Veil of Maya
- By Jim Hicks
A recent column by Slavoj Žižek on the film Zero Dark Thirty is preceded by a statement of fact and an essential question: “Many have pointed out that Kathryn Bigelow's film endorses torture. But why has such a film been made now?”
I think I can answer that. On January 10, the Oscar nominations were announced, and Zero Dark Thirty garnered five, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress. Moreover, according to Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times, only the bullying of U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain—who penned an open letter to express their disappointment in the film—kept Bigelow from a Best Director nomination, and kept the film from rivaling Spielberg’s Lincoln, with its twelve potential prizes.
Turan is slicing and dicing small potatoes. As for Feinstein, Levin, McCain, and the Academy of Motion Pictures, apparently they’re on the wrong side of history. Bigelow’s fellow filmmaker Michael Moore has noted that Zero Dark Thirty is “a movie made by a woman (Kathryn Bigelow), produced by a woman (Megan Ellison), distributed by a woman (Amy Pascal, the co-chairman of Sony Pictures), and starring a woman (Jessica Chastain) ... about how an agency of mostly men are dismissive of a woman.” And then, on January 24, 2013, only two weeks after the Oscar nominations were announced, the other boot dropped. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (also in the film) removed the U.S. military ban on women serving in combat.
So screw the Oscars. When Kathryn Bigelow cast Jessica Chastain in a Mel Gibson role, it obviously changed everything, even the military. There’s no limits now to what woman can accomplish.
Okay, I’ll come clean. I don’t seriously believe that Zero Dark Thirty caused—or even influenced—the reversal of the women-in-combat ban. I also agree with Cynthia Enloe (someone who is a helluva lot smarter than me on these issues) that “allowing women equal opportunity to kill in the name of ‘national security’” doesn’t “amount to genuine liberation.” My point is other: just because something comes after something else doesn’t mean the first thing causes the second. Long ago, the fallacy of believing otherwise was captured by a fancy Latin phrase: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Nobody could believe that.
Well... nobody except storytellers, and their unfortunate audiences. Roland Barthes, for one, has speculated that stories inevitably incite us to fall for just that sort of nonsense. “Everything suggests,” Barthes comments, “that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read as what is caused by” (Barthes 266). Narrative teaches us destiny.
With all the ink spilled already, there probably isn’t much left to say about the depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty. Here I want to make a different case, and offer a reading of the whole film (rather than just the obscenity of its opening scenes). Nothing could be clearer, of course, than the movie’s trajectory: it begins in darkness, with an audio recording from September 11, 2001, and it ends in light, after the summary execution of Osama Bin Laden, with Jessica Chastain’s Maya alone, grieving. The structural symmetry between key sequences—the opening with its torture scenes and the closing with its raid on Bin Laden’s compound—is obvious, and hardly worth mentioning.
Midway through the film there’s a pivotal scene, impossible to miss, one you’ve seen so many times that it’s given your moviegoing DNA Lamarckian stretchmarks. The Coach—or, in this case, the CIA’s AfPak bureau chief—gives us a stirring halftime harangue, because the home team is getting their butts whupped. Here’s the nub: “They attacked us on land in ‘98, by sea in 2000, and from the air in 2001. They murdered three thousand of our citizens in cold blood, and they’ve slaughtered our forward deployed. And what the fuck have we done about it? ... I want targets! Do your fucking jobs, bring me people to kill!” (Boal 52).
[You may, perhaps, want a footnote or two here: ‘98 was the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, 2000 the USS Cole attack. The film depicts the suicide bombing against the CIA’s “forward deployed” at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan, where seven CIA operatives were killed.]
Coach clearly leaves out a detail or two. More important, though, is how this locker-room tirade mirrors history within the film itself. Until this point, other than torture, the good guys have done precious little. Except suffer. (Come to think of it, they even suffer when they torture: count how many times, early on, the camera cuts to Maya, to register the distress on her face. And then note how soon that stops.) The bad guys, in contrast, manage an armed attack on civilians in Saudi Arabia, they blow up a bus in London, they bomb the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, and they even penetrate the defences of the CIA itself at Camp Chapman. They attack, we suffer ... then, at last, retaliate. Or is that payback? Either way, we have no choice.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: (1) Your fellow torturer puts a dog collar on him, and then locks him up in a small wooden box, but he still mumbles incoherently: “Once again, [you’ve] learned nothing” (Boal 17). Cut to the Khobar Towers, Saudi Arabia, where a “bearded Arab man” kills “two Western men” and three other “residents” with an assault rifle. (2) Then the black site “prisoner” in Poland confirms your theory, but your boss still pokes holes in it. Cut to a bus in London, seconds before it blows up. (3) You fail to make Abu Faraj talk, and your fellow torturer gives up and goes back home. Cut to dinner: as you discuss this failure with a colleague, the Marriott explodes around you. (4) In the attack on Camp Chapman, they kill your colleague and friend; worse yet, another co-worker tells you that your prime suspect is already dead. “What are you gonna do?” Maya: “I’m going to smoke everyone involved in this op, and then I’m going to kill bin Laden” (Boal 51).
Zero Dark Thirty, in sum, is a perfect film—if all you want from Hollywood is pro-war propaganda. And yet, to my knowledge, only Glenn Greenwald has advanced the claim I’m pushing here, near the end of one of several columns on the film, each full of eloquent outrage. So let’s unbury his lead: “As it turns out, the most pernicious propagandistic aspect of this film is not its pro-torture message. It is its overarching, suffocating jingoism. This film has only one perspective of the world—the CIA's—and it uncritically presents it for its entire 2 1/2 hour duration.”
In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis calls Bigelow’s film “the most important American fiction movie about Sept. 11,” and, sadly, she may also be right. If history truly begins on that day, if it includes none of the tens—or hundreds—of thousands killed by our soldiers, if the very landscape of war itself is restricted to our buildings, our cities, and our boys, and if it ends in triumph (with King Phillip’s head on a pike), then we should all rejoice in Jessica Chastain’s inevitable Best Actress Oscar. All we need do is follow the logic of Zero Dark Thirty, and our destiny will be clear, our war perpetual.
Maya ... one powerful illusion.
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Works Cited
Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." The Barthes Reader. Ed. S. Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty: An Original Screenplay.
