Authors: Mickey Huff
Critics initially praised the film on release for its “realistic” depiction of the search for Osama bin Laden (OBL), including the famous raid on the Abbottabad compound that resulted in his alleged death (a story that, like 9/11, leaves us with a number of unanswered questions). But the film subsequently came under fire for claiming to be historically accurate, particularly with regard to the film's opening scenes in which an actor/CIA agent tortures another actor/al-Qaeda detainee to unearth a crucial piece of information that leads CIA investigators to discover bin Laden's whereabouts.
The resulting firestorm of criticism of the film from congressional leaders, drawing on Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigations from the previous year, attacked the ZDT team for misrepresenting (sort of) the facts in the OBL huntâ“the US may torture alleged terror suspects, but the US did
not
torture terror suspects to find Osama bin Laden”
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âand sank the film's chances for an Oscar. “Since [Bigelow and Boal] presented their film as a form of history it has been judged on historical grounds and it has been found wanting,” explains noted terrorism researcher Peter Bergen in a
Time
magazine cover story on Bigelow.
“Zero Dark Thirty
is a great piece of filmmaking; it's a far weaker work of history.”
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True enough, Mr. Bergen, but the film's function as an imperial propaganda piece has proved far more useful to the US of Empire, legitimating a whole host of US post-9/11 policies and directives. Begin with
Zero Dark Thirty's
opening sequence, featuring 9/11 audio footage of dying victims (used by Bigelow's production team without permission from 9/11 victims' families),
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set against a black screen followed by an immediate “jump cut” to a CIA Middle Eastern black ops site. This explicit edit from the destruction of the World Trade Center building to Middle East torture sites reinforces the dominant popular US political narrative that “19 box cutterâwielding Muslim fanatics acting alone” carried out the 9/11 attacks, and reminds American filmgoers that, whatever nasty business the US may do in the Middle East, it is being done as a response to that “horrific” 9/11 attack on US soil.
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Zero Dark Thirty
also reveals to American audiences (because US newspapers of record seem unable to consistently report on CIA activities worldwide) that the US has crafted a network of “black sites” around the world, beyond public scrutiny, where the dirty business of
the empire's maintenance is routinely handled. The presence of this so-called “secret government” may come as a surprise to many popcorn-snorting Americans in their comfy theater seats, but, after all, in real life, the guys deemed “bad” by said secret government must be apprehended and brought to justiceâor, better yet in our brave new post-9/11 world, broken, abused, and/or assassinated if they've already been deemed guilty as charged. ZDT's main character, a CIA agent named Maya (played by Jessica Chastain) functions as an audience surrogate in this role.
The flame-haired Chastainâplaying a “lone-wolf female” in a man's worldâwinces on first witnessing the torture of an al-Qaeda detainee. In short order, though, Maya steels herself to the task, single-mindedly devoting herself to capturing bin Laden and facing down numerous more-powerful male higher-ups along the CIA chain of command. Some critics have followed female director Bigelow in interpreting Maya as a “feminist folk hero”âtenacious, scrappy, and determined to succeed in a man's world.
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Others, including this writer, see Maya's constructed composite character as an unconvincing bone thrown to would-be feminists who are happy to see Maya kick some chauvinistic white male ass (while brown male asses get the life beaten out of them). “Do not now cleanse the wars of/on terror with the face of a white blonde female. Do not detract from the heinous aspects of the terror war by making it look gender neutral,” declared Al Jazeera's Zillah Eisenstein.
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Referring to “imperial feminism” in her column, Eisenstein well articulated my own feelings about Maya as a constructed composite Hollywood character who is more imperial cliché than real life:
Maya is not believable to me. She is an awful stereotype: a driven, obsessive woman, alone with no friends. She has no depth. She is all surface. She says she prefers to drop a bomb rather than use the SEAL team. She says she knows 100 per cent that Osama is in the building. She says she is the “mother---er” who found the safe house in the first place. She assures the men of the SEAL team that Osama is there and that they must kill him for her.
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Or, as PolicyMic writer Hannah Kapp-Klote succinctly summarized, “In
Zero Dark Thirty,
Jessica Chastain's character's femininity and slight frame justify US policies that are unjustifiable.”
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Beyond playing the diversionary “gender card” by using a female CIA agent as distraction, the propaganda machine of the Bigelow/Boals team runs much deeper. In May 2013, independent journalists broke a news story that revealed the extent to which the CIA's Office of Public Affairs collaborated with Bigelow and Boals in drafting
Zero Dark Thirty's
script through a series of “five conference calls” designed to “help promote an appropriate portrayal of the Agency and the bin Laden operation.”
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Script changes made by Boals at the CIA's request included removing the use of intimidating attack dogs in a key torture scene, censoring a scene involving a CIA officer and “drunken firearms abuse” at a party, and, perhaps most importantly, downplaying main character Maya's involvement in the film's opening torture scene from active participant to passive observer. Apparently, “reel” life does not mirror real life in the CIA's mind when it comes to representing the truth about the global war on terror on the silver screen. Perhaps
Gawker
said it best: jokingly referring to ZDT as “The CIA Director's Cut,” Adrian Chen observed that “Kathryn Bigelow's Osama bin Laden revenge-porn flick
Zero Dark Thirty
was the biggest publicity coup for the CIA this century outside of the actual killing of Osama bin Laden.”
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Zero Dark Thirty's
most powerful use as a propaganda piece involves using the silver screen to convince American audiences to accept torture and extrajudicial killings in the name of the greater imperial goodâa particularly troubling example of fantasy mediating fascism, to reinvoke bell hooks' insight. ZDT “teaches us that brown men can and should be killed with impunity, in violation of international law, and that we should trust the CIA to act with all due diligence,” observed
Mondoweiss's
Deepa Kumar. “At a time when the key strategy in the âwar on terror' has shifted from conventional warfare to extrajudicial killing, here comes a film that normalizes and justifies this strategy.”
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Kumar's provocative article linking Hollywood propaganda and US political policies is vital reading for anyone interested in the relationship between fantasy and fascism in the US of Empire. Kumar concluded her analysis of ZDT by observing:
Here then is the key message of the film: the law, due process, and the idea of presenting evidence before a jury should be dispensed with in favor of extrajudicial killings. Further, such killings can take place without public oversight. The film not only uses the moral unambiguity of assassinating bin Laden to sell us on the rightness and righteousness of extrajudicial killing, it also takes pains to show that this can be done in secret because of the checks and balances involved before a targeted assassination is carried out.
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Interestingly, scientific studies are now revealing that Hollywood movies can, in fact, play an active role in promoting the acceptance of specific kinds of formerly aberrant behavior within the mind of the collective audience. Consider researcher Luke Mitchell's insightful observations in his
Popular Science
article, “The Science of âZero Dark Thirty': When We Can Condone Torture.” Mitchell described Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner's work on “cognitive dissonance” and proximity to torture as it is being performed. Mitchell explained how Gray and Wegner conducted experiments with observers witnessing staged acts of torture. Those observers removed from the scene tended to feel the pain of torture less acutely, and, paradoxically, assumed the tortured was innocent, while observers closer to the event tended to assume guilt on the part of the tortured.
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Why? Here's Mitchell's explanation:
Gray's research suggests that torture's very repugnancy is what causes some of us to defend its useâwe feel terrible about it, so we think there must be a reason for it.
In movies, the effect may be more pronounced: The giant screen brings us even “closer” to an interrogation. We condone the torture because the cinematic intimacy causes us, the audience, to feel complicit.
This proximity biasâa variation of confirmation bias we might call the Zero Effectâis relevant for scientists engaged in all kinds of observational research. It is also a crucial consideration for those of us watching interrogators at work, onscreen or in life.
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(Emphasis added.)
In other words, fictionalized recreations of graphic torture, when set in the context of a film that is presented as “based on real life events”âlike ZDTâpush audiences to an acceptance of behavior they might normally deem reprehensible. Constructing a bad-ass lone-wolf fiery female agent to legitimize torture, promoting extrajudicial killing, revealing black sites, and steeling American audiences for the hard work of empire
âZero Dark Thirty
does all of this in powerful and provocative fashion.
CONCLUSION: BEYOND THE IMPERIAL SILVER SCREEN
We all go to movies for different reasons, hoping to be entertained, educated, inspiredâand sometimes all three. Because of film's unique power to move us emotionally, and now, in the Internet Age, to be available everywhere to everybody at any time, movies occupy a central place in our national storytelling culture like no other medium. And yet, too often, movie audiences fail to watch with a skeptical eye, and movie reviewers fail to report on films critically, while influential corporate commercial and political interests are quick to exploit Hollywood's uniquely powerful reach to propagandize, rather than to educate.
We all bear some responsibility for the perpetuation of fantasy film propaganda that plays a vital role in justifying twenty-first century US fascism. “Such a system requires an equally powerful system of propaganda to convince the citizenry that they need not be alarmed, they need not speak out, they need not think critically, in fact they need not even participate in the deliberative process except to pull a lever every couple of years in an elaborate charade of democracy,” concluded Deepa Kumar. “We are being asked, quite literally, to amuse ourselves to death.”
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If we are to take the Oscar night words of Michelle Obama at all seriously, if we really want “our children [to] learn to open their imaginations, to dream just a little bigger,” then we'll need to work collectively to move our Hollywood moviemaking culture beyond simplistic stereotypes, rehashed storylines, and political propaganda, to a new reality that acknowledges cross-cultural complexity, multiple points of view, and a shared sense of community and global purpose.
It's no easy taskâbut let us begin by being honest about the films that Hollywood produces, and push for new mediated fantasy worlds that bring out the best in us as human beings rather than simply pandering to nationalistic goals and imperialistic designs.
DR. ROB WILLIAMS
is a media educator, musician, historian, journalist, and professor who teaches online and face-to-face courses at the University of Vermont and Champlain College, and serves as publisher of
Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence
newspaper.
Notes
1.
Michelle Obama, Academy Awards 2013
Argo
White House video feed presentation,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtLKn5YlulcJ
.
2.
The phrase “crap detectors” comes from Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner,
Teaching As A Subversive Activity
(New York: Dell, 1969), 1â16.
3.
Jack Shaheen, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People,” Media Education Foundation PDF, 206,
http://www.mediaded.org/assets/products/402/transcript_402.pdf
.
4.
bell hooks, “Cultural Criticism and Transformation,” Media Education Foundation PDF, 1997,
http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/402/transcript_402.pdf
. And for more on the history of the connections between Hollywood and the political establishment of Washington DC, especially among conservatives and the GOP (which challenges the conventional wisdom of the Hollywood liberal stereotype), see Steven J. Ross,
Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and hear an interview with Ross covering the contents of the book, both historically and in current context, by Pacifica Radio's Mitch Jeserich on the show,
Letters and Politics,
KPFA Radio, April 17, 2013, archived online at
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/90755
.
5.
See, for example, Jim Garamone, “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-Spectrum Dominance” American Forces Press Service, June 2, 2000,
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289
.
6.
For more on the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), see
http://www.newamericancentury.org
. For a summary and link to full documents from PNAC published September 2000, “Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” see
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3249.htm
.