Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty is a complex and difficult film, and here I want to hammer the things I think about it into coherence. The question for me is: What does it say about torture?

The answer is that although it has some commonalities with things I’ve seen before, it does not cheerlead for torture in the same way as do some other texts I have worked with. I have three main questions. Firstly, where does torture appear in the film? Secondly, how is it shown, and in what narrative context? Finally, I ask, what are the effects of this?

Where does torture appear in the film?

Firstly, the opening few scenes of the film are centred around the torture of the nephew of Khalid Sheik Muhammad (KSM), and from these scenes we can draw two points.

1)  Torture is horrible. This is valuable: even though the scenes are explicit and difficult to watch, they make several points about the horror of torture. By showing explicitly what is involved in procedures described elsewhere in anodyne phrases like ‘close confinement’, ‘dietary manipulation’, and ‘waterboarding’, the film does great work in demystifying torture. It is stressed that torture is horrible and distressing.

2)  The central narrative point of the film is established: the American characters learn that they must find Abu Ahmed if they want to find Osama bin Laden (UBL).

Therefore, we draw the conclusion that although torture is horrible, it has utility. It is true that the information is extracted from the prisoner in the context of a comparatively genial conversation over food – but this is only possible because the torturer has established his control over the victim’s personal sovereignty so completely that even the mention of ropes and a box will force him to continue his disclosure. This is invisible power, this is authority: commanding a person to speak against himself with a facial expression and the hardening of the voice. Make no mistake, this remains duress, and the only reason he speaks is the knowledge that incurring his torturer’s displeasure incurs further torture. Continued violence is the hidden referential content throughout this conversation.

But to return to the point: torture is awful but it has worked. From this stage of the narrative we know that Abu Ahmed is the key to the story – as indeed he proves to be.

We see more torture, however: Maya spends a great deal of time rewatching taped torture sessions and gleaning from them repeated references to Abu Ahmed. Which is to say: torture testimony confirms the original piece of information, which we later learn to be the key to the discovery of UBL.

So from this we conclude that torture works. It may be morally degrading for all involved, it may be hideous: nonetheless, we see that torture works. Further, since each titled section of the film is roughly clustered around an intelligence technique or a military tactic (Tradecraft: surveillance, Canaries: Navy SEALS), we can conclude that the opening section of the film, The Saudi Group, treats torture as its intelligence technique. This adjacency is another crucial factor in the film’s normalisation of torture. Each technique is subject to failure and redundancy, but each represents a stage in the procedural progression of the narrative. Torture in Zero Dark Thirty is one technique among many, perhaps less palatable than but just as potentially useful as any other intelligence measure.

How is it represented?

This is why it is disingenuous for Bigelow to claim the first amendment in defence of her torture scenes.

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time. [...] confusing depiction with endorsement is the first step toward chilling any American artist’s ability and right to shine a light on dark deeds, especially when those deeds are cloaked in layers of secrecy and government obfuscation.

Of course depiction is not necessarily endorsement. I agree that we need films and novels and paintings that deal with and represent torture and violence. I don’t have a problem with the fact that she has done it, I have a problem with the way she has done it: the visual techniques and the specific narrative context. She has not explicitly endorsed torture: indeed, some of the things she does are radical and brave, particularly placing the torturer from the opening of the film at the heart of government by its conclusion, making a necessary and powerful allegation about the absence of accountability for war crimes. 

However, what she has done is emphasise the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld narrative of militarily effective torture. She uses the ideological fiction that torture in CIA black sites produced useful information as her ‘factual backdrop’, simultaneously excluding an enormous amount of information about war on terror prisons. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay are mentioned only as a hindrance, as something that ‘fucked us’, and that introduced the law as a barrier to operations. None of the hundreds of false positives are mentioned at all. No mention is made of rendition flights or of murders in custody. Perhaps these things are not relevant to the hunt for UBL – indeed, because they were totally useless and counterproductive – but to exclude even mention of them is disingenuous. This selection of material is an inherently political – and not neutral – process, and one that skews her narrative in favour of a very dubious position.

Her realism is important here. Bigelow is undoubtedly an excellent filmmaker, with a great talent for storytelling and the creation of compelling images. But what function does this aesthetically accomplished realism perform? As always, it is to conflate her ideologically determined diegetic universe with the real world, in order for the film to seem objective and to appear to be telling the truth.

There is much talk about how the filmmakers have attempted to be even-handed, and have simply presented the evidence from which viewers can draw their own conclusions. It is not even-handed. In places it is American self-criticism – a portrait of moral decline and failure – but that does not make it even-handed. For example, to begin with the obvious, it assumes that finding and killing Osama bin Laden is a good and desirable thing. This is true, but it is not a neutral fact: and as such, a film that claims it as its central objective should not claim to be neutral. It is not even as balanced as The Battle of Algiers (1966), which at least had a colonial mouthpiece in it to oppose the FLN. By adhering to facts and dates – and by claiming to base her film on testimony of those involved, as the introductory titlecard proclaims – Bigelow creates a visual reality effect, the point of which is to seduce us into believing that the images correspond to and reproduce some historical factuality with a high degree of verisimilitude. Some commentators have used phrases like ‘documentary authenticity’, as though documentaries were automatic conduits to truth, and ‘journalistic objectivity’, as though journalists are immune to bias. To paraphrase Errol Morris: style doesn’t guarantee truth. When somebody says that a film looks like a documentary, ask what they mean. An Errol Morris documentary creates a very different reality effect to a documentary by Nick Broomfield or Claude Lanzmann, and none of them are neutral.

Effects

War fictions are always political. They do – are – war work. American fictions like this are obviously ideological products. Zero Dark Thirty, by reproducing the Bush narrative as though it constitutes a neutral factual backdrop, naturalises an extreme and untrue position, guiding the audience to the familiar dirty hands conclusion – we don’t want to do it but we have to because it works – rather than allowing them to decide based on the evidence presented.

In 2001, Cheney said that Americans would have to work on the dark side to get things done. In 2012, Bigelow shows that walking on the dark side, though no picnic, was worthwhile.

Appendix: Code Name: Geronimo

Bigelow’s representation of violence is nothing like as salacious or triumphalist as that seen in Code Name: Geronimo, the direct-to-DVD alternative version. It shows the story of the SEALS, lionising them in the same uncritical and macho fashion as Act of Valor (2010), and using the same gun-barrel viewpoint – visually echoing video games – that it made popular.

Here we see Osama bin Laden being shot, and we are invited to experience the act of shooting him dead.

 HEADSHOT

So at least Zero Dark Thirty is not as crass as Code Name: Geronimo reveals it could have been.