by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
Upon the suggestion of long time and valued blog contributor James in LA, this column on “Zero Dark Thirty” and the controversy surrounding that film is offered as a supplement to the earlier entry in the series on propaganda,”Propaganda 102: Holly Would and the Power of Images“. It is in part movie review and in part a critical examination of the film’s content as related to the controversy around whether or not this film is pro-torture propaganda. Thank you for the excellent suggestion, James!
Is “Zero Dark Thirty” (ZDT) a good film? Is ZDT propaganda? If so, is it pro-torture propaganda (i.e. does it support or promote the idea of torture as a valid and/or necessary intelligence gathering methodology)? Let us examine these questions . . .
ZDT is well paced, the cinematography is strong and it is well written by Mark Boal – all tributes to the technical expertise behind this film being first rate and director Kathryn Bigelow ties it all together in a better than average Hollywood package. The 157 minute running time moves rapidly and keeps you engaged. As a film, ZDT works. Kind of. And I’ll get to that, but first, the acting.
The supporting cast is a veritable who’s who of some of today’s best character actors from James Gandolfini (“The Sopranos”, “Where the Wild Things Are”) to Harold Perrineau (“The Matrix Reloaded”, “Lost” and “Oz”) to Stephen Dillane (“Game of Thrones” and even more notably Thomas Jefferson in the “John Adams” HBO mini-series) to Mark Strong (perennial Guy Ritchie gangster favorite, “Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy”) to John Barrowman (known to any Whovian and “Torchwood” fans as Capt. Jack Harkness). Many of these strong actors though are a bit wasted on parts that often are only a couple of lines and/or scenes, but their presence does greatly contribute to the overall quality of the film. Three actors really drive the film and get the bulk of the screen time: Jessica Chastain (“The Help”, “The Debt”), Jason Clarke (“Lawless”, “Public Enemies”), and Jennifer Ehle (“Contagion”, “The Ides of March”, “The King’s Speech”). My compliments to the cast and crew on skilful execution of their jobs. Especially the lovely Jennifer Ehle who is as strong a stand out in this film’s deep ensemble cast as she was as the scene stealing epidemiologist she played in the equally strong cast of “Contagion”.
Character-wise the film’s primary focus is on Chastain’s “Maya”, Clarke’s “Dan” and Ehle’s “Jessica” and in some ways they are representations of two different schools of thought on how to best gather intelligence. Maya is the young blood. New to field intelligence work, she’s thrown into the deep end. Her first field assignment and her first scene is with Dan as he is in mid-torture, er, interrogation. Maya is the audience proxy into Dan’s “Torture Works!” world and into Jessica’s “Old School/We Have Rules” world. Her choice is clear and it is clear from the first scene. She’s with Dan.
The torture itself is brutal and inhumane and the character Dan comes across as a pure psychopath and a sadist. Dan alternates charm with threats, beatings, stress positions (including cramped confinement), humiliation, and waterboarding. The waterboarding depicted is done so in a spontaneous and off hand way that is seems almost a casual aside. We know from memos from Cheney’s lawyers that the practice was methodical and repetitive. This is not the only time the film deviates from what we know to be the reality of torture. The other is that torture led to a detainee revealing the nom de guerre of OBL’s courier when it has been revealed that this information was in fact part of a larger traditional human and signal intelligence operations. In the real world, almost all of the information acquired through “enhanced interrogation techniques” was recalled because it was inherently unreliable.
Dan is the least sympathetic character of the film, but I don’t think he’s meant to be unsympathetic. He’s just a guy with a tough job. Maya is at first a bit taken aback, seemingly uncomfortable by Dan’s torture techniques, although she rather quickly (almost unbelievably so) opts to participate instead of watching although her involvement in the torture proper is fairly passive compared to Dan. To show how tough she is, she assures Dan she’s “fine” when asked. In one fell swoop, the young blood becomes true believer. This is all within the first fifteen minutes mind you. The torture component is only in the first part of the film, but it does set the tone thematically and as Maya character development. Maya meets Jessica afterwards in a mid-level status update meeting among the various CIA assets running ground operations in Pakistan. Jessica advocates using greed as a motivating factor to encourage people to bring them actionable intelligence. Later, Maya offhandedly dismisses this tactic by noting “it worked well enough in the Cold War” and rationalizing her tacit approval of Dan’s techniques under the rubric that the enemy are fanatics. The relationship of Jessica and Maya is important later down the road as they become friends despite their differences. This is important to the analysis of whether this film constitutes pro-torture propaganda, but the basic progression of the film is fairly simple. Torture, misadventures in human intelligence gathering, solid lead, decision to act, apprehension, afterward/closing.
At the most basic level, ZDT is a well made film. On that level, I must say it was a good movie. Not everything that is propaganda is excluded from being art. In cinema, the prime example of that is “Casablanca”. It was certainly pro-Allied propaganda in the “good people choose to act against the Nazis” kind of way. That in no way interferes with enjoying it as a film and in part because the message is one that just about everyone not a Nazi can agree with. That is not the case with ZDT and it is part and parcel of why it almost works as a movie. ZDT is certainly a piece of propaganda in the most negative meaning of the word. It presents a clear and unambiguous portrait of torture as being critical to intelligence gathering and it does so from the first scene. This message is irrevocably fundamentally wrong from both a human rights and Constitutional standpoint as well as an outright lie about the role of torture in capturing bin Laden. It is revisionist history of the worst sort; the kind designed to whitewash the actions of bad actors.
Not only does the new blood Maya quickly buy in to the torture paradigm of information gathering, it is never once denounced by any character. This includes the “voice of traditional intelligence methods” character of Jessica. She voices her opinion in favor of traditional techniques, but she seems otherwise perfectly fine with Dan’s methods. That Dan’s methods are justified is further illustrated by traditional human and signal intelligence as being portrayed is not only ineffective but a direct causal factor in the death of the Jessica character which serves as the final impetus for the Maya character to kill bin Laden. And it’s consistently and from the get go kill bin Laden – no talk is had of capture. Maya wants him dead and will stop at nothing until he’s dead. Several other characters take action based upon or make comment of the value of the “detainee program”. Dan leaves the field and goes back to Washington in part because he’s “burned out” in the unintentionally least sympathetic scene in the whole film. Po’ ol’ Psycho Dan is just worn out from all that torturing. He’s “seen too many naked men.” Of course, that he smells the changes on the political wind and wants to get out before he gets caught does nothing to enhance sympathy for the psychopath’s plight. His interest is strictly in himself and his self-preservation. He even warns Maya that she “doesn’t want to be the last one left holding the dog collar” before going home, in reference to the earlier torture scene where Dan makes a prisoner wear a dog collar and walks him around the cell. The CIA Station Chief Joseph Bradley (played by Kyle Chandler) bemoans the loss of the detainee program as does Mark Strong’s character George, a nebulously defined CIA manager fairly high up the food chain and in charge of the task force that employs Maya. These commentaries stand out in stark contrast to what the later half of the movie shows, namely that human and signal intelligence are the means which ultimately lead to bin Laden’s capture despite the dogged insistence that the initial break came from torture. Even when prisoners choose to cooperate, they make it clear it is because they do not want to be tortured further.
Some in the press are speculating that Bigelow was played by the CIA’s right wing elements that followed Cheney’s lead on torture. Some think she’s a right wing ideologue endorsing torture herself. I say it is irrelevant to the end product being propaganda by merit of having a decidedly pro-torture message. Dupe or willing propagandist, the product is propaganda just the same.
ZDT is propaganda at its blackest. It starts with torture, never criticizes torture, bemoans the loss of the tool and never waivers that it was instrumental in capturing bin Laden despite the reality to the contrary. It ends with Maya on a plane home, crying – unrepentant, unquestioning, tears of her sacrifice that ignore her part in war crimes, still very much the hero. And that is the final nail in the coffin that makes ZDT almost work as a movie. There is no examination of whether torture is wrong or not. Just a tacit endorsement writ large in the self-pitying tears of the lead actress as she rides off into the sunset.
As the credits rolled, from behind me I heard another theater patron say, “Well . . . f@ck.” I turned to see a college kid with a t-shirt bearing the text of the 8th Amendment. I smiled a slight sad smile, tipped my ball cap to him and his girlfriend. “Nice t-shirt,” I said. They waved before walking away hand in hand up the aisle, excitedly mumbling to each other in that insular way young lovers do.
I knew how they felt. It was cold and rainy outside as I exited the side door of the theater opposite the young couple. It was rainy and cold in my heart. I thought, “So many people are going to see this movie and buy its bullshit without questioning the message, or worse, believing it.” But maybe not. Maybe it will backfire and act as unintentional agitprop to reinvigorate the discussion about torture and what we should do to hold those responsible accountable. Ah, hope. Our greatest strength as a species and concurrently our greatest weakness. But I digress.
There has been much defense in the media played by many involved with the film. Director Kathryn Bigelow said, “We depicted a variety of controversial practices and intelligence methods that were used in the name of finding bin Laden. The film shows that no single method was necessarily responsible for solving the manhunt, nor can any single scene taken in isolation fairly capture the totality of efforts the film dramatizes.” Which is utter nonsense as every bit of intelligence gathered is predicated on torture forcing a prisoner to tell us the nom de guerre of OBL’s courier when in real life we knew that from other traditional sources of intelligence. It’s abundantly clear in the film that no progress would have been made without torture first revealing that bit of information. Even a Sony executive weighed in. “We are outraged that any responsible member of the Academy would use their voting status in AMPAS as a platform to advance their own political agenda,” said Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and chairman of its Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group. “This film should be judged free of partisanship,” she said, adding that the film “does not advocate torture.” Also utter nonsense and anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of propaganda can tell it is utter nonsense by the content of the film. The film doesn’t explicitly endorse torture, true, but the implicit endorsement practically screams off of the screen. Thanks, Amy, but I think I’ll judge the movie by simple human decency and the fact that torture is unconstitutional and illegal and any film that acts as a tacit endorsement of torture is vile no matter how well made it is. Then again, what do you care? You got my money and I’m not a member of the AMPAS. I will, however, probably choose to vote with my dollar on the next film either you or Kathryn Bigelow are attached to that I might be interested in seeing as well as any product in general from Sony or Columbia/Tri-Star. I don’t think I’ll see another Kathryn Bigelow film even if it’s so good it makes you cry tears of gold, sweat happy playful puppies and smell like fresh baked cookies.
I don’t regret seeing the film. It was not a waste of time. It is an excellent study piece in propaganda. It was well made. However, I do wish I had my money back. People who advocate torture – even implicitly – shouldn’t get a dime for doing so. Having seen this, I urge you to see it for as free as possible and make up your own mind in light of what you have learned from this series or elsewhere about the nature of propaganda.
If you’ve seen it or not, but especially if you have, what do you think?
Source(s): “Zero Dark Thirty“, CNN, Global Research
~submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
The Propaganda Series;
Propaganda 105: How to Spot a Liar
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Streisand Effect and the Political Question
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Sound of Silence
Propaganda 104: Magica Verba Est Scientia Et Ars Es
Propaganda 103: The Word Changes, The Word Remains The Same
Propaganda 102: Holly Would and the Power of Images
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Build It And They Will Come (Around)
Propaganda 101: What You Need to Know and Why or . . .
Related articles of interest;
Next up: Dirty Wars (screenwriter Jeremy Scahill and director Richard Rowley)
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/sundance-film-festival/la-et-mn-sundance-dirty-wars-documentary-sale-20130120,0,1039574.story
Sundance 2013: ‘Dirty Wars’ documentary sells to Sundance Selects
By Julie Makinen and John Horn
January 20, 2013, 12:02 p.m.
PARK CITY, Utah — Compared to feature films, documentaries are selling like hotcakes at the Sundance Film Festival: On Sunday, Sundance Selects snapped up the North American rights to “Dirty Wars,” a journalistic look at America’s covert operations.
The movie premiered in the U.S. documentary competition section and was directed by Richard Rowley. The film follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill as he traces the rise of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a secret and elite fighting force. The film’s screenplay is by Scahill and David Riker.
Jonathan Sehring, president of Sundance Selects/IFC Films, called the movie a “tough-minded, gripping film that plays out like a detective story.”
“Dirty Wars” is the second doc acquired by Sundance Selects at the festival; the company also bought rights to Nick Ryan’s K2 movie “The Summit.”
anonymously posted 1, January 20, 2013 at 10:23 pm
Bigelow: “Torture has its uses.”
———————–
Clarification:
Bigelow: Torture has its uses. (No quotation marks. Thanks for catching it.)
Gene H. wrote: Not the smokin’ gun as it were on Bigelow’s manifest hypocrisy, but the review itself was quite telling as a piece of standalone pro-torture propaganda. Thanks for the update.
I agree and you’re welcome.
( Regarding “You catch so much good stuff, you must have an Internet IV.”
😉 )
What Gene said about Pro-torture propaganda. It is amazing that something so blatantly illegal is still being discussed.
ap,
That a pure piece of apologist propaganda like that came from the WSJ does not surprise me at all. They aren’t worth wrapping fish in since Rupert bought them. I love that Mary Kissel “corrected” herself mid-sentence to say that the film “showed how uses of enhanced interrogation techniques might have led to, or did lead to, the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden”. Ahhhh. The WSJ towing the neocon line. i.e. lying. No surprise there. That NDAA removing the prohibition on domestic propaganda is already up to full steam is without question. But the quote of Bigelow? It wasn’t a direct quote, but a paraphrase of the opinion of the lying dingus that was what Bigelow was doing, showing that torture has its uses in intelligence gathering which the experts agree is not the case. Not the smokin’ gun as it were on Bigelow’s manifest hypocrisy, but the review itself was quite telling as a piece of standalone pro-torture propaganda. Thanks for the update.
You catch so much good stuff, you must have an Internet IV. 😉
Bigelow: “Torture has its uses.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/20/afghanistan-prison-torture-un_n_2516531.html?ref=topbar
http://live.wsj.com/video/opinion-bigelow-torture-has-its-uses/B2248305-7ADA-49C6-BD0B-A6890F5FD465.html?KEYWORDS=bigelow#!B2248305-7ADA-49C6-BD0B-A6890F5FD465
Beyond Torture: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the Promotion of Extrajudicial Killing
Rebranding the War on Terror for the age of Obama
by Deepa Kumar
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/15-4
Excerpt:
As Glenn Greenwald notes, Brennen has “spouted complete though highly influential falsehoods to the world in the immediate aftermath of the Osama bin Laden killing, including claiming that bin Laden “engaged in a firefight” with Navy SEALS and had “used his wife as a human shield”.”
Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for the “best picture of year” Oscar award, is a harbinger of things to come. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by Obama earlier this month includes an amendment, passed in the House last May, that legalizes the dissemination of propaganda to US citizens. Journalist Naomi Klein argues that the propaganda “amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.”
We can therefore expect not only more such films, but also more misinformation on our TV screens, in our newspapers, on our radio stations and in social media websites. What used to be an informal arrangement whereby the State Department and the Pentagon manipulated the media has now been codified into law. Be ready to be propagandized to all the time, everywhere.
We live in an Orwellian world: the government has sought and won the power to indefinitely detain and to kill US citizens, all wrapped in cloud of secrecy, and to lie to us without any legal constraints.
The NDAA allows for indefinite detention, and a judge ruled that the Obama administration need not provide legal justification for extra judicial killings based on US law thereby granting carte blanche authority to the president to kill whoever he pleases with no legal or public oversight.
Such a system requires an equally powerful system of propaganda to convince the citizenry that they need not be alarmed, they need not speak out, they need not think critically, in fact they need not even participate in the deliberative process except to pull a lever every couple of years in an elaborate charade of democracy. We are being asked, quite literally, to amuse ourselves to death.
Thank you anonymously.
‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is Osama bin Laden’s Last Victory Over America
by Matt Taibbi
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/zero-dark-thirty-is-osama-bin-ladens-last-victory-over-america-20130116#ixzz2IGlZRFAs
Excerpt:
I mean, this is real Keystone Kops stuff, on a grand scale, only it had the minor side effect of destroying everything America purports to stand for, in addition to being comically stupid and ineffective.
Zero Dark Thirty is like a gorgeously-rendered monument to the fatal political miscalculation we made during the Bush years. It’s a cliché but it’s true: Bin Laden wanted us to make this mistake. He wanted America to respond to him by throwing off our carefully-crafted blanket of global respectability to reveal a brutal, repressive hypocrite underneath. He wanted us to stop pretending that we’re the country that handcuffs you and reads you your rights instead of extralegally drone-bombing you from the stratosphere, or putting one in your brain in an Egyptian basement somewhere.
The only way we were ever going to win the War on Terror was to win a long, slow, political battle, in which we proved bin Laden wrong, where we allowed people in the Middle East to assess us as a nation and decide we didn’t deserve to be mass-murdered. To use another cliché, we needed to win hearts and minds. We had to make lunatics like bin Laden pariahs among their own people, which in turn would make genuine terrorists easier to catch with the aid of genuinely sympathetic local populations.
Instead, we turned people like bin Laden into heroes. Just like Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, there were a lot of people in the Middle East who were on the knife-edge about America after 9/11. Yes, we were hated for supporting Israel, but the number of people willing to suicide-bomb us was still a tiny minority.
The EIT program changed that. We tortured and humiliated thousands of people across the world. We did it on camera, in pictures that everyone in the Middle East can watch over and over again on the Internet. We became notorious for a vast kidnapping program we called by the harmless-sounding term “rendition,” and more lately for an endless campaign of extralegal drone attacks, through which 800 innocent people have died in Afghanistan alone in the last four years (the Guardian claims we’ve killed 168 children in that country in the last seven years).
Now we have this movie out that seems to celebrate the use of torture against Arabs, and we’re nominating it for Oscars. Bigelow can say that “depiction is not endorsement,” but how does she think audiences will receive it in the Middle East? Are they going to sell lots of popcorn in Riyadh and Kabul during the waterboarding scenes?
This film got nominated for Best Picture – it could even win. Has anyone thought about how Zero Dark Thirty winning Best Picture will be received in places like Kashmir and Waziristan and Saudi Arabia?
But forget about all of that. The real problem is what this movie says about us. When those Abu Ghraib pictures came out years ago, at least half of America was horrified. The national consensus (albeit by a frighteningly slim margin) was that this wasn’t who we, as a people, wanted to be. But now, four years later, Zero Dark Thirty comes out, and it seems that that we’ve become so blunted to the horror of what we did and/or are doing at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Bagram and other places that we can accept it, provided we get a boffo movie out of it.
That’s pathetic. Bin Laden was maybe the most humorless person who ever lived, but he has to be laughing from the afterlife. We make an incredible movie that celebrates his death – a movie so good it’ll be seen everywhere in the world – and all it does is prove him right about us.
(The entire article is worth the read.)
nick,
I have no issue with FOX’s entertainment divisions – they make some good product – except for FOXNews, which of course isn’t even close to actual news even compared to the other networks. Overall, TV news is basically a joke.
I like the fact that Dennis has moved on. He needs a forum so that he can continue to get his ideas out in front of an audience. If Fox is willing to provide that forum, I’m all for it.
Dennis is an honest man with years of experience dealing with public forums. He isn’t going to change no matter what stage he’s on.
This is a good thing for all of us.
Gene, Ailes is a businessman and idealogue. That’s why he gets the ratings and has been very successful. It’s the news BUSINESS, just like it’s show BUSINESS. Fox tv has been way ahead of the bloated Big 3 networks for a couple decades now w/ much better tv shows. It started w/ The Simpsons. They’re way more innovative. The same w/ Fox/Searchlight Films. They consistently produce quality, out of the box films. I know these are all different divisions in the corporate empire but what is consistent in these divisions is imagination and a fearlessness. They are not “conservative” like the other media empires.
Fact: Zen gardens do not make all peaceful.
One is labeled a sockpuppet because one cannot hide their writing style very well and aren’t nearly as clever as they think.
Any more questions? Oooo. Wait! I got one, Mr. Kotter!
Why is it that someone called a sockpuppet would object to having their strategy revealed when their name wasn’t?
FACT: Identifying a strategy is not identifying a poster.
FYI –
“A claim regarding the existence of black sites was made by The Washington Post in November 2005 and before by human rights NGOs.[37] US President George W. Bush acknowledged the existence of secret prisons operated by the CIA during a speech on September 6, 2006.[38][39]
[edit]”
Point: This is a site where folks can post opinions anonymously. How is it that one is labeled a sockpuppet?
nick,
“The guy has gonads, unlike most pols.”
Yep. That’s why I still like him despite being disappointed on a few matters. Most of the left would avoid being on Fox like the plague. My question is though is adding him to the roster a sign of a move toward legitimacy for FOX or simply window dressing and they still intend to be the propaganda network for the far right. I tend to think the later. Rupert is a tiger who cannot change his stripes. Not to insult tigers.
That’s funny. I didn’t think Tricksy was arguing with you, Sockpuppet.
Dennis Kucinich will be working out of the Fox affiliate in Roswell, NM.
On a serious note, I don’t find this a surprise. Kucinich was often a guest on Fox. The guy has gonads, unlike most pols.
Hey, Blouise, ” Former Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has joined Fox News Channel and Fox Business as a paid contributor, TV Newser reports.
“Through 16 years in Congress and two presidential campaigns, Fox News has always provided me with an opportunity to share my perspective with its enormous viewership,” Kucinich said in a statement. “I look forward to a continuation of our relationship this time as a Fox News contributor.” TPM
Tricksy,
Figuring out which fool to argue with here is easy.
Torture did not happen? It wasn’t ordered by Cheney and approved by Bush? It wasn’t given flimsy legal cover by Bybee, Yoo and OLC? It wasn’t rubber stamped by Ashcroft?
Ignoring the facts is the very worst kind of tunnel vision.
Did I even mention Bush? No.
The very portrait of a straw man argument.