BOOKS AND ARTS DECEMBER 21, 2012
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May I suggest an amendment to the Constitution? It should be as illegal as it is misleading to open a movie with any statement about its being “based on fact.” That very assertion precedes Zero Dark Thirty, the new picture by Kathryn Bigelow, which has already won several critics’ awards and must be in the running for the Best Picture Oscar.
On September 11, 2001, airline flights hijacked by terrorists attacked famous American buildings. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. This was a cruel and horrifying outrage, even if you know it by heart now. It’s easy to see that political leaders and many Americans might demand revenge. But that wrath and the consequent mission need not smother questions about why the terrorists did what they did. One reason for voicing that hope is that, as I write, the New York Times has a happy picture of Hillary Clinton greeting Martin McGuinness, the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland.
I’ll come back to that. Zero Dark Thirty begins with the agonized phone calls and news reports of 9/11, whereupon the film develops a narrative of the CIA being charged with the task of vengeance. So two agents—Maya (Jessica Chastain) and Dan (Jason Clarke)—interrogate a prisoner attached to Al Qaeda. The man is tortured, and waterboarded. He is shut up in a small box. He is made naked before Maya. She winces at all of this and makes full use of Chastain’s pale face and mournful eyes. But a lead is emerging: there may be a man who acts as a courier to Osama Bin Laden, who has given up making phone calls. And as the process builds, we realize that Maya is obsessed with getting Osama.
This is the significant motivation in what proves to be an action film. In interviews, Bigelow and Chastain have averred that Maya is “based” on an actual woman in the CIA who toiled for years to track down Osama. Of course, this agent cannot be named (or not yet). But she can be built into a silent, rather repressed Maya of Arc, a woman not permitted to take part in the final executioners’ mission, but who stays close and is the moral authority at the end of the film, surveying the corpse and nodding, as if to imply, “Mission accomplished.”
There’s something else achieved in the aura of Maya. Her dedication to the task allows the film not to notice that a president began to scour Afghanistan and Pakistan for Osama but then lost patience with its difficulty and turned to another war. Of course, this lack of political texture (in favor of heroic military flavor) is consistent with the refusal to ask why the terrorists did what they did.
What emerges from these omissions and its powerful diversionary concentration is a film that John Wayne would have approved—though he would have said that if Bigelow and the screenwriter, Mark Boal, were going to take 157 minutes to tell the story, they should have been clearer with it. If it’s based on fact, isn’t it possible to make it lucid, instead of mystifying? I know Jessica Chastain does not resemble John Wayne, but we learn no more about Maya than we do about any of Wayne’s characters. Iconically, she is a woman, and Chastain is the beautiful ghost of our time. She is as dipped in saintly revenge as Shirley Eaton was covered in gold paint in Goldfinger. But family life, romantic thoughts, religion, jokes, or any other idea in her head? Is she a real wreck, like Carrie Mathison in Homeland? No.
Kathryn Bigelow’s direction insists on that impersonality. It’s not just that she wants to direct like a man; she wants to be one of the guys, if the guys are from the units that won the screen version of World War II. Zero Dark Thirty is “researched” (that is to say, based on fact). It had some assistance from the CIA. The crucial compound in Abbottabad is a replica of the real place. When the assassins use night-vision goggles, so does the movie camera, casting a green glow on everything until we are inside the house. Once we are there, after the loss of one of the helicopters, everything goes wonderfully well. Our guys have no casualties and no doubts. So women and children are shot down on the way to getting Osama, and it is all tense and exciting—and a very old-fashioned, self-satisfied movie, with James Gandolfini pretending to be Leon Panetta!
I don’t believe Maya is closer to fact than Gandolfini’s cameo; she’s a figurehead for the movie and a way of making it easier for us to identify with the SEALs who take out Osama. This action is emphatic and very clean, if you can forget the faces of the children huddled together after Osama has been killed. There is a moment in the film where Obama is on television denying torture as a tactic, and we get the blank faces of Americans who know very well that torture has been used. That’s about as far as this timid but martial film is prepared to go into politics. Just as Terrence Malick used Jessica Chastain in The Tree of Life as an emblem of faith, persistence, and goodness, so in Zero Dark Thirty the actress stands for American virtue, with the depth and personality of a placard.
If you like World War II films, you’ll enjoy this. But ten years after 9/11, is it sufficient to harp on vengeance, or do we need to work harder to understand the complexities of Afghanistan and Pakistan? (The movie says nothing about which Pakistanis knew what.) Osama was a murderer and a fanatic, and we don’t negotiate with such people or give them character in movies. Or not at first. But a pragmatic settlement often comes at last—it has to. The Japan that sneak-attacked Pearl Harbor was rebuilt through American efforts. The people intent on slaughter in Vietnam are more or less friends again, as they were when Ho Chi Minh was kept alive by American doctors because of his opposition to the Japanese. Reconciliation has occurred in South Africa. Menachem Begin ordered the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, yet he was part of a triumphant moment of peace-making with Anwar Sadat and Jimmy Carter. And then there’s Martin McGuinness, and Gerry Adams—you should look them up.
Terrorists don’t like us, just as we didn’t like the British once, or various foreign leaders against whom we conspired. And we all had our reasons, as we did in allying ourselves with Stalin, whose victims exceeded even those of Hitler. It is important to remember that the support for fanatics sometimes comes from ordinary people who have grievances. The only end to terror is the exhaustion it breeds and (this is easier said than done, but it needs to be said anyway) an answer to its grievances. Without those things, vengeance is a video game for kids.
11 comments
I think it's important to distinguish between people whose goals are rational (e.g. a united Ireland or a simliar nationalist cause) even if they are not achieveable in the foreseeable future, and those whose objectives involve an irrational vision of some kind of global transformation according to the lights of one particular minority in one particular religion.
- ironyroad
December 21, 2012 at 12:59am
"The only end to terror is the exhaustion it breeds and (this is easier said than done, but it needs to be said anyway) an answer to its grievances." That's a pretty simplistic, sweeping and unsubstantiated statement with which to close an article that blasts a film for its superficial take on a complex topic.
- Thunderroad
December 21, 2012 at 2:45am
David, I've come to learn that "based on fact" means "once upon a time." Dan
- dbuck1
December 21, 2012 at 7:10am
Well, we learn in today's profile of Ms. Rice that she lacks that vision thing too. Andrew Sullivan gives this movie a thumbs up because it includes so many scenes of torture, which he believes, wrongly in my view, will make viewers as opposed to torture as Sullivan. It's an odd human trait, to believe that others see the world as I/we do. Of course, terrorists don't see themselves as terrorists either; they too seek revenge for the real or imagined wrongs of others. In my comment to the profile of Ms. Rice, I mention that the neocons have a single-mindedness about intervention, which does have the advantage of clarity; this movie could be described as the neocon view of 9/11 with its single-mindedness about revenge, which likewise does have the advantage of clarity.
- rayward
December 21, 2012 at 9:07am
As with every piece of literature or movie that attempts to encapsulate a singular moment in history through the gauzy memories of "victory", Americans are highly sensitive to questioning the morality and justification of our military causes. When Eastwood directed 'Letters of Iwo Jima' there were many that lamented that such an esteemed actor and director woud give voice to the 'enemy' because it humanized them instead of solidifying the mythology of the Japanese 'dogs' we fought. The existential moral outrage exhibited itself 62 years after the fact. Any discussion of whether dropping the two atomic bombs on the U.S. was morally, ethically or militarily necessary is met with derisive comments from the Right about 'revisionism' and political correctness. Few, if any, of the fictional films about Vietnam that attempt to address the moralities of that war do so only through the thin veil of the singular soldier discovering themselves through catharsis via some act of individual bravery or disintegration into madness or simple resignation through exhaustion. The closest we have gotten on film (that I know of) that looks at the ethical impacts of total U.S. involvement was the documentary 'Fog of War'. And that was a view from 30,000 feet. Does it surprise anyone that there has yet to be a movie made about the Iraq or Afghan wars that would question the intent of those involved on the U.S. side or gives voice to those on the Iraqi or Afghan / Pakistani sides? Zero Dark Thirty is just a contemporary western. I wouldn't walk into that movie expecting to see an understanding of what made Osama what he was or why the Afghanistan is a graveyard for empires. Does this second movie by Bigelow set in the War on Terror give us a better insight to what has happened over there? Perhaps but in the same vein that other war movies before them have. I expect the passage of time will allow Americans to actually take accountability for the questionable interrogation and torture tactics we use(d), the drone strikes, or the shock and awe methods used in the name of vengeance or honor. But I suspect it will be 40 years from now, when Afghanistan is slightly better off than it is today and we've moved on after our interests and short attention spans have turned to something else will there exist enough distance to look back and honestly evaluate the War on Terror. With the complexities of war, how we view them through our personal lenses as agressor or defender, it would be difficult I think to try and capture all of those complexities in a single film that honestly looks at the situation from both sides in a way that one can understand that neither side holds the higher moral ground and that war in itself is nothing more than the muddling through a graveyard of rationality, morals, vengeance, sympathy, and empathy. All of those elements of humanness are left in the trenches and foxholes in the march towards a victory where the victor stands exhausted, confused, hollowed out and unsure what to do next.
- singlspeed
December 21, 2012 at 10:48am
An addition to my first comment above: an "answer to grievances" as David Thomson invokes it the article's final comment is difficult to imagine if the "grievance" is the modern world itself. In a somewhat similar way, the Nazi Party's grievances could not be answered e.g. the "Dolchstosslegende" -- the myth of Germany having been "stabbed in the back" by Jews at the end of WW1. Such a grievance could not be answered because the basis of the grievance was fantasy not reality. No Jews had stabbed Germany.
- ironyroad
December 21, 2012 at 1:24pm
It is true that it might prevent future incidents if we could understand why incidents like 911 happened. Yet, maybe it is too much to expect of cinema to provide us with any clear answers, particularly a mere two hour film. Even in a book, it seems hard to see how a rational person could get into the mind of someone who lived in the US and yet perfidiously chose to fly a plane into a building. We’ll never really know, and can only infer a few things that a rational mind might reasonably grasp. In the film Lord of the Rings, we never learn why the orcs are bent on world domination in subservience to an evil lord. How could they even like their job? We only sense that there is something very wrong with that picture and something we can only hope will not succeed. It is not clear that understanding orcs would make it possible to negotiate with them either, though the film (and the book) never asks that question. Should we expect more of a film that hits on something far more personal and really does happen in this world?
- wkdawson
December 22, 2012 at 10:02am
I'm not sure we don't know why they hate us or why 9/11 happened. It's that we just really disagree, okay? As for the environment that leads to support for terrorists among those with "legitimate grievances," it's hard to know what to do, as legitimate grievances are often mixed with illegitimate ones. In any case, I certainly don't have any problem in principle with a "Western" on getting bin Laden. I do have a problem with the film if it suggests that torture was necessary to capture bin Laden if it wasn't, and certainly if it says that torture led to bin Laden but didn't. (I'm not clear on the facts there, and I haven't seen the film, so I'm withholding judgment for now.)
- JakeH
December 22, 2012 at 10:55am
I agree malahat -- and I'd add The Shootist to the list. I also raised my eyebrow at this: "she wants to be one of the guys, if the guys are from the units that won the screen version of World War II" WTF? Is this projection a sideswipe against Bigelow, against WWII movies (quite a range, too, if you think about it), or against the fact that the screen version was't the actual war, or all three? Thomson isn't thinking clearly here about the nature of narrative and the relationship of fictional representation to historical fact. And he seems to be saying that a moment in the movie with a clip of Obama saying something about torture is political but the torture scenes in the movie are not? That makes zero sense.
- ironyroad
December 22, 2012 at 7:59pm
. . . The War Lover, The Guns of Navarone, Das Boot, Saving Private Ryan, Flags of our Fathers . . .
- ironyroad
December 22, 2012 at 10:27pm
Likewise malahat! Yuletide wishes to you and yours!
- ironyroad
December 23, 2012 at 2:59am