Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)

[MichaelB]

she was recruited out of high school by the CIA (ya, right?!)

The agent that Chastain's character was based on was recruited in college, but the agency has been known to recruit kids as young as 17.

A friend of mine was recruited by the CIA before she was out of her teens - she was completely bilingual in Russian (to the extent that she could pass convincingly for Russian or American), and this was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it's not hard to see why they weren't too concerned about her age.

I imagine this is equally true of people bilingual in Arabic, perhaps even more so.

[JabbaTheSlut]

IMO it's a film about the war against terrorism as religion. Maya being the prime believer, the fundamentalist. And the death her faith, when she finds out the God, killed in the end, is a mere mortal. A great film I think.

[hearthesilence]

A friend of mine was recruited by the CIA before she was out of her teens - she was completely bilingual in Russian (to the extent that she could pass convincingly for Russian or American), and this was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it's not hard to see why they weren't too concerned about her age.

I imagine this is equally true of people bilingual in Arabic, perhaps even more so.

Not quite the same, but I remember the child of one of my parents' friends was recruited by the NSA when he was 18. He wasn't in high school though, he had skipped ahead and was finishing undergraduate school. He was a math genius who specialized in number theory, and he would have been involved in code breaking, etc.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Steven Shaviro, A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty.

Zero Dark Thirty is the ne plus ultra of proceduralism, its ultimate expansion and reductio ad absurdum. It’s all about the well-nigh interminable process of searching for, and then eliminating, Osama Bin Laden. The premise and initial impetus of this process is of course the mythological demonization of Bin Laden, as the ultimate culprit responsible for Nine Eleven. But in the relentless proceduralism that the film presents to us, this goal or rationale is abraded away....Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t show us a way out from the nightmare of liberal proceduralism, but it makes this nightmare visible at a time when its sheer ubiquity might otherwise leave us to take it for granted and thereby ignore it.

[TMDaines]

I saw this film last night and found it to be rather shallow and bloated. Given the story of its production, it shouldn't be too surprising that it felt like two films stuck together. More importantly, however, it seemed appalling orientalist, something which hasn't been touched upon too heavily here. Why were the Pakistanis constantly speaking Arabic and not Urdu, English or any of their regional languages? Nobody has seemingly picked up on this. The locations in Peshwar looked bizarrely colonial. Why were people wearing so much traditional, almost archaic dress?

[jindianajonz]

I saw this film last night and found it to be rather shallow and bloated. Given the story of its production, it shouldn't be too surprising that it felt like two films stuck together. More importantly, however, it seemed appalling orientalist, something which hasn't been touched upon too heavily here. Why were the Pakistanis constantly speaking Arabic and not Urdu, English or any of their regional languages? Nobody has seemingly picked up on this. The locations in Peshwar looked bizarrely colonial. Why were people wearing so much traditional, almost archaic dress?

While I don't remember the specific attire in Zero Dark Thirty, this random slideshow of a mongoose/snake fight in a Peshawar market show's that the majority of onlookers were wearing clothes that I'd say are closer to traditional than western.

Looks like you aren't alone on the language issue though.

[TMDaines]

Yeah. I tried to find out why they were speaking Arabic and I can't find any reason why. All I can find are blogs and articles making reference to the same issue.

For the clothes, it's mainly the headwear.

---

Edit: I just found this blog that makes reference to these things.

I immeadiately noticed the food too when watching, but gave them a pass, since I couldn't remember whether they were in Pakistan at that point of the film or what was the nationality of the guy they were feeding - I don't think he was Middle Eastern anyway. When they said "hummus" I just presumed they weren't in Pakistan.

The SUV comment made me think twice too.

For a film with this large a budget and that purports to be a plausible, "journalistic" representation of the period, it is terribly researched. It's as if there's the thought that everyone just speaks "Muslim".

If anyone here is from Pakistan or has spent a lot of time there, I'd love to hear your take on the country's portrayal in this film.

[Michael Kerpan]

Thanks for the link to the Cinema Pakistan essay. This really suggests a serious lack of professionalism on the part of the ZD30 production staff.

[knives]

If anyone here is from Pakistan or has spent a lot of time there, I'd love to hear your take on the country's portrayal in this film.

My sister's done some research there (though mainly in Jordan) so I can check in to see if she's seen the film.

Edit: Nope.

[warren oates]

HBO's very good documentary about the decades long intelligence war against Al-Qaeda and UBL, Manhunt, based on the Peter Bergen book, premiered this week. Jeff Stein's review explains both why it's worth watching and why it hasn't really shed any new light on the questions about torture.

[HistoryProf]

HBO's very good documentary about the decades long intelligence war against Al-Qaeda and UBL, Manhunt, based on the Peter Bergen book, premiered this week. Jeff Stein's review explains both why it's worth watching and why it hasn't really shed any new light on the questions about torture.

had a chance to watch this Wednesday night as i'm in Seattle for work this week and the Hotel has HBO. It was at once fascinating and frustratingly vague at critical junctures. It most certainly didn't shed any new light on things, and it's not like we didn't know the CIA was well aware of OBL's plans prior to 9/11.

At the same time, the humanity of the women who were "obsessed" with stopping OBL was moving, and reignited those decade+ old frustrations about the FBI's refusal to listen to the CIA and the overall complete and total failures in communication by everyone involved. Seeing the videos of OBL praising the soldiers training in the US before 9/11 is just maddening.

Well worth watching, but you aren't going to learn much you didn't already know.

[Sonmi451]

Well surprise surprise. Anyone still want to claim this is not a propaganda piece?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may ... y-cia-memo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[hearthesilence]

It would be a smoking gun if the actual film did indeed portray the CIA in an unambiguous positive light. I guess you feel that it did but most people I know didn't come away from the film believing that.

[Sonmi451]

No, it certainly is not unambiguous. If it was, there would be nothing to debate. But I do think we are meant to realize clearly who the heroes are, and who to root for. And this memo shows that the CIA was at least a de facto producer on the film.

[matrixschmatrix]

It would be a smoking gun if the actual film did indeed portray the CIA in an unambiguous positive light. I guess you feel that it did but most people I know didn't come away from the film believing that.

It would be proof that the CIA portrayal in the film is meant to be read positively if you read the potrayal of the CIA positively?

[hearthesilence]

No it would be proof that the CIA was unambiguously positive if a portrayal intended as positively ambiguous was interpreted as unambiguously positive if the film was positively ambiguous about the CIA.

Wait, I've lost my train of thought....

[willoneill]

And this memo shows that the CIA was at least a de facto producer on the film.

That's a bit of a stretch; these types of requests happen in the development of biopic-type films all the time, and no one would consider those parties "de facto producers".

[Donald Brown]

Kevin Gosztola spells out how this is much ado about something.

[flyonthewall2983]

Latest CIA reports debunk the film's narrative that the "enhanced interrogation" helped catch Bin Laden.

[hearthesilence]

Looking through that report, the film feels kind of sanitized. "Rectal rehydration"? Which sick assholes came up with that method?

[criterion10]

With the release of the torture report, it's virtually impossible to still defend the politics of Zero Dark Thirty, though I'll admit that I still do quite enjoy the film for the visceral, procedural elements.

[hearthesilence]

I never really felt like those were the politics of the film. Clearly the characters believed in pursuing that method, but without being didactic about it, the film itself seemed aware how morally dubious such tactics were.

When I was a kid, one thing that made me very angry was the damaging effects child abuse could have on people I knew. We were in grade school, but we weren't oblivious - the culture had definitely become very outspoken about what a parent can't do to their own child, even if it wasn't as drastic as tying them up or beating them until they were bruised and bloody. You could even see that in public service announcements with regularity. But the parents involved weren't oblivious either. They were fully aware that what they were doing could spark outrage. But they did it anyway, for years. That's pretty much what I get from Zero Dark Thirty, that sense of people aware of their own wrongdoing but finding reasons to do it anyway. It's a big reason why I honestly never felt like torture was justifiable in this film.

Not even from a narrative viewpoint either. The identification of Bin Laden's courier mentioned in that article is dubious - it came about after they stopped torture on that person. Breaking him wasn't extracting anything, and later it's discovered that they had obtained the lead for that particular information soon after 9/11 (from a tip or some kind of shared intelligence, I forgot which), it just got buried in a filing cabinet out of ignorance.

[jindianajonz]

Latest CIA reports debunk the film's narrative that the "enhanced interrogation" helped catch Bin Laden.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the article asserts:

The Senate report released Tuesday found that the coercive techniques led to no unique intelligence

Isn't that how it played out in the movie as well? As Hearthsilence said, the agents in the movie already had the name of the courier but didn't pay attention to it until the torture victim also gave the same name; i.e. the information they obtained wasn't unique. It seems to me that the senate report actually lines up with the film rather nicely.

[hearthesilence]

Latest CIA reports debunk the film's narrative that the "enhanced interrogation" helped catch Bin Laden.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the article asserts:

The Senate report released Tuesday found that the coercive techniques led to no unique intelligence

Isn't that how it played out in the movie as well? The agents in the movie already had the name of the courier but didn't pay attention to it; it was only when the torture victim gave the same name that the memory of the agents was jogged and they actually pursued the lead- i.e, the information he gave wasn't unique.

You're correct, that's what I referred to as well.

[jindianajonz]

Yeah, I missed that last sentence of yours and went back and edited my post