Critics, Cheney apologists and liberals are at each others' throats, but film needs the scenes – as inaccurate as they are
"I'm betting that Dick Cheney will love the new movie Zero Dark Thirty," wrote New York Times columnist Frank Bruni at the weekend, firing the opening salvo in a week-long conflagration between critics and columnists on Kathryn Bigelow's new film about the hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden – more specifically, the role that torture played in that hunt.
"No waterboarding, no Bin Laden," said Bruni. "That's what Zero Dark Thirty appears to suggest."
As the awards rolled in – best film and director from the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle were quickly followed by the top honors from the National Board of Review and Boston film critics – liberal ire mounted.
"I don't believe that this film is being so well-received despite its glorification of American torture," said Glenn Greenwald in these pages, despite not having seen the film. "It's more accurate to say it's so admired because of this." This calculated kick to the shins elicited a swift response from the film community, not least New York magazine's Mark Harris, who went mano-e-mano with Greenwald on Twitter.
To take a step back for a minute, Zero Dark Thirty does depict several torture sessions, under Bush, which produce information, which are shown eventually leading to Bin Laden's courier, and thence to Bin Laden himself. This reading of events – that torture led to the killing of Bin Laden – is demonstrably false.
According to several official sources, including Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate intelligence committee, the identity of Bin Laden's courier, whose trail led the CIA to the hideout in Pakistan, was not discovered through waterboarding.
Greenwald is therefore perfectly entitled to his dismay. Anything that feeds the posturing of pumpkinheads like MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, charming his morning viewers with schoolboyish enthusiasm for cramming men into coffins, is a Bad Thing.
On the other hand, making films that stem the posturing of pumpkinheads, while a noble aim in the abstract, is ultimately a fruitless and quixotic endeavor. Pumpkinheadedness is a self-replenishing resource. And Greenwald's guesses as to what the tone of Zero Dark Thirty might turn out to be, were he to see it – "glorifying", "noble", "clinging tightly to patriotic orthodoxies" – while reasonable guesses, given the number of jingoistic, gung-ho tubthumpers Hollywood does produce every year, prove to be way off-target.
Zero Dark Thirty is not that film. Anybody going into it expecting to come out air-punching the good ol' USA are in for a shock leaving them shaken not stirred. The movie does indeed make a case for torture. But guess what? It looks surprisingly similar to a movie making the case against it. The torture in the film is squalid, sickening and prolonged. The innocent-looking huts in which it takes place, bathed in chalky sunlight, have the corrugated drabness of Nazi death camps. The head bully-boy – played by ruggedly handsome New Zealand actor Jason Clarke – is as magnetic as Ralph Fiennes was in Schindler's List. And these are our heroes. As David Edelstein said in his review: "As a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic. As a piece of cinema, it's phenomenally gripping – an unholy masterwork."
The word "fascist" gets kicked around a little too much in connection with the arts. As a general rule, if something involves the purchase of a theatre ticket, rather than a jackboot pressing on your carotid, it's probably not fascism. And I'm as bored as the next man by people telling me I must be made "uncomfortable" by a film – to have my moral certainties shaken, my ambivalence nursed and doubts explored and so on. Too often, it means merely a cross-hatching of symmetrically-opposed sympathies – a studied neutrality, as neat as the certainties it opposes. Confounding one's certainties is such a routine part of our liberal arts diet that I can't believe anyone is remotely confounded anymore.
Rare is the film in possession of the real thing – deep, full-bore ambivalence – and the few that are happen to be masterpieces: Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, a film that pulls off the impossible feat of being both pro- and anti-terrorist at the same time; or Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's Wagnerian epic about the Vietnam war that is also a Gonzo, gung-ho classic thanks to the contributions of writer John Milius, a self-proclaimed Zen anarchist and NRA member, who hated all the hippies infesting Hollywood at the time, and who wanted to shoot the film in Vietnam while it was still going on in order to teach them all a lesson:
We would have arrived in time for Tet probably … and all these people who were in school with me, who had done all these terrible things like planning to go to Canada, and do something as drastic as getting married to avoid the war … they were willing to go to Vietnam … They wanted to carry lights and sound equipment over mine fields, and I think Warner Bros probably backed off because they figured most of us would probably be killed.
But Milius's jingoism survives in the film – it's there in the ride-of-the-Valkyrie sequence, and the surf's-up scene on the beach, with Robert Duvall, himself a GI kid who grew up in a military family and served two years in the US army during the Korean war, squatting on his heels, bare-chested, taking in the "smell of napalm in the morning". It is among the greatest of all war scenes, lyrical and barbaric in equal measure, and it couldn't have been made except by a film-maker in two minds about war. How could anyone be otherwise?
Why did Bigelow and Boal make up the stuff about torture getting Bin Laden in their film? Who knows. Maybe they wanted a dramatic opening. The word is that Boal "went native" at the CIA and fell in love with his sources.
As much as one might hate anything that adds to the self-justification of thugs like Cheney, Zero Dark Thirty would be a lesser film without those scenes. It's Breughelian frieze of America's secret history, would feel incomplete without them – artistically redacted. I'll be interested to see what kind of audience it gets.