Zero Dark Thirty was criticized for tacitly glorifying torture. There's an argument that the film's presentation of the act being performed by the protagonist and other supporting characters on her side in the service of the search for Osama Bin Laden ultimately paints a more forgiving picture of the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques. They might not be 100 percent reliable, but they get results, and at the end of the day they led to a successful raid against a mass murderer, a fact every audience is very aware of as they take their seats.
This is true.
The reply to this argument could be phrased as: while torture was used and some intelligence was gained from it, the film takes great pains to show these practices in unflinching detail. The viewer isn't meant to come around to a position of supporting the use of these methods, but they are necessary for understanding the full history of the war on terror and the search for bin Laden. They are there not in the service of propaganda, but rather of cinema verite, further reinforced by the documentary style in which the film is shot.
This is also true.
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The Nazis and Japanese soldiers of World War II era action and adventure films, both contemporary works and more modern ones, are basically an amorphous blob of clones. They talk funny and all dress the same, and history has vindicated the wickedness of their cause, so go ahead and shoot about eleventy billion of them to prove how awesome you, the hero, are in the face of overwhelming odds. It's no surprise that some of the first video games to feature the player shooting humans and not aliens or demons saw Nazis as the targets. The National Socialist party was one of the most evil movements of the 20th century, and the conflict in question really did see scores of men charging at each other across fields and down bombed-out city streets. These images and the soldiers like Audie Murphy that spawned them were canonized as modern day warrior-saints, and subsequently elevated to the position of epic heroes like Hercules or Odysseus.
World War II has provided so many irresistible images that it has become the template of choice for politicians to use when arguing for war. Appeasement at Munich was the example provided to urge action in Vietnam and Iraq. After all, the Greatest Generation proved themselves in war, why can't we? I mean, if we couldn't, then how could we be Great, right?
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Nukes and TV (then later the internet) have ensured that we don't get to have our own World War II. The threat of mutually assured destruction from total war is too great to allow for that kind of conflict, first of all. But just as importantly, the world has shrunk. It's hard -not impossible, but still very hard- to label entire swathes of the world as vicious and savage when you can find out about what they're really like relatively easily. It's even harder to do this when you're supposed to be the good guys because you beat the bad guys who did just that in order to justify genocide on a previously unheard of scale.
9/11 was an evil act that killed thousands of innocents, but it wasn't perpetrated by a singular nation state, or even one definitive group of people. The perpetrators might be more accurately likened to a cult, both in their devotion to a warped creed and the manner in which they operate. But who's going to pay billions of dollars to mobilize the American war machine to go to war with a cult? And just as important, are you really going to sell what happened to the American people as the actions of a relatively small and messed up portion of the Earth's population? Will that be enough to rile them up in the face of this overwhelming attack? No, you're going to need a force of pure evil, formless but deadly. The problem, of course, is that they happen to look just like regular people. That, in fact, is a key component of their strategy.
We can wage war on armies quite well, better than anyone else in fact. But how the hell do you fight a war against people?
*****
The first scene of Zero Dark Thirty occurs over a black screen as audio from phone calls and radio dispatches culled from the events of September 11, 2001 play. The image of the towers on fire has been overused to the point of banality. Just over a decade out, it's hard for most people to feel much more than odd pangs of reminiscence when they see it. This audio, however, is not only fresh but effective. It's a singularly terrible human experience diluted to its essence, and accomplishes in just a minute or so what no bloated montage could hope to. Immediately after this, we cut to a scene of the main characters torturing a man. Not even a terrorist, but a middle man who handled finances for other terrorists. There is no soundtrack and the loud echoing of the interrogator's harsh commands all lend the scene a brutal immediacy. We can't help but sympathize for the captive, despite the fact that he helped murder 3000 innocent people, as the interrogator is quick to point out.
We don't know how to feel, and that's really the point. The truth is that the war on terror is such a complex mess of morally gray areas that there is no narrative that neatly fits it. In some cases, America kind of is the evil empire taking on the underdog rebels, which is supposed to make us the bad guys. In many others, we are the battered but still standing bastion of freedom staring down a violent fanaticism. We can be both and neither at the same time because the truth is there aren't ever just good guys and bad guys. At the end of the day, we're all just guys. And girls, fine, but you get the point.
*****
Commander Vimes, head of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, is a great cop not just because he's diligent about enforcing the law, but because he's willing to ask himself if the law is worth enforcing. When his hometown is all set to be embroiled in a war with a far away, vaguely Middle-Eastern country, he at last manages to do the only sensible action available and moves to arrest both of the armies for attempting to commit the greatest crime of all; starting a war.
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