from or avenge themselves upon terrorism. There’s no debate: by means of torture, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) digs her way from Osama bin Laden’s outer network to his inner circle, one, two, three. As journalist Malcolm Harris put it, “That Kathryn Bigelow used to be involved in left aesthetics should make us shiver in fear about who we may yet become.” But subtly, in the way Bigelow presents her lead character’s view of the battlefield and the flag under which she strives, Zero Dark Thirty betrays mixed feelings about its own ramifications.
Start with the heroine’s name: “Maya” in Sanskrit is the illusion of reality that we all experience, which creates a false division between our selves and the wider universe, and ultimately becomes the source of all suffering. (“Maya” also ranks among the top 2,000 most popular names for girls in America. We like our illusions.) Practically all the information Maya gathers through the course of the film is obtained through intermediaries, or through filters. Never once does she punch or strip or waterboard a detainee, but she’s there when it happens, and occasionally gives the orders that make it happen. What she does not take away from in-person interrogations, she gathers by the medium of the video screen.
A great portion of Zero Dark Thirty deals with Maya’s gradual inurement to seeing. She starts off visibly sickened by the acts she’s party to. Agents around her, like the brutal field op Dan (Jason Clarke), try to shield her from direct involvement. “There’s no shame in watching on the monitor,” says Dan, who keeps pet monkeys at Bagram Airbase in a cage more spacious than the box into which he shuts captured al-Quaeda informant Ammar (Reda Kateb).
But Maya hardens, as one must, at least on the surface. Soon she’s leading interrogations on her own, and perusing the videorecordings of other torture victims for clues to bin Laden’s refuge. She rubs her eyes at footage of humiliated men hanging by their wrists and grilled for intel, but that could just be the fatigue of a long night’s cram session. Soon enough, she’s chatting by satphone with her colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) while watching a drone strike that appears to have no more consequence for her than a Pringles ad.
These screens through which Maya views horror tend to pixellate, their images breaking down into the component bits that make up the whole. This is an effect we experience, even in the age of high-definition displays and phenomenal video bitrates, when we lean too close to our monitors. A bit or pixel by itself is the most basic unit of information, but it’s useless without context. Try to build a house out of one brick and see how far you get. Maya is gathering bricks, and soon they’re all she can see.
As Maya works, the American flag intrudes on her periphery. For the most part, it hangs limp as she interacts with fellow agents in bunkered, insulated CIA stations. It’s presented as a mundane office object, always to one side of the frame, never intruding or signaling sharp meaning.
At Camp Chapman, the pivot point for the entire film, the flag snaps awake in the wind and forcefully imprints on our awareness. It is doubled in one shot–a shot that if held for a few more languorous frames would smack of Terrence Malick–by the billowing camouflage netting that shelters Jessica while she awaits a crucial rendezvous.
The flag is pristine; the netting that mirrors it, of course, is ragged and full of holes. The symbol is transmuting before our eyes.
Jessica’s death in the field radicalizes Maya with a new sense of exceptionalism: “I believe I was spared so I can finish the job,” she says. This is a very American sentiment. When Maya presents her evidence that bin Laden resides in an Abbottabad compound, when she’s undercut by her male colleagues, when she identifies herself to the chief of the CIA as “the motherfucker that found this place,” the American flag is perched on her shoulder. Upon entering the room, in fact, she’s directed to sit next to it.
Maya goes on to observe the Abbottabad raid–again, from a distance–and confirm the assassination of bin Laden. Her job completed with a simple nod of the head, she then boards a C-17 for home, takes her place, and begins to weep.
Maya sits against sagging red cargo netting strung across white acoustic quilting–the ragged flag again. The dusk light is on her ivory skin. The woman who portrayed a Universal Mother in Malick’s The Tree of Life is here the symbolic mother of a nation, wounded and wilting, frayed by the bloody work done in delivering it.
to paste what i wrote when this debate was at its most furious:
surely the lack of triumphalism in the treatment of bin laden’s death allows the film to evade such pro-torture readings? maybe i’m alone in finding that final set piece to be the saddest of the lot, revealing this goal strived for with such fervor for so long to be just another ugly scene balancing the books against a series of other ugly scenes, sagging under the sickening weight of the situation’s overall cost and providing little if any catharsis. it’s all there in a soldier’s throwaway line, isn’t it? “what a mess”.
in fact, if anything the worst scenes of the final half hour involve the film heavy-handedly forcing this point home by lingering on the face of a soldier as he can’t look away from the terrified faces of young/female occupants, and of course the emphasis on maya’s lack of relief; this isn’t a happy ending precisely because it’s the inevitable end-product of a war characterised by an atmosphere that nurtures, among many other disturbing things, pro-torture politics.
Yeah, she squirts a few at the end (torture demands so much of us torturers), but it just lends dignity to the sacrifice of her humanity in the name of something greater. This isn’t a movie that makes you less resolved to kill. The most effective way for a modern mind to sidestep its conscience is to eulogize it this way.
And this mother of a nation thing–an aryan goddess shedding tears through necessary bloodshed–couldn’t smack more of fascist propaganda.
there is nothing “great” about bin laden’s death in ZDT, the entire final act is infused with numb, deflated futility. bigelow’s point is that it *wasn’t* worth it, there’s zero dignity to be found, this woman has become a lonely, hollowed-out husk with just this grotty fucking corpse to show for it. the books are balanced, the numbers equate, but the human cost is immeasurable. the despairing shake of the head, the “what a mess…” — that’s bigelow’s thesis right there.
i do think boal confuses the issue somewhat with his crappy script though.
Disagree with the claim that the Abbotobad Scene in ZDT wasn’t meant to be “great” or register as anything but a complete triumph. And it should be. It is the most successful American military operation in decades and filmed as such, its Bigelows Tour De Force and anything but numbing or deflating. And if Bigelow wanted to Show Maya as a husk of a human than she probably shouldn’t cast the worlds most ethereal beauty in the part and shoot her final scene in gorgeous magic hour lighting.
if all you see is glory when bigelow’s lingering on the horrified face of a soldier processing the screams of women and children, or realistically depicting the brutal slaughter of indistinguishable enemies, or indeed showing maya’s numb, exhausted reaction to identifying the body as bin laden, then there’s nothing left to discuss i suppose.
Well done Jefferson for the article, and it’s a nice companion to Angelo’s original review.
I remember watching an episode of the post-911 TV series Threat Matrix in the early 90s, within which one of the characters knowingly tortured a terror suspect to death by feeding him citrus (to which he had an allergy), and in a subsequent courtoom episode the torturer was acquitted (and their actions implicitly vindicated) because the torture yielded results. It honestly reminded me of what an East German TV show from 1961 glorifying the Stasi would have looked like.
I also remember watching the post-911 episode of The West Wing within which a character sought to explain middle eastern politics on a fucking blackboard, implicitly patronising the audience aschildren, and leading to the stunning conclusion that “Al-qaeda=KKK” Well no, it didn’t then and doesn’t now.
Then there’s Zero Dark Thirty. I think it was unusually brave for an American film to be this morally complex and let its audience decide whether losing your soul justifies being king (or queen) of the world-the Hays code and its demand for morally pat endings still casts a long shadow, and kudos to Bigelow for not yielding to the easy option.
*should have been early-2000s for Threat Matrix-doh!
Where’s the original review?
@Saif: Ain’t gone anywhere, though I accidentally linked another site’s review under Related Articles. Fixed.