Zero Dark Thirty: The End Justifies the Means

Claims of Fact, Truth and Fiction

Let’s get this out of the way first:  this is a good movie and it would be surprising if Jessica Chastain did not win the Oscar for her performance.  Having said that, all the controversies about the film are justified.  It is said that for art to be art, it has to challenge convention, create conversation, conceptualize new directions.  Perhaps that is what Zero Dark Thirty attempts.

This film asks us to believe that it is reality based fiction, a reenactment of true events uncovered and reported by the film makers.  This statement cannot be easily dismissed.  The writer and the director (Kathryn Bigelow) have championed the film as “reported film making“, stressing the bona fides of Mark Boal (the writer) as an embedded journalist during the Iraq war.

From that position, then, the question left open of torture as a means to an end is upsetting and a movie like this one, purporting to be factual, should make it clear that more misleading than true information is obtained through torture methods.  Other possible misleading “facts” key to the narrative:  The existence of a single CIA operative, conveniently for the film a woman, doggedly pursuing OBL despite and sometimes against an obstinate bureaucracy;  a real Kuwaiti businessman giving the lead that takes the intelligence services to Bin Laden’s courier;  the conclusive “positive identification” made by that same operative by simple facial recognition of a man shot in the face.  These can be truly confusing statements when presented as historical facts.

Perhaps the movie is muddled because of the history of its creative process.  Bin Laden was found and killed by the CIA and US Special Forces in May 2011.  Nearly a year before, a major studio had greenlit a film about Osama Bin Laden and the unsuccessful quest to capture him, ending in his Tora Bora escape — a riveting action story spanning from 9/11/2001 to December 2001.   The film was heading into principal photography when the news of OBL’s death came out.  The film makers then had the pressure of what to do, how to rewrite?

Speculating based on what we see on screen, it seems the finished film begins the same way as the first scripted story could have, with 911 tapes from the WTC  and the key issue of black sites and torture up front, driven by an agent who obviously has inner conflicts about the methods.  While possibly fruitless in the original version (OBL escaped) in the final version presented it is not clear if torture was instrumental in the success of the long haul mission.  The middle in the story is now extended from a few months to ten years.  And, possibly, the last line of the movie is kept: “where do you want to go?”

The film is good, but the factual and moral ambiguity undermines its intent, its message.  An ambiguity perhaps found  through the unique way the project was brought to its conclusion and then accepted by its creative team — because of the controversy it would generate.

CJRangel – January 2013

For a commentary on ZD30’s screenplay and its use of the conflict of torture as a theme click here.

Whaaaat?