Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)

[Shrew]

And the real question then to Cocus and Sonmi and others remains: Is this enough? To indict war in general by focusing on the personal/psychological/existential toll on individual foot soldiers? And if it's not, then you'd kind of have to be against other films that have taken similar approaches with politically incorrect sides of older wars, like Cross of Iron and Letters From Iwo Jima.

At the risk of putting words into mouths, I think their answer would be no. The difference between Hurt Locker and the Catholic church/Cross of Iron/Iwo Jima is that these things are over (really, only the most militant atheists are gonna look at the Catholic church and think, "Fuck you for the inquisition, you totally unchanged institution"), so to consider the problems of the individual soldier or believer is merely to universalize the terrible experience of war. Making individual Nazis sympathetic or even heroic isn't a threat because the institution is dead, and only an expressly pro-Nazi slant would make the film (nostalgically) imperialist.

With the Hurt Locker, America is still around and could possibly start more wars, and thus the threat of the institution is still present. I think Somini's argument was that it's not enough to just say "war is bad" without interrogating the culprits that started the war when they still exist. He seems to think that the film has no criticism of any American policy, and thus implicitly agrees that yes, these soldiers are fucked up but still fighting for "America" so it's worth it. My counterargument is that the film does question whether the soldiers are actually fighting for "America/Democracy around the world". At the film's end its clear that given a choice between war and America, Renner's character will always choose war, and that mindset is why we got into that mess.

If you want my opinion, a far guiltier example of American imperialism (at the time) would be Written on the Wind, or Daddy Long Legs, where the characters are perfectly free to just get up and say they're going to start an oil business in Iran, or join a mining company in South America. I still love the movies though.

[warren oates]

And the real question then to Cocus and Sonmi and others remains: Is this enough? To indict war in general by focusing on the personal/psychological/existential toll on individual foot soldiers? And if it's not, then you'd kind of have to be against other films that have taken similar approaches with politically incorrect sides of older wars, like Cross of Iron and Letters From Iwo Jima.

At the risk of putting words into mouths, I think their answer would be no. The difference between Hurt Locker and the Catholic church/Cross of Iron/Iwo Jima is that these things are over (really, only the most militant atheists are gonna look at the Catholic church and think, "Fuck you for the inquisition, you totally unchanged institution"), so to consider the problems of the individual soldier or believer is merely to universalize the terrible experience of war. Making individual Nazis sympathetic or even heroic isn't a threat because the institution is dead, and only an expressly pro-Nazi slant would make the film (nostalgically) imperialist.

With the Hurt Locker, America is still around and could possibly start more wars, and thus the threat of the institution is still present. I think Somini's argument was that it's not enough to just say "war is bad" without interrogating the culprits that started the war when they still exist. He seems to think that the film has no criticism of any American policy, and thus implicitly agrees that yes, these soldiers are fucked up but still fighting for "America" so it's worth it. My counterargument is that the film does question whether the soldiers are actually fighting for "America/Democracy around the world". At the film's end its clear that given a choice between war and America, Renner's character will always choose war, and that mindset is why we got into that mess.

If you want my opinion, a far guiltier example of American imperialism (at the time) would be Written on the Wind, or Daddy Long Legs, where the characters are perfectly free to just get up and say they're going to start an oil business in Iran, or join a mining company in South America. I still love the movies though.

But your formulation sort of ignores that it was the Bush neocons, not the American military, who started the Iraq war. They're gone. The institution of the American Army itself isn't inherently prone to imperialism. The culprits who started the war and ought to be interrogated have long moved out of the White House. I think that's where I'm sensing a disconnect. There's a fuzzy analogy being floated out there between the Bush Neocon Ideology and the ethos of the American military. Something akin to Nazism in the German Army or Emperor worship in Imperial Japan. That's what doesn't smell right to me. Iraq might be more recent, but in this respect it couldn't be more different. There simply was/is no mechanism for creating or enforcing any ideological stance on the order of these other dangerous historical examples among enlisted men/women or officers in the U.S. military.

About the Catholic Church: Unfortunately, it did take until the year 2000 to admit any wrong doing over their treatment of Galileo, to offer just one example. But more to the point: their on-going political actions against gays and women and their cover-up of worldwide sex abuse scandals continues unabated. Hardly ancient history for millions so affected.

[John Edmond]

it was the Bush neocons, not the American military, who started the Iraq war. They're gone. The institution of the American Army itself isn't inherently prone to imperialism.

Armies don't kill people, neocons kill people.

[tarpilot]

And killing a person has never, ever had positive results.

[Shrew]

I didn't mean to argue that the military was all neoconservative, but I think Renner's character is (though probably unknowingly, in the sense that he likely thinks of himself as apolitical). The film goes to great lengths to show that there are no politics in the trenches and you're just trying not to die, and the other characters are pretty much all just soldiers caught in a bad situation and trying to get out. While Renner himself has no real agency for the war (and probably care why it started), it's his enthusiasm for combat and the rush that gets everyone into trouble (which I think is a neoconservative "jump to war first think about the ramifications second" predilection).

Which is why I think the film cuts so deep in the end. Renner's actions are mostly in line with a neoconservative foreign policy, but neocon rhetoric is totally taken up with concern for the home and the family (and its associated family values). And I think his actions illustrate where neoconservative priorities would ultimately lie.

[Black Hat]

Greenwald eviscerates Bigelow (comparing her to Riefenstahl) and her cavalcade of bouquet throwing film critics in his column today largely based on Frank Bruni's op ed from yesterday's times and Dexter Filkins' New Yorker profile of Bigelow.

From Bruni:

"t's hard not to focus on them, because the first extended sequence in the movie shows a detainee being strung up by his wrists, sexually humiliated, deprived of sleep, made to feel as if he's drowning and shoved into a box smaller than a coffin.

"The torture sequence immediately follows a bone-chilling, audio-only prologue of the voices of terrified Americans trapped in the towering inferno of the World Trade Center. It's set up as payback.

"And by the movie's account, it produces information vital to the pursuit of the world's most wanted man. No waterboarding, no Bin Laden: that's what "Zero Dark Thirty" appears to suggest."

Filkins (Greenwald's Emphasis):

"Bigelow maintains that everything in the film is based on first-hand accounts, but the waterboarding scene, which is likely to stir up controversy, appears to have strayed from real life. According to several official sources, including Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the identity of bin Laden's courier, whose trail led the CIA to the hideout in Pakistan, was not discovered through waterboarding. 'It's a movie, not a documentary,' [screenwriter Mark] Boal said. 'We're trying to make the point that waterboarding and other harsh tactics were part of the CIA program.' Still, Bigelow said, 'the film doesn't have an agenda, and it doesn't judge. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience."

Greenwald

Bigelow and Boal are speaking out of both sides of their mouths here. As noted, she is going around praising herself for taking "almost a journalistic approach to film". But when confronted by factual falsehoods she propagates on critical questions, her screenwriting partner resorts to the excuse that "it's a movie, not a documentary."

If Bigelow had merely depicted episodes that actually happened, then her defense that she is not judging and has no responsibility to do so would be more debatable. But the fact that she's presenting lies as fact on an issue as vital as these war crimes, all while patting herself on the back for her "journalistic approach" to the topic, makes the behavior indefensible, even reprehensible. Is it really possible to say: this is a great film despite the fact that it glorifies torture using patent falsehoods?

Thoughts?

Greenwald's been having a fun twitter war the last few hours with Mark Harris & Glenn Kenny who have predictably taken his column personally and do not understand his point.

[warren oates]

No one on this board is going to argue that torture is morally right or so unquestionably effective as to be a necessary option, even in the most extreme ticking bomb fantasy. Whether water boarding, when it was being done, illegally and with questionable effectiveness lead to the disclosure of any of the mosaic of information that the CIA used painstaking over a decade to track down Bin Laden is another question. The dozens of books I've read on the topic over the years disagree. Some prominent voices from the interrogator trenches like Ali Soufan and Matthew Alexander could not be more outspoken against torture in general for ethical reasons or against the use value of any of the known results. Then there are credible reports by writers like Mark Bowden that the flow of information that lead to Abottabad began with torture:

It should also be noted this effort did involve torture, or at the very least coercive interrogation methods. The first two mentions of Ahmed the Kuwaiti [Bin Laden's courier] were made by Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Mohammed al-Qahtani in coercive interrogation sessions. The third, the misleading characterization of the Kuwaiti as retired by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, came during one of his many water-boarding sessions. Hassan Ghul verified the Kuwaiti's central role during secret interrogation sessions at an undisclosed CIA detention center. It is not known what methods were used on Ghul, but the agency did seek permission from the Justice Department to employ coercion. There is no simplistic narrative of a hard-pressed detainee coughing up a crucial lead, but there is also no way of knowing if these disclosures would have come without resorting to harsh measures. In the case of Qahtani, in particular, given his long and stubborn resistance, it seems unlikely. Torture may not have been decisive or even necessary, but it was clearly part of the story.

I think Bowden* overstates his case near the end of that passage. Obviously, there's no way to prove that these specific detainees in question would have talked if they were merely coerced and manipulated psychologically, in accordance with the laws of war, and with methods that experienced battle-hardened interrogators like Ali Soufan and Matthew Alexander have shown to be exceptionally effective. But on a certain narrow point he's correct in that there's simply no way to know what some of the high value detainees may or may not have offered anyway or the full extent of their disclosures since this is all still shrouded in secrecy perhaps for all the wrong reasons.

Then there's the only question that really matters in this thread, which is, regardless of how you feel about it or what the government ought or ought not to have done, given the best evidence for what did happen: Does Zero Dark Thirty represent/dramatize any of this history accurately or not?

*(I fully expect some people to call out Bowden as bought and paid for the U.S. military, but I think that's weak and he's not the only one to report on this issue and draw similar conclusions.)

[Cocus]

I appreciate the last few posts. However, to return to an earlier comment, to one who lives in Ireland it is clear that the damage done by the Catholic Church is not restricted to the past, nor even to the recent past. The Church is still a vital reactionary force in Irish life: ...clerical and patriarchal supremacy has made [Ireland] famous as a laboratory of authoritarian repression.
[A System of Soft Terror - Life and Death in Ireland by JAMES DAVIS, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/07/ ... n-ireland/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]
The shame is that Ireland welcomes the Pope, the Queen of England, and Hilary Clinton as if they were heroes, rather than as representatives of global terrorism. It is gratifying that people who post here take Kathryn Bigelow and her supporters to task for her unquestioning support of bullies and terrorists.
It should come as no surprise that most Iraqis view such films as The Hurt Locker much as Africans view Zulu or native Americans view Thanksgiving. Iraqis don't see much artistry involved in scenes of crumbled buildings, trash-strewn streets, dead children and loops and loops of concertina wire.

[Michael Kerpan]

I'm with Greenwald.

[Black Hat]

Not the only one for sure but, that doesn't make Bowden more credible as the majority of the American press is betrothed to the military/government and has been roundly discredited. Your criteria of what 'really matters' in this thread is at best specious as the film does not exist in a vacuum for, as Greenwald pointed out, reviewers like Edelstein are walking away from it saying "it makes a case for the efficacy of torture." If that's the message the majority of people who see the film take away from it then Zero Dark Thirty has to be viewed within the prism of a propaganda film, vis a vis justifying a policy of torture, irrespective of its cinematic qualities.

[Mr Sausage]

The problem with a movie like this is that a lot of critics are going to be going in looking to confirm the opinions they already hold. It's difficult to tell how selectively the critics above are analyzing this movie. So I'm going to ignore them until I see the movie myself.

I suspect that while the movie mingles fact with fiction, it is trying not to be polemical. Such an approach is actually more likely to get misreadings than any other. But I could well be wrong.

[Black Hat]

What's the general consensus here on how she handled The Hurt Locker?

[criterion10]

I personally didn't care for The Hurt Locker, but for some reason I'm interested to see how Bigelow handles this film. I'll be honest and admit that my expectations are rather high. Are there any reviews or people out there who didn't care for THL but did like ZDT?

[Cocus]

The problem is, it's Hollywood's version of the Iraq war and of the soldiers who fight it, and their version is inaccurate.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/ ... hdad-lens/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-hoit ... 49043.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[warren oates]

A more balanced view of the brewing torture controversy in ZDT from Wired's Spencer Ackerman who, unlike some of the foaming pundits quoted above, has, gasp, actually seen the movie.

[Robert de la Cheyniest]

I know Greenwald purports to simple be analyzing the reactions to the movie and not the movie itself. But for my money you just can't write a piece like that without having seen the movie. Show me why reviewers have this reaction and use something from the text itself to illustrate your points. I'm as left as they come but I really don't see how this piece makes a lot of valid points. How can you compare someone to Leni Riefenstahl without even seeing the movie she made? How can you say "I don't believe that this film is being so well-received despite its glorification of American torture...[but] because of this", Thereby implying that everyone who likes the movie must be a chest-thumping warmonger when again, you haven't even seen the movie you're castigating people for liking

[zedz]

I haven't seen the movie either, but isn't this a classic 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation? Omit torture from the film, and everybody accuses it of being a whitewash, since it's freely acknowledged that such techniques were employed in prosecuting the so-called 'War on Terror'; include it, and you get attacked from both sides for contradictory reasons.

[flyonthewall2983]

You nailed it. It's obviously a thorny issue for people, even though really this will be the 2nd film of this year that I know of that depicted such techniques as Denzel Washington's character in Safe House is waterboarded early in that film.

[Black Hat]

I would disagree with the 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' scenario in so far as much that waterboading did not lead to Bin Laden's capture. Furthermore, if it's shown outside of the search for Bin Laden context there is no evidence that torture, excuse me, 'enhanced interrogation techniques' have ever led to anything and even if it had it would not justify it.

Outside of telling us what everyone knows already, that yes there was a torture program which Zero Dark Thirty depicts, and glossing over the main point of contention Greenwald, Dan Froomkin & Jay Rosen among others have brought up, what is Spencer Ackerman's point is with his review? He concludes with this...

What endures on the screen are scenes that can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American.

Is he serious with this? What on earth does this even mean? Not surprising that Ackerman's the same person who admitted shilling for General Petraeus after his downfall. Tough to take him seriously.

Given the information already out there about the film I don't believe it was at all necessary for Greenwald to see it before writing about one aspect of it. However, common sense says he would have made life a lot easier on himself by watching it first. Then again with people like Edelstein, Joe Scarborough & David Ignatius already chirping about how the film shows that torture worked, Greenwald's point was necessary to be made.

[warren oates]

From Greg Sargent at The Wasington Post

Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier’s role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the “only timely and effective way” to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.

[matrixschmatrix]

Gonna go ahead and ignore the input of anyone who euphemises torture as 'enhanced interrogation'

[Mr Sausage]

Given the information already out there about the film I don't believe it was at all necessary for Greenwald to see it before writing about one aspect of it.

And if he'd come to a conclusion that you oppose through the same method? How quickly would you be ready to defend his critical take on some hearsay? In how many other situations would you accept pointed criticisms of a movie by a critic who hadn't seen it?

You ought to seriously ask yourself: are you cutting this guy so much slack because he says things that you want to hear said? It certainly seems that way when you end with:

Greenwald's point was necessary to be made.

Personally, I value intellectual honesty and informed criticism more than having my own views confirmed for me. So I think Greenwald's points are irrelevant. He did not come by them honestly or rigorously, and therefore I have no time for them, even if they are things I'd like to believe (or not). I'm with George Orwell: you have to be able to criticise your own side if you ever want to approach being an independent thinker.

[Sonmi451]

Given the information already out there about the film I don't believe it was at all necessary for Greenwald to see it before writing about one aspect of it.

And if he'd come to a conclusion that you oppose through the same method? How quickly would you be ready to defend his critical take on some hearsay? In how many other situations would you accept pointed criticisms of a movie by a critic who hadn't seen it?

You ought to seriously ask yourself: are you cutting this guy so much slack because he says things that you want to hear said? It certainly seems that way when you end with:

Greenwald's point was necessary to be made.

Personally, I value intellectual honesty and informed criticism more than having my own views confirmed for me. So I think Greenwald's points are irrelevant. He did not come by them honestly or rigorously, and therefore I have no time for them, even if they are things I'd like to believe (or not). I'm with George Orwell: you have to be able to criticise your own side if you ever want to approach being an independent thinker.

The thing is, if you read Greenwald's entire piece, he is not reviewing the film. He makes that abundantly clear. What he is reviewing is the take-away from the film, that torture led to the killing of Bin Laden. This take-away seems to be the consensus, even among the film's many supporters, so there is absolutely no reason why Greenwald should not discuss it.

[Mr Sausage]

He's reviewing other people's opinions of a movie he hasn't seen, then using that to criticize the movie and its director (didn't he refer to her as Leni Riefenstahl?). His opinion is irrelevant. The whole piece is confirmation bias, and now that he's committed himself to these positions, he's even less likely to watch the movie in anything other than a confirming mood.

Again, what we are seeing is someone using this film as an opportunity to tell the world in loud terms what side he is on. This is all so boring and predictable. This is the kind of movie everyone could sit around and easily discuss for weeks without having ever seen so much as the trailer. Which is why it's so important for everyone not to do that, and for them to reserve judgement and criticism until they actually have seen its images in motion.

[Cocus]

Mr. Sausage, I don't think you are being fair. The issue of whether the movie is good/great is not connected to its propaganda value. In so far as it is an American movie, dealing with the assassination of a popular political figure, it will raise political issues. It is to these issues that many of the comments have been addressed, and not to the cinematic values. You don't have to see the movie to talk about its value as propaganda for American military policy and adventures in exotic places.
Doesn't engaging in discussion entail telling people which side you are on? I didn't find this discussion boring and predictable except regarding the extent to which people will go to deny the relevance of national and international politics to life on Earth. This is especially true of those people who supported the current wars. That is what I find predictable.