The Moral Murkiness of Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty tells the ten year tale of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow it is a morally complex, ambiguous film that is both thrilling and intellectually stimulating.

It is a thoroughly engaging, if not a little hard to call entertaining, real life thriller. As an example of a film about the fight back against terror, it pales in comparison to United 93 in terms of raw emotional power but its realism and careful construction come close to that film’s documentary style. In the final sequence at bin Laden’s secret hideout, it is hard to believe at some points that it was not filmed at the exact location of the true events, so meticulous is the reconstruction. The thriller and the procedural elements are wholly gripping and powered by horrendous torture scenes, references to real life tragedies and a climax that is edge of the seat exciting and simultaneously depressing.

It is the politics however that make Zero Dark Thirty the most difficult to watch and comment on. It shows torture in all its disgusting glory from water boarding to treating detainees like dogs to sleep deprivation and humiliation. It positions scenes of torture immediately after the real life voices of the innocent victims of 9/11 fill your ears with cries for help giving context to why America would feel the need to commit such inhumane acts. It only shows the torture of detainees who are clearly guilty of some involvement in terrorism. It seems to almost implicitly suggest that more torture could have prevented later tragedies in 7/7 and elsewhere and it makes a CIA operative who commits the worst, most degrading and reprehensible acts of torture to be a reasonable, kind of nice guy who has to get out of the job because of what it is doing to his mental health. Torture it seems is a tough job but the film seems to say someone has to do it. When Obama comes on the television saying he plans to scrap torture, it puts a right spanner in the works of the characters we have come to care about.

But the film does not celebrate torture. It does not glorify it. And it even sort of suggests that torture failed and that instead good detective work solved the case of where in the world bin Laden was hiding. It suggests the impact torture has on the people who commit it but fails to say much about the devastation it causes detainees and certainly not the ‘perhaps hundreds whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments’. It’s a streamlined Hollywood narrative film so perhaps there is no time for such issues but as it is, the film seems to suggest torture had its merits, might have been necessary and perhaps even should still be allowed. This strict sticking to narrative conventions also explains why there is no context to the 9/11 attacks, no sense of the CIA’s past sins or the reason for jihadist’s hatred of America; not that that would excuse the attacks, just as the attacks don’t excuse the murder of Afghan and Iraqi civilians. And on the subject of inexcusable, so is the using of 9/11 victims phone calls without the families’ permission.

But beneath the politics is a solid film, well acted, incredibly sombre in the face of what should have been a great victory and subtly feminist. Jessica Chastain is fantastic as Maya, supposedly a composite of many CIA officers (mostly women) who were deeply and determinedly involved in the hunt for the world’s most wanted man. The score resembles the anticipation inducing dull thudding of United 93, a film that similarly created a pain staking reconstruction of real events.

One of the most interesting points of the film is where it makes your sympathies lie. You can’t help but sympathise for the torture victim despite his involvement with 9/11. You want Maya to succeed in her quest but then the final fire fight makes you sympathise with the people closest to bin Laden as they wail and weep. It’s a tricky, morally complex mess, just like the real situation.

Zero Dark Thirty certainly does not shy away from the controversy surrounding the ‘war on terror’ and should be commended for that. Simply as a film, it stands tall amongst real life thrillers. Its politics might me morally dubious but they are complex enough to provoke serious and stimulating debate and for that I highly recommend it.

Deconstructing Cinema: Cloverfield

Six years after 9/11, a mysterious teaser trailer appeared in cinemas before screenings of Michael Bay’s explosive but empty Transformers (2007) film. With no title, just a release date and the name of producer J.J. Abrams, the teaser showed a party full of young professionals being disrupted by huge roars and a distant explosion. The trailer culminated with the head of the Statue of Liberty flying through the air and bouncing down a street full of terrified people. Backed up by a viral marketing campaign that leaked limited information about the monster featured in the film, Cloverfield built up a strong following before it was released in January 2008...

Read the rest of this article at Static Mass Emporium. 

Differing Documentaries

 Two documentaries that deal with America's foreign policy but in very different ways:

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? (Morgan Spurlock, 2008)

Spurlock makes another personal documentary, this time using his hunt for Bin Laden as an excuse to travel to the Middle East showing us all how lovely Muslims really are.  And in one shocking sequence that is as one-sided as the rest of the film, how bloody miserable and horrible the Israeli’s Spurlock encounters are.  Using the impending birth of his first child as a ticking clock to give the doc some momentum, Spurlock rarely does any real hunting and instead uses his platform to show that the ordinary folk of Muslim countries don’t hate American people but just how their government behaves.  Surprisingly not as well-received as Super Size Me, this one is better and despite its stiflingly obvious agenda, more of a must-see.  Interestingly it ends with Spurlock not going in to Pakistan to continue his search for the elusive Bin Laden.  If only he’d known…

Why we Fight (Eugene Jarecki, 2005)

Documentary exploring the military-industrial complex using a famous speech of Eisenhower’s as a springboard to consider the need for ongoing war-mongering by a country that demands war to be business as usual.  Jarecki makes a straight-forward, hugely informative and engaging doc that needs not the now-more-conventional antics of a Spurlock or Moore to entertain the audience.  Definitely less amusing than anything thos guys have made though...

I have to say I'm a sucker for demanding entertainment value even from documentaries and despite Jarecki's film being sobering, more informative but just as biased, Spurlock's makes for more enjoyable viewing.  However Spurlock's on-camera shtick might grate with some and perhaps his appeal will wear off very quickly.  Therefore Jarecki must be applauded for taking the 'I' out of political documentary and just delivering a cold, hard look at the state of the most powerful nation on Earth.

If you are lucky enough to be a member of Lovefilm, these are both available for free streaming!

Anyone seen either of these?  As always, I metaphorically offer a penny for your thoughts...

Cinema of 9/11

The tenth anniversary of the attacks on America are approaching and I'm currently writing an article about films that have tackled and clealy referenced the tragic events of 11th September 2001.

In preparation, this week I finally got round to watching the short film anthology '11/09/01 September 11'. Made in 2002, this seems to me to be the first cinematic response to the tragedy. It is an amazing collection of work with interesting international directors tackling the events in very different ways. It's hard to choose favourites from such a diverse, thought-provoking collection. However the French director Claude Lelouch's 11 minute segment created a strong emotional impact with use of news footage and the experience of a deaf woman in New York.



Ken Loach's piece leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. For me it was a very effective history lesson. It puts 9/11 into perspective by reminding viewers of the massacre of 30,000 Chileans, a massacre that the American government was behind. Good points to raise but I can't shake the feeling that the films here should be more focussed on New York, the towers, the lives lost in 2001 (not to suggest that they are more important than the lives of Chileans- just becuse of the title of the film).



However Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's segment is at the other extreme. It is nothing but images and sounds from the day. People fall, black screen, people fall. It feels a bit exploitative of the incredible footage but is undeniably extremely saddening and shocking despite having seen these images over and over before.



Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), Mira Nair (India) and Sean Penn (USA) also impressed with their short films. Their respective contributions show the impact of 9/11 (or lack of impact) on a class of school children in Iran, the search for a lost son and the xenophobia experienced by a American-Muslim family in the aftermath and the impact of the towers fall on one lonely old man in New York.

This week I also started watching the TV series 'Rescue Me' starring Denis Leary about firefighters in post 9/11 Manhatten coming to terms with loss and grief. Totally politically incorrect with its homophobic and sexist lead characters, three episodes in and I'm hoping the characters become more sympathetic. Anyway, the references to 9/11 are abundant as all the characters lives have been touched by the tragedy. I'd be interested to know how New York firefighters feel about their representation in the show.

I also plan to re-watch 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002) which used Ground Zero as a backdrop. Obviously I will consider United 93 and World Trade Center (both 2006) and their head-on depictions of the tragedy, but also their themes of hope in the face of total despair.

I also intend to consider the use of the aesthetics of 9/11 in films such as Cloverfield (for more on this please read http://host.uniroma3.it/riviste/Ol3Media/Turner.html) and War of the Worlds (Spielberg, 2005).

I will also explore the use of 9/11 in two Michael Moore documentaries (Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11), Adam Sandler drama 'Reign Over Me' (astounding performance-melodramatic but well worth a watch!) and Robert Pattinson tear-fest 'Remember Me'.

It's going to be gruelling watching 9/11 related films for the next few weeks but it is a subject that I have very strong feelings about and I'm looking forward to getting started on the article. Is there any films I've missed that clearly should be included here?