I’ve now seen Zero Dark Thirty three times and not only has it grown in power and resonance with each viewing, I have also become increasingly incensed by the ridiculous controversy surrounding the movie’s depiction of torture (which, in case you’ve been living under a rock, its detractors claim it endorses). Actor David Clennon (thirtysomething), a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recently announced he would not be voting for it in any category at the upcoming Oscars because the film “never acknowledges that torture is immoral and criminal.” Martin Sheen and Ed Asner, among others, have also publicly joined Clennon in this boycott. Well, I suppose they’re right about Zero Dark Thirty to the extent that it features no lines of dialogue in which a character acknowledges the immorality or criminality of the torture being practiced. But, I would argue that Bigelow, being a true visual artist, also understands the crucial importance of showing instead of telling. How do I know ZDT isn’t pro-torture? First, let’s acknowledge that Reda Kateb, the great Arabic actor who plays Ammar, the man being tortured, lends the character dignity (which is more than the actors playing the one-dimensional baddies in the non-controversial Argo are allowed to do), and this is equally true of Homayoun Ershadi (the lead in Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry) who plays another detainee. More importantly, even if the movie showed that “torture worked,” which it doesn’t, even if Ammar had blurted out bin Laden’s address while being waterboarded, ZDT would still not be pro-torture because the overall tone of the torture scene is pathetic. Kathryn Bigelow has said that she wishes torture was “not part of that history” and her attitude is reflected in many subtle decisions she makes in terms of composition and editing: in the torture scene, notice the reaction shots of Jessica Chastain’s Maya recoiling in disgust, or the way a tear involuntarily falls down Ammar’s face as soon as he starts drinking from a juice bottle, or the quick close-up of Ammar clutching the bottle tight against his chest as if he’s afraid that Dan, his CIA “interrogator,” is going to take it away from him. If anything, viewers are asked to identify with Ammar over the unlikable Dan, whom Ammar calls “an animal” and whom the filmmakers have pointedly tricked out with frat-boy mannerisms (he calls people “bro” and references kung-fu movies and Bob Marley). There’s an irony, I suppose, in the way Clennon and his ilk imply they could’ve conceivably enjoyed the very same movie if only the filmmakers had bothered to have a CIA character say something as simple as “This torture business is terrible. We were wrong to do it!” Fortunately for the rest of us, Bigelow doesn’t believe in making movies for the dumbest members of her audience.
Speaking of torture, the execrable phrase “torture porn,” which has entered the unofficial critical lexicon to describe a relatively recent subgenre of the horror film, did run through my mind while watching Michael Haneke’s Amour. This movie’s primary reason for being is apparently to make the audience suffer as much as possible by not only showing the inexorable physical and mental decay of a stroke-addled old woman but stretching it out for a near-pornographic eternity. In a way, it’s a shame I can’t recommend it; the lead actors (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) aren’t just great performers, they’re iconic symbols of a heroic era in French film history. I mean, a love story about an octogenarian married couple where the man is played by the lead from My Night at Maud’s and the woman is played by the lead from Hiroshima Mon Amour? Who could screw that up? Austrian miserabilist Michael Haneke, that’s who. The only Haneke films I had previously seen were the original version of Funny Games and The Piano Teacher, both of which turned me off because of what I perceived as their hypocritical mixture of titillation and moralizing. Amour has been regarded in some quarters as a more “mature” version of Haneke but it seems to me he’s really only substituted euthanasia here for the violence in Funny Games and the sex in The Piano Teacher. This wouldn’t be so offensive if Haneke were more upfront about what he was doing. But never in cinema’s history has a filmmaker tried so hard to hit the viewer with a sledgehammer while simultaneously trying so hard to pretend that’s not what he was doing. Haneke is like a more dishonest version of Lars Von Trier (who at least acknowledges his role in rubbing your face in unpleasantness) in that he’s much more careful about stacking the deck when it comes to punishing the audience – notice how Trintignant’s Georges isn’t just a good husband, faithfully devoted to his wife, but impossibly good, flawless, and practically saintlike? Contrast this with the way a truly great director like Leo McCarey presents a more complex, human and heartbreaking dynamic in his similarly-themed masterpiece Make Way for Tomorrow by having his elderly protagonists occasionally behave in ways that are kind of annoying. Pauline Kael once derisively used the phrase “a clean pornographer” to describe Stanley Kubrick but that’s a description that I think better suits the morally and intellectually bankrupt Haneke, a master of exploitation who always hides his visions of human nastiness beneath the alluring veneer of high culture. I hated, hated, hated Amour.
Amour Rating: 4.9
(While I can’t endorse Amour, I can highly recommend this parody twitter account for Haneke. This is the funniest thing on the internet: https://twitter.com/Michael_Haneke)
January 18th, 2013 at 10:00 am
I always appreciate that you’re willing to deconstruct that which is popular, even if your opinions aren’t popular.
January 18th, 2013 at 10:09 am
Thanks, Jill, but do you mean my defense of ZERO DARK THIRTY or my criticisms of AMOUR? I’m assuming the latter since both Ethan and Stacy (not to mention every critic in the world) loved AMOUR. As you know, I have yet a third piece about ZERO DARK THIRTY in the works (not about torture) inspired by our post-screening discussion. I will be thanking you and Stacy in the intro!
January 18th, 2013 at 11:41 am
The issue isn’t necessarily that the film is pro-torture, but rather it ignores the elephant in the room; That the main central pieces of intelligence were gathered only via torture, which led to not only bad intelligence, but it almost derailed the quest to put down al-Qaeda.
ZDT is misleading because it does what the Bush Administration (and to an extent, the Obama Administrator) did not do. Toward the Third Act, a CIA official complains at a round table that there are no other working groups concentration on al-Qaeda (that is, other than a handful of field officers around said table). But, he does not mention that the Administration ran off to Iraq, and closed down the Usama Bin Laden (UBL) desk at the CIA. Or, is bad intelligence admitted, which was ONLY gathered via torture, help send the States on a goose chase through.
The biggest gripe is how Bigelow captured Maya — how is she supposed to be perceived? On the one hand, she’s against torture (the opening scene), but then with a flick of the switch, she’s now wearing a hijab and having henchmen punch detainees on command. This even trickles into her relationship with Jessica — It’s understood they don’t like each other, and then all of a sudden, they’re buddy-buddy (and talking nonchalantly as a drone strike goes on).
If this film did anything, it’s that it painted a bleak picture of Middle Easterners, and if that was the end films message (that the USA are evil people) then UBL won. The veil of American intelligence was stripped away, and a powerful, evil, ignorant nation was revealed.
But, the fact that we’re talking so vehemently about a film, especially one that is nominated (and not without omission or vocal outcry) for best picture. And for that, I will always love your blog.
January 18th, 2013 at 6:14 pm
Thanks for the kind words, Alfred.
I understand your points about what the film did NOT flesh out but it is already 2 hours and 37 minutes long and jam-packed with information. There would really be no way of showing that “torture leads to bad intelligence” without creating at least one entirely new subplot and at that point it would have to be two movies or a mini-series or something. The film already shows that torture is ineffectual (e.g., Ammar refuses to give up information that would’ve prevented the attack in Saudi Arabia) and that’s good enough for me. Also, there IS a glancing retrospective reference to “running off to Iraq” and it’s made in an extremely negative light (something like “I was in the room when your former boss pitched WMD Iraq . . .,” which basically acknowledges that that war was founded on faulty “intelligence”).
As far as not knowing how Maya is to be perceived, I think that ambiguity is one of the film’s strengths. We are supposed to admire her because she’s good at her job, she’s determined and she’s a tough woman in the “boys’ club” of the CIA but, at the same time, she does become more complicit in “enhanced interrogation” as the film goes on (as you acknowledge). There is something both heroic and sad about her obsession with finding bin Laden, the only job she’s ever done, and one for which she was recruited directly out of high school. Why does she cry at the end? Because she has pent-up emotions that she hasn’t allowed herself to express? Because she’s relieved the hunt is over? Or because the constant striving that gave her life meaning is now gone and there’s nothing to fill the void? This is pretty much the same ambivalence that Bigelow and Boal show towards Sgt. James in The Hurt Locker (who was also obsessed with his job but was never going to be a good husband or father or even fit into mainstream society).
January 18th, 2013 at 10:48 pm
I still contend that this brouhaha has more to do with gender than torture. If Bigelow had the insider backing of a Spielberg, Clooney, or a Weinstein to set the tone of the discourse, I don’t think the grumblings about torture would have gotten this far. As an independent on her own, she’s out their flapping in the wind with no moral support from the industry.
And, I disagree with those who contend that the main pieces of info came from torture. It was part of the fabric of the investigation as presented in the movie, but in the montage of Maya reviewing the recordings of the interviews in which the name of the courier is mentioned, at least half of the prisoners simply gave up the name in an interview. They are all detainees, but not all of them needed to be tortured to reveal information. Because all of this is shown in one montage, I suspect viewers are assuming all the detainees were tortured to get the info.
And, didn’t the main terrorist who was tortured give up the name only after Maya and the Jason Clarke character trick him into thinking they know more than they do? That would suggest that it was brains over brawn that resulted in the lead. I am not sure I am right about this. It was tricky in the beginning to keep track of the all of the info and what it mean.
January 19th, 2013 at 8:53 am
Suzi, thanks for stopping by and bringing up a couple of good points. First, you are correct that Ammar only gives up the name of the courier when he’s been tricked into believing that he had already given up other valuable info under sleep deprivation. This occurs over tabouleh and hummus.
I agree it’s unfortunate that the discourse surrounding the movie has focused completely on torture when that’s only one small (albeit important) part of the movie. The only reason I wanted to write more about why it’s not “pro-torture” is that the controversy isn’t going away in the media and I feel like there needs to be more voices countering the critics by citing specific examples from the film. The controversy, unfortunately, is hurting ZDT. I just finished my first week of classes for the spring semester and very few of my students have seen it. I’ve heard a lot of them say things along the lines of “I heard it was propaganda.” It’s kind of amazing that it’s the number one movie in the country but I guess it’s mostly people over 30 who are going to see it.
Finally, thanks for pointing out that ZDT is an independent film! It’s funny that a lot of critics see it as some kind of unholy alliance between Hollywood and the CIA when, in reality, it was financed completely outside of the studio system and probably never could’ve been produced by a Hollywood studio.
January 21st, 2013 at 1:46 am
Yeah – I didn’t think Zero Dark came across as pro-torture. From what I know about the CIA and torture (not a whole lot), water-boarding and other tactics (playing heavy metal, sleep deprivation) have been used by various administrations, and the film just tried to show them accurately. I MUCH prefer to be given scenes like this, nakedly and viscerally, as opposed to with ominous theme music playing. I actually disagree that the character of Dan comes across as unlikeable and like an “animal”, but more just does what you’d think an interrogator would do in those situations. I thought the film as a whole did a good job of leaving an “unsettling” feeling. When the credits rolled I had this weird sense that people wanted to clap (great film), but that it would be disrespectful to do so, or something like that. Remember when the Obama administration announced that they’d taken down Osama? A lot of people celebrated — there’s this great American patriotism like “we’d got him.” As this post and others have pointed out, that’s definitely not what the film communicates. Just a small thing — but I liked that there was never a close-up of Osama’s face. That would have gone too far.
On another note — I just read a commentary lauding Bigelow’s microscopic look at all the tiny movements in a given scene: loading CDs to view interrogation footage, when the CIA agent asks Maya to “sit back there” before the CIA director enters, conversations in hallways where things like who walks away first and who pauses during the conversation, etc. take on a meaning and build suspense. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I liked it. The actual review said: “The first three-quarters of “Zero Dark Thirty” are precise and clinical, almost to a Le Carre-like degree, and the movie’s fixation on detail becomes hypnotic rather than boring.” http://www.film.com/movies/zero-dark-thirty-review
It also occurred to me that the film presents a totally “American” or “Western” encapsulation of the manhunt for Osama. That seems deliberate. There was virtually NO discussion/commentary/exploration of what your average Pakistani thought about what the Americans were doing. I guess that could be a criticism, but not, in the sense that the film presented a totally isolated, self-contained group of characters and themes (or just Maya) that were so hell-bent on getting Osama. Like when the CIA director asks Maya whether she’s worked on anything else, and she says “No, nothing else.” The point being — the film wasn’t supposed to take on a multi-cultural or otherwise “broad” look at the different dynamics of the hunt.
All that said, it’s hard not to, just a little, “root” for the American team while watching. Again that could be a criticism, but it probably manifests what some or most Americans deep-down thought when Osama was killed. Maybe the movie makes you ask, “Are you rooting for this?”
January 21st, 2013 at 8:55 am
Thanks for your thoughts and the link to Stephanie Zacharek’s review. I hadn’t read it yet though she’s a critic I’ve long admired.
January 24th, 2013 at 2:37 pm
THANK YOU. I HATE AMOUR and LOVED ZERO DARK THIRTY.
I would rather have beaten my head against a brick wall for 139 minutes than suffered through this interminable, dull, depressing, unemotional film. When we left the theatre, I made my husband promise to kill me immediately before I reached this stage of my life. For the record, I am not a young person. I am happily married. But if you are considering seeing this movie, save your money. Visit the stroke ward of your nearest nursing home.
January 24th, 2013 at 11:24 pm
Thanks, deltamysterywriter!
March 8th, 2013 at 7:26 am
Hello
After reading a few reviews of Amour I was relatively certain that I knew how it would turn out and that I would not like it. Richard Brody’s review only strengthened that belief. Now, after reading your review, I know for sure that Amour is not for me. It reminds me of the reaction to Precious. Many people raved about it, but I thought it was awful. (“Misery porn.”) Here’s a link to Brody’s review of Amour, in case you have not seen it.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/01/michael-hanekes-amour-reviewed-by-richard-brody.html#commentAnchor_nyr_2000000002083996
March 8th, 2013 at 7:47 am
Thanks for stopping by. “MIsery porn” is right!
Yes, I had already read Brody’s review. His review is one of the very few I came across that I feel got it right.