Kathryn Bigelow: America's 21st Century Leni Riefenstahl? ...or HollywooDoD.
Politics aside, Zero.Dark.Thirty. is a terrible cinematic experience, not unlike Bigelow’s previous propagandic slog, The Hurt Locker. Trite, cliched and contrived. Everything about it is ugly. The cinematography is drab and uninspired, exhausting the eyes at almost the same rate the pacing dulls the mind. The editing is weak, the script is awful and the performances are even worse. Simply put: it's crap. On the political front, it is worse than awful: it legitimizes twelve years of war crimes. Despite press kit claims to the contrary, this not just a film that tells the story of the killing of bin Laden: it is 100% pure state propaganda and it will serve to soften many people's stances on torture. And cinema being the popular medium that it is this movie has more power to convince the American public that torture is acceptable (and even noble) than all of the combined press briefings and committee hearings of the past two administrations. In short, this is not merely a bad film, it will actually serve to make the world a worse place to live. The film opens with the already familiar motif of ‘blank screen with audio from 9/11 playing in the background’. The last sounds that trail out before we are presented with images onscreen are of a woman (9/11 victim Melissa C. Doi)'s voice and that of an emergency dispatcher... Doi's voice weeps, "I'm going to die, aren't I?" and the audio fades out...
CUT TO: TORTURE (Get it? Get the message? GET IT?) [hint: THE CRIMES OF 9/11 MAKE TORTURE OKAY] Somehow, despite her claims of having made an apolitical film that does not condone, whitewash, or validate the use of torture, Kathryn Bigelow makes certain to have every scene of torture in the film somehow follow either a depiction of an attack somewhere or has some reference to an attempt shoe-horned into the script, making the it crystal clear for the audience that America's hand was forced, and that torture was used only because of the serious threat that was posed by the radical Islamists.
Bigelow makes no mention of the fact that the "threat" had passed by September 12th, and virtually no work had to be done to prevent more attacks because al-Qaeda had already shot their bolt. The film merely reinforces the big lie that al-Qaeda was a massive global network capable of launching more than one attack like 9/11 and that it was merely the first shot fired in the Third World War. The filmmaker also works to reinforce official state propaganda that implied that al-Qaeda was an actual organization with a top-down hierarchy that would make the killing of bin Laden a meaningful decapitation that would leave the organization leaderless. How much input he bin Laden had in 9/11 is unknown, what is known is that the man who organized and planned the attack (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) was in custody two weeks before Bush & Blair invaded Iraq, an inconvenient fact that has been largely suppressed for nearly a decade.
Bigelow and Mark Boal's insinuation that 9/11 is the reason that the US resorted to torture is, of course, a bald-faced lie that ignores the historical record. Torture is not new to the US military. Even specifically the act of waterboarding is old hat for the American Empire: 1905, American soldiers waterboarding a Filipino insurgent in the Philippines
1968, American soldiers waterboarding a Vietnamese person in Vietnam
The were nationalist independence movements the U.S. crushed, not terrorist groups that attacked American cities or had to be interrogated in some sort of ticking time bomb fantasy. These movements were similar to the nationalist independence movements that Americans have crushed all over the Middle East that lead to the development of the particular brand of Islamism that attacked the US in 2001.
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Personally, I haven't the slightest idea why Bigelow would even want to reiterate every point of propaganda made by the White House and their stenographers in the media. How dull and unimaginative. What an artless and intellectually unsatisfying project to work on. Why would anyone spend time on making this shit? Why would anyone want to watch the mechanical recreation of torture and assassination in a movie theatre with a popcorn and Coca-Cola?
And yet, as mechanical as it is, it is not a documentary-syle reenactment of historical events, it is a thoroughly popcorn-friendly Hollywood action film ...only based on real-life war crimes. If Bigelow had been at all interested in creating a historical work, she would have had to - by nature - address and interrogate the official version of events. But Bigelow challenges nothing. Nada. Zero Dark Thirty could have been turned out by the Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld and their Office of Special Plans.
Every nook and cranny of the film is packed with official propaganda. Bigelow has the C.I.A. folk bemoaning the lack of cooperation of the ISI (Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence), as if the C.I.A. were so naive that their questionable loyalties were somehow a new development (like any other nation, Pakistan uses proxies to fight their wars. ISI has used Islamists to fight their war against India in Kashmir. They've also helped develop, organize and support the Taliban in Afghanistan, and were involved alongside the C.I.A., in supporting the "freedom fighters" in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan - none of this is news, nor was the U.S. not previously involved in supporting many of the people who turned on them since). The effect of the scene is to depict the C.I.A. as the "good cops" and the ISI as "dirty cops", yet another obstacle in the path of their noble mission to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.
This fits in with the main line of propaganda in the depiction of the actual assassination of bin Laden, that Pakistan was not cooperative and that Pakistan's military may have been helping hide bin Laden. Bigelow accepts everything the C.I.A./media told her at face value and does not once deviate from this. Apparently, Bigelow wanted her audience to absorb this point because it is made repeatedly throughout the film. She even has Leon Panetta appear shocked to learn that bin Laden's hideout (this site was known to American intelligence and Abbottabad was long a refuge for jihadis) might be located only 8/10ths of a mile from “Pakistan's West Point”(PMA Kakul).
While it is certainly possible that elements of the Pakistani military were aware of his whereabouts, I do believe it is equally plausible that Pakistan had more to do with his killing than is depicted in the film. It wouldn't be the first time that the U.S. staged something to cover up collaboration with a willing partner (see The Battle of Manila). Pakistani President Zardari could not afford to appear to have supported the attack. It very well could be that elements of the Pakistani military, with or without Zardari's endorsement, handed bin Laden to the US, and merely faked their "outrage" when the C.I.A. violated their sovereign territory. I am not saying that this did happen, but there are countless possibilities outside of the familiar version that Bigelow presents. It is known that Pakistani intelligence pointed to that compound half a decade before as a potential hiding spot for jihadi fighters. I believe it had even been raided before. Whatever the particulars, what is known is that it was not unknown to either Pakistani or American intelligence, despite the depiction of events in the film.
Kathryn Bigelow further distorts the past by lumping all attacks carried out post-9/11 as being tied directly to bin Laden. It was bad enough the first time we had to experience this distortion of events, when the complacent media repeatedly connected all Islamist attacks to al-Qaeda, even when they were unrelated. There is simply no excuse for Bigelow to reach back and undo what time had healed.
The attack in Khobar was not the work of al-Qaeda, but similar/related anti-Saudi Monarchy groups operating in the Arabian Peninsula. That attack (the first depicted in the film, immediately following the first scene of torture) is used to inject the 24/Jack Bauer "ticking time bomb" rationale into the film. If you listen closely you can hear Bigelow whispering, ‘If only we had tortured him more we could have prevented that attack!’
The Marriott Hotel attack was never convincingly tied to any specific group. The Shoebomber (petty criminal turned halfbaked Islamist, Richard Reid) was probably the best indication of what an overhyped ‘organization’ (network, more accurately) al-Qaeda was. The July 7th attacks were carried out by British-born youths who were reacting to their own nation's assault on Iraq. The smoking car of Times Square "attack" was the work of one Faisal Shahzad, another sad sack who turned to "terrorism" (failed terrorism) in response to the "War on Terror". He was not a hardened jihadi/Islamist, he was a financial analyst out of Connecticut.
Regardless of their lack of association with the target of the manhunt depicted in the film, all of these attacks/attempted attacks are taken out of context, as the film gives absolutely no background to why any of this might be happening. Nothing is said of the Middle East, the collapse of Arab Nationalism, the rise of Islamism, any modern history whatsoever. Nothing. Nothing is said of the Arab world except one line when Maya (the drab, one-dimensional bore that is the grey centerpiece to the film) is asked what she thinks of Pakistan: "It's pretty fucked up." Nice.
One minor detail that is absent from Zero Dark Thirty that is worth mentioning: THE INVASION OF IRAQ. The narrative is written exclusively from the American perspective and omits entirely the suffering of the Arabs and Muslim people. Bigelow does not merely give it short shrift, she virtually excises it from the record. If one knew nothing of the time from 2001 to 2010 other than what you saw in ZeroDarkThirty you would never know that America was involved in numerous ground wars and occupations at the time. You certainly would not be aware that tens of thousands of Afghans and Pakistanis plus more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians had perished by the time some pathetic jackass drove his car to Time Square and set it ablaze with firecrackers. In the film, this is depicted as one attack in a possibly endless torrent of terrorism unleashed on America and its allies, who have responded with only what appears to be the cast of CSI show, who stand around a big table and stare into computer monitors. Oh, and occasionally waterboard someone (well, for the first hour anyway).
The characters, ostensibly based on real-life individuals, are hollow and cliche. The lead (Jessica Chastain) is wooden and her character flat. The dialogue given the actress is even worse. The audience is supposed to take her seriously because she curses (gasp! like a man!) in a few scenes, but this elicited only laughter from me. This laughter was unintended, but other scenes her hard-assed stubbornness is actually played for laughs (deflating any defense of the film as nothing more than the sober depiction of events devoid of Hollywood-styled embellishment) as she repeatedly scrawls, on the office window of her station chief, the number of days that the Abbottabad lead has gone unverified. The most absurd scene has her confront C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta when he asks her who she is, "I'M THE MOTHERFUCKER WHO FOUND THIS PLACE!" It is so out of place and preposterous it has to be seen to be believed. In an earlier scene following the attack on Camp Chapman (an equally ridiculous sequence) she yells, "I'm gonna smoke everybody involved in this op, and then I'm going to kill bin Laden!"
BOO-YA! Wait, when did this turn from the dramatization of a historical event (the opening titles said this was based on "first-hand accounts of actual events") to a corny revenge film? Oh, my mistake. This is HollywooDoD.
I couldn't help but think that there is probably an interview out there somewhere where Bigelow "admits" that she sees a bit of herself in Maya. She needn't bother when twits like film critic, Richard Corliss, will volunteer their own shallow observations such as
"In a way, Maya is the C.I.A. equivalent of Bigelow, a strong woman who has mastered a man’s game."
(vomit)
Chastain herself offered this:
"I can't help but compare my character of Maya to you [Bigelow]: two powerful, fearless women that allow their expert work to stand before them,"
Kathryn Bigelow has only made things worse by attempting to defend her atrocious cinematic offal from criticism by wheeling out everything from the First Amendment to her alleged status as a lifelong pacifist. I suspect that her motivation is to keep Academy Voters on her side, but I do not doubt that she is displeased with the accusations of being an apologist for war crimes.
"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. This is an important principle to stand up for, and it bears repeating. For 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." (L.A. Times)
This is nothing but self-serving indignation: She absolutely endorses torture with her film. No question. She not only defends the practice, she romanticizes its practitioners (war criminals who should be charged with crimes against humanity in any other context). Her depiction of the Jason Clarke character is almost lustful.
As if to underline her own spineless lack of conviction she closes her LA Times piece with a thorough contradiction of her claim of being a pacifist:
"...we should never discount and never forget the thousands of innocent lives lost on 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks. We should never forget the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation's safety and security. Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation"
In my world "pacifists" do not make their living making incredibly (bad) violent films, nor do they promote the military and intelligence agencies that wage war against the Third World. (When considering her ‘pacrifism’, also keep in mind the closing lines of her acceptance speech for Hurt Locker: "I’d just like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world. And may they come home safe. Thank you.")
To return to her love for her characters, Maya and Dan: - torture is depicted as something that tests the character of these individuals and nothing more. It is not depicted as a vicious crime committed against real human beings, but merely a backdrop to the characters Boal dreamed up. And this is not so because of a lack of editorialization, because there is plenty of opinion injected into Zero Dark Thirty. With touching music and close-ups of pained faces and furrowed brows we are urged (manipulated) to feel for the emotional anguish of these poor agents. No such cinematic artifice is employed to make us feel for their victims.
And there were plenty of victims. Tens of thousands of poor Arab and African men, women and children have been kidnapped and tortured by the United States and its allies. Hundreds have been tortured to death and many more have been executed or disappeared permanently. By one estimate the torture program also lead to more than three thousand (mostly US troops) revenge killings. None of this is addressed. None of it. Remind yourself that the director, Bigelow, claimed above that she is "shining a light" on a "dark deed", and even went as far as implying that she made "a case against torture". Ha.
The reality is that the film is peppered with atrociously written and poorly delivered (Mark Strong's performance in this scene is particularly cringe-inducing) speeches like this:
"I want to make something absolutely clear. If you thought there was some secret cell somewhere working al-Qaeda, I want you to know that you are wrong! This is it. There's no working group coming to the rescue. There's nobody else hidden away on some other floor. This is just us. And we are FAILING. We're spending billions of dollars. People are dying. We're still no closer to defeating our enemy. They attacked us on land in '98, by sea in 2000, and form the air in 2001. They murdered three thousand of our citizens in cold blood, they've slaughtered our forward deployed. And what the fuck have we done about it? What have we done? We have twenty leadership names and we've only eliminated four of them. I want targets! Do your fucking jobs! Bring me people to kill!"
and
"I don't fucking care about bin Laden. I care about the next attack. You're going to start working on the American al-Qaeda cells. PROTECT THE HOMELAND."
How do these histrionics "shine a light" on anything? How do they do anything but reinforce the idea that all of these war crimes were carried out under tremendous pressure to protect the American public?
*****
The final 45 minutes of the film are dedicated to the attack on the bin Laden compound. This is not interesting or exciting to watch. Why? There is nothing exciting about a crack team of highly-trained killers armed to the teeth and covered from head to toe in high tech breaking into a house and shooting a bunch of unarmed men and women one by one. It is more disturbing than it is suspenseful. The closest they come to injury is when their advanced stealth helicopter (a piece of military equipment that Bigelow clearly had a hardon for, as evinced by a three minute sales pitch and about ten incredibly tedious minutes of footage of it flying around in the dark) craps out and pitches itself into one of the walls of the compound.
Like Dan, the SEALs are depicted as thoughtful, beardy hunks whose brand of camaraderie should be familiar to anyone who has seen any of the Transformers films.
"Were we supposed to crash that helo?"
Wow, SEALs are so cute!
Later, after one of the SEALs shoots an unarmed woman in the back he explains to a comrade that "I had to pop his wife". The comrade asks if she will live, to which he responds "She'll bleed out." The comrade grimaces, "What a mess."
Jesus Christ. This would have been the time for Bigelow to step up to the plate and actually depict the cold, methodical way that an surgical strike is carried out. These hits are done with impunity and without remorse. But, because they are nothing more than state propaganda whores, Boal and Bigelow go out of their way to artificially inject emotional reflection into the scene in order to excuse the brutal and unconscionable murder of this woman. Or do Boal and Bigelow actually believe that it was realistic for two SEALs to break silence to express their personal misgivings and regret over the body of a faceless Muslim woman?
As if all this were not enough, they depict bin Laden's twelve-year-old daughter as being easily distracted from her grief and terror by the condescending gift of a glow stick from one of her father's murderers.