Zero Dark Thirty, out this weekend, 'remarkably accurate' yet still controversial
Zero Dark Thirty, the critically acclaimed film that looks at the events leading up to the death of Osama bin Laden. The film, though, has not been without controversy, particularly on Capitol Hill, where several senators have been outspoken critics.
The Osama bin Laden manhunt movie Zero Dark Thirty opens in theaters across the country this weekend.
But director Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller opened in select theaters back in December and in the process earned rave reviews. But it's also generated a fair amount of controversy, particularly on Capitol Hill.
Senators John McCain, Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin have slammed the movie for its alleged inaccuracies — in particular, scenes depicting the CIA’s use of torture as an “enhanced interrogation” technique.
“I find a lot of the anger about the portrayal of torture in the movie to be confusingly misplaced,” said Mark Bowden, a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the nonfiction book Black Hawk Down. “It represents a willful misreading of the film. Torture is shown to be brutal, cruel and ineffective.”
Bowden believes Washington’s disapproval stems from a political agenda, rather than the film’s content.
“It complicates their lives,” he said, pointing out that John Brennan’s recent nomination for CIA director inflames the issue.
Brennan was accused of condoning the use of torture to gain information from suspects following 9/11. “(Politicians) would like for that all to go away,” said Bowden, who is also the author of The Finish, a novel that traces the events leading up to bin Laden’s death, “and this movie doesn’t serve that end.”
Although the movie condenses a decade’s worth of events into 157 minutes, Bowden calls it “remarkably accurate.”
The mistake, he said, was one of marketing, presenting Zero Dark Thirty as a work of journalism.
“I don’t think they should be blurring the line between what they do and what journalists do,” he said.
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Meanwhile, it's time to end the obfuscating once and for all. Waterboarding was invented during the Spanish Inquisition. The US prosecuted Japanese officers who used the technique for war crimes following WWII. The Khmer Rouge further refined the practice. Waterboarding is torture. Unfortunately, much of our media willfully avoids calling the practice by its name as this site demonstrates - http://www.coveringtorture.org/
Torture is torture. It's also against the law.
I don't even know if Jessica Chastain played an actual, historical character, or whether this was the portrayal of events as directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
It's like the game Clue: You are able to elicit information because of the cards you hold in your hand and holding those against information discussed with other subjects.
The film doesn't show that torture results in a subject giving up a central, crucial plot or figure in the movement, or coughing up everything they know in a confession.
In fact, the most brutal torture results in ZERO information of use being elicited during the physical torture process itself. Some information comes out later, when the torturers go easier on the guy.
If you, Peter, don't think that is likely, that people can be broken that way, then you are living in a dreamworld.
If you think "breaking" people is wrong, that I understand, and if your point is to say that it's been criminalized and is illegal fine, but either take a moral / legal stand or don't: By saying "torture is ineffective" you are parroting a meme put out there by the political wing of the certain members of the U.S. government and of some members of the CIA -- other members just as close or closer to the truth would insist on the factual reality being closer to the more nuanced portrait of the role that torture has played in the process of intelligence gathering.
As an opponent of torture, I found the "torture is ineffective" meme to be seductive and comforting.
The movie made me question whether I'd been sold something. Imagining myself a subject of it, I personally don't see how undergoing water-boarding that caused me, over and over again, to lose total control over my body and experience the panic of drowning on a primal level, how I would not eventually weaken and respond to kind, civil treatment by eventually sharing some useful information with my captors.
Especially if they were intelligent, intense, detective / psychologists and knew how to work it out of me psychologically.
Again, it's comforting to hope that this is not true, and it's also comforting to imagine those engaging in torture as animals and pure sadists, to get on a high horse about them and condemn their illegal acts and to pull out tropes like "we're becoming worse than the assailants themselves and compromising our own humanity in the process," but I thought the film adequately portrays a sort of "tool" kind of person, obsessed and single-minded in pursuit of a goal, not doing it for glory, or for patriotic self-sacrifice, but likely because of some other deeper, more obscure psychological motive.
I found the movie to be deeply spooky in a way because it refused to moralize and because of it's neutral stance on everything that happened. I dislike Bigelow's two movies on the 9-11 wars because they don't question the premises or pull the camera back to the point where we see the senselessness of the situation more clearly, but of the two, Hurt Locker upset me more because this neutral portrayal was made of a situation where we were, by many more bullet points, engaged in an unjust war. Zero Dark Thirty is about a criminal, military, intelligence manhunt for a person who did make a conscious choice to support flying commercial aircraft filled with people into enormous buildings filled with people, most of whom were non-combatants except when looking at the world in a Marxist or radical Islamic fundamentalist point of view.
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