Kathryn Bigelow, “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012)
This film purports to document the hunt for World Public Enemy No 1, the Saudi national Osama bin Laden, and the people and incidents involved in that hunt, leading from the hijackings of four passenger jet aircraft and the World Trade Center attacks on 11 September 2001 up to and including the raid by US Navy SEALs on a compound in Abbottabad, supposedly bin Laden’s residence, in Pakistan in 2011. The film opens with a black screen and a muddled soundtrack of firefighters’ radio calls, people crying for help in the WTC buildings and emergency call operators attempting to calm them down before exclaiming that they can’t hear the WTC callers any more. Cut to a scene in which a Middle Eastern man is being beaten and waterboarded by American agent Dan (Jason Clarke) and some masked accomplices. One of these accomplices is soon revealed as a woman, Maya (Jessica Chastain), a rookie CIA agent posted to Pakistan. The film then follows Maya’s obsessive mission to track down and kill (rather than bring to justice) the dreaded bogey bin Laden while battling the male-dominated CIA paper-shuffling supervisors and administrators.
Along the way, the film fetishises torture and the staging of spectacular stunts based on actual incidents such as the July 2005 bomb attacks on public transport in London, a bomb attack at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad (Pakistan) in 2008, a suicide bomber attack that killed seven people (including a CIA colleague of Maya’s, supposedly) at an airbase in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009 and a car-bomb blow-up attempt at Times Square in New York in 2010. Bigelow’s selective use of information given her by the CIA to build a narrative structured in chapters, some of which carry CIA-jargon titles like “Human Error” and “Tradecraft”, that privilege the use of torture over other (perhaps more mundane and less visually arresting and gruesome) methods of obtaining information should leave viewers in no doubt that Bigelow is embedded with the US Department of Defense and has imbibed very deeply official US government propaganda that torture is justified if the results obtained are valuable. The film shows Maya watching DVD after DVD of men being tortured, Maya brutally interrogating and torturing men herself, Maya and another CIA agent manipulating and torturing a man related to one of the 9/11 hijackers and exploiting his memory loss, Maya happily receiving information from a financier who promptly gives up when he sees her (presumably she’s tortured him in the past) – taken together, all these incidents show that Maya resorts to intimidation, manipulation and torture as a first resort to get what she wants.
Whether the resulting information could have been found in other ethical ways is not even considered in the film. As it happens, a snippet of information found by another rookie female CIA agent in a neglected file does lead indirectly to the location of OBL’s hiding place, thus negating all previous torture efforts, but the film does not treat this agent as heroic or significant and she drops out of sight for the rest of the movie. If any proof is needed that Bigelow and script-writer Mark Boal are enthralled by torture and torture techniques and what they can do, then the film’s particular narrative emphasis, what it dwells on and what it leaves out, provides the proof in spades.
The question of torture aside, the film is a tedious and unenlightening trawl through a glorified police investigation in which Maya, a metaphor for various women agents who worked on the case, reveals unpleasant psychopathic qualities as she pursues her quarry. She empties her head and body of anything resembling compassion, consideration and empathy for others and ultimately a soul. Other CIA agents regard her with some awe at her lack of social life, a sense of humour, need for sleep and family photographs around her work desk. Even the fellow who teaches her the ropes regarding torture is shown to be affectionate towards monkeys he keeps in a cage in an Afghan airbase. At the conclusion of the film when she’s by herself, Maya sheds a tear as if finally demonstrating that she has rejoined the human species – but this comes across as a cynical after-thought on the director’s part. Discussions as to whether Maya is crying for the loss of her innocence, whether she might later come before a US Congressional inquisition on why she constantly used torture to get information, or for making herself redundant now that she’s achieved her career goal, are really neither here nor there.
Characters in the film are unpleasant one-dimensional thug stereotypes. Maya and Dan evoke no sympathy for their single-minded pursuit of OBL. A troublesome aspect of the film is that female CIA agents like Maya and Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) are portrayed as more gung-ho and focused on the hunt for OBL than their male counterparts, as though ZD30 were trying to win over a paying female audience, bill itself as pro-feminist and show that women can be as militaristic as men and presumably are up for frontline combat roles.
While Bigelow has claimed that ZD30 is “a modern, rigorous film about counter-terrorism”, the actual film comes over as racist. There have been criticisms that in Pakistani-based scenes, the language the locals use is Arabic rather than Pashto, Punjabi or Urdu and that Islamabad and some other Pakistani cities resemble war zones or dusty Middle Eastern towns rather the chaotic, overcrowded, several-million-strong metropolises they actually are. The supposedly climactic scenes in which Navy SEALs are sent out at night to storm the OBL compound may very well be inaccurate: evidence is slowly accumulating that both Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA participated in a joint operation in Abbottabad in May 2011, during which a helicopter crashed. The film shows Maya’s astonishment at being a target for demonstrations and even death, as if the thought had never occurred to her that her work might be encouraging more, not less, terrorism. Bigelow makes no attempt at trying to understand the background to the 11 September 2001 attacks or even whether the other terrorist incidents that follow in the movie are in any way at all connected to OBL and al Qa’ida.
“Zero Dark Thirty” turns out to be a journey into a heart of darkness – Maya’s (and by extension, Bigelow’s) own heart of darkness.