Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty

Now that we've got [Blackadar]...

How you say things often matters more than the degree of disagreement. I don't agree with you but ultimately there's not much to be done once we're clear on the points of disagreement barring new information or actually seeing the film. Then there's posting around someone because they're ass-talking.

And then there's not having any clue about it at all but posting anyway, which describes you because you haven't even seen the film yet. Why don't you go do it today and then you can come back and lament how much torture was glamorized and celebrated? You'll really like the scene where they hang the guy by his fingernails, dance around the fire, throw feces at him while chanting "USA, USA".

Jason, we did get valuable intelligence from enhanced interrogation techniques. What we received, from whom, and when is all classified. You don't know what we got. I don't know what we got (though I do know we got some decent info). In fact, from what I understand we did get some really valuable shit specifically from sleep depravation not dissimilar to the events where the guy is tricked after the hotel massacre. Once received, there's no way of knowing that we could / would have received it any other way. You state it as a fact, but your premise is faulty.

You called it a whitewash, but a whitewash would have not shown it at all. I keep asking the same question over and over and none of you "she LOVES torture" folks will answer it. Would it have been better if she pretended the EIT didn't exist at all? Or show what I described a few posts above? How should Bigelow have addressed the entire torture issue in the context of this movie, of this plot and of this CIA analysts' story, taking into account this movie is not about torture?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH. You have no idea why that's so funny, do you?

How do you know there was "decent info"? What is a quantifiable threshold for you past which it's worthwhile? How do you weight it against all of the false, misleading, or otherwise useless information you get from torture victims? Where does the known, verified torture of people who knew shit-all fit into it? The point is people in the field with the access to broad secret information say the film significantly overrepresents the utility of torture in capturing Bin Laden. In contrast, you offer a bunch of handwaving and assumptions which fly in the face of the broad history of interrogation routines for which we do have good records. In essence, you've created a tautology that there must have been good intel because the US went so far to get it. You're not recognizing the degree to which the enhanced interrogation program might well have been a half-assed shortcut put together by ruthless people who were given an impossible goal in terms of developing a strong interrogation corps with no language or culture resources to draw from, and that this was coupled and at times indistinguishable from a broad directive to terrorize/permit terrorization of captives as part of systemic intimidation. Which the US has done before, just as many other occupying powers have, and will do again.

Film lends itself pretty easily to the efficient representation of big issues. In this case, accurate to the record as we currently know it would have been demonstrating the failure of torture to obtain actionable intel, or the demonstration that in fact even the accurate intel still requires conventional means to get from being in one pile of reliability to the other. The truly excellent procedurals capture success and failure, and use the human element and accurate metaphors and syntheses in order to re-create complex, difficult to digest situations. That would have been the story of this manhunt rather than the one in your fever-dream.

Showing something difficult or ugly exists is not inherently good or better than omission if you're not prepared to engage the hard questions around it. For instance, let's say for the sake of argument that the CIA and everyone else is lying about the role of torture in Bin Laden's capture. All you have to do is acknowledge the tension around this cost-benefit even if it's successful, which can be done in all kinds of ways in films that don't have any trouble portraying the waste and cost-benefit conflicts in a wide variety of arenas.

There's even a good movie that could be made about a capture like Bin Laden's that was primarily driven by torture intel, and what that ultimately would mean in terms of the morality of torture. The problem is that people, and people like you specifically, confuse 24's logic for that story, and it's not. Movies like the Battle of Algiers have set precedents in that field for decades, now, as have the sort of police procedurals referenced above.

Finally, please stop obsessing about how people want more brutality in the movie. That is not the key variable. The key variable is the context in which the violence is presented.Demonstrating the quantity and character explicitly would be one kind of movie, but it's not the only means of doing it.

It is incredibly hypocritical to talk about movies before they are in general release. I should have traveled to the future, seen it, and then gone back to Dec 15 to post the thread. I hope you'll be calling out everyone who discusses films before they are out based on available materials and reviews. This will be a valuable public service, akin to what you've no doubt accomplished in protecting you, yours, his, hers, ours, and everything.

You're a ridiculous little man quite apart from anything you've been through, and if you did half the horrible things you imply or allude to in your efforts to obtain marginal advantages in internet arguments, then you need professional help. Put up or shut up.

FTFY

In other words, maybe you should learn to think for yourself rather than taking the word of some internet blogger.

No, but it's enough to know that I served my country, unlike most of you fucks who don't know a goddamn thing about service, war, torture or any of the other subjects that have come up in this thread. I've never wished this on anyone before, but I hope you get to experience combat and everything that goes along with it. Have a nice day and enjoy the movie.

No, because I hear a whole lot of hand-wringing, judging and self-flagellation, but not one goddamn solution on how the subject should have been addressed.

Of course, you don't know how it was presented, because you haven't seen it.

I figured that was the deal. I'm a former infantry sergeant in the USMC and among other joyous turns of events in my life, I served two combat deployments in Ramadi and Fallujah. Gallant is a West Point graduate who served doing whatever it is that officers do, but we try not to hold that or being in the Army against him. So put the card back in the deck for another day, maybe.

Just remember that when you stare into the groceries, the groceries stare into you.

Put up or shut up. We want proof, including details of classified operations.

Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what you just asked me for? Sorry that I can't provide details. If you did serve, you understand exactly what that means. In fact, if you have any clue at all, you already know where I spent my time.

WHO DID YOU TORTURE ON QT3???

Once again, no one is asking for details or "proof", and frankly I would rather you'd kept it out of the discussion altogether if you're not comfortable talking about it. I've posted extensively in an unclassified sense (which is the vast majority of what I did once it was no longer operationally sensitive) about my experiences overseas in threads where it was relevant, such as ones dealing with the allegations of war crimes in Fallujah and so on. With reference to torture, I never tortured anybody and good EPW handling was a high priority in my unit, especially in the second deployment where the Petraeus doctrine explicitly adopted general good practices as elements of strategy in and of themselves.

However, I have reason to believe (based on timing) that a number of the people whose capture I handled were mistreated subsequently, since some were transferred to Abu Ghraib during its more festive times or were simply disappeared as far as my need to know went. Because you are only given details relevant to your raid and broad strokes statements about their alleged crimes, I can't begin to compare that to something more comprehensively handled at the level of a CIA-run extradition, which still seems prone to false positives. I did what I could, and it doesn't change a thing, and even if I knew then what I know now I doubt it would have mattered all that much. That's what I have to live with among many other things, and it's not something I'm going to resolve in a thread on the internet. But it does inform my perspective on torture.

These experiences aren't clubs with which you beat civilians; they are opportunities to make sure that whatever it is you know or think you know as a result of them can be shared when appropriate because that's the real value of service in a civic sense. If that's not your bag, then so be it, but it's a cheap shot when it's used to allude to mystical knowledge and firewall yourself from criticism.

Cats, apparently. Though that may have only been when he was stationed in his yard maintaining a defensive perimeter.

Yeah, to cats, you mentioned that already.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh god it hurts i can't catch my breath HAHASHAHAHA

So... this movie was pretty good, I thought.

THIS IS BEST THREAD

Blackadar, I don't think anyone here questions your right to discretion if you want to say you were overseas doing some sort of unpleasant War on Terror-related job but you don't want to talk about it. The way it's come out, though has been a bit inadvertently like a dance of the seven veils, and not because of LK or anyone else acting like they don't believe you. And the Qt3/BF community has a pretty good idea of LK's experiences since he's posted about them before. Saying to him "if you served prove it, since you want me too" sounds like you're making a demand of him neither he nor anyone else ever made of you.

I've known LK personally for nearly five years now, and in all that time this has got to be one of the most unintentionally ridiculous arguments I've ever seen made against him. The guy has done all the shit he's said he's done and I'm sure a lot of stuff that it's no one's business but his own to know about, but not talking about that shit means he doesn't talk about it. It doesn't mean he hints at it to win internet points.

Your experiences with combat and service clearly have informed you into a different type of special than LK's, but that says more about you than it does about the experience itself.

Yes, because I shall consult no one and nothing other than myself before forming an opinion because all knowledge just pops into my head when I need it. I gave my opinion of the narrative structure, partly informed by other people and the knowledge, insight and expertise they bring.

Guilty as charged.

The thing is you keep saying this, but I'm not talking about how vividly the film portrays torture. I was hoping things would calm down, but since they haven't suffice it to say, the film had the opportunity to at least bring some ambiguity about the role of torture because of the competing facts around its effectiveness and its role in revealing the couriers name. Imo, it didn't.

I'm not going to rehash the argument again though. That is what that post you quote is about. The argument isn't that the film didn't make me squeamish enough.

Every time I read a Blackadar post in this thread, I think about his chest-pounding post in the Chick thread and chuckle. I don't think Blackadar's done shit. He may have been in the service, but he didn't get that enormous chip on his shoulder from his time there. Hey Blackadar, take your fantasia fairyland and shove it up your ass.

Seriously? "I have a compelling argument, but I can't tell you"? That's your comeback? You don't know shit about shit.
If you possess(ed) such information, you were trained and indoctrinated to shut the fuck up about both the information and your possession of it, not brag about how big your classified dick is.

If your counterargument is "Hey, I know I shouldn't have said that, but LK just pissed me off SO MUCH", you have not proven worthy of the trust placed in you by the government you served.

When did Blackadar become batshit? The above post was one of the dumbest things I've seen, and I don't have brett on ignore.
Then there is this thread.

Zero Dark Thirty is the best movie Kathryn Bigelow has made. It is not a popcorn movie. It is completely unflinching, yes, but unflinching in its embrace of torture. It is probably the first great myth that has been recorded for a western audience about Bin Laden's killing, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it will prove deeply influential in how this story is told.

It certainly has false steps, most notably in terms of the pace of strategic deconstruction of Al Qaeda motivations. Michael Scheuer would probably burst into flames if directly exposed to this film, but he would understand the necessity of taking it with a smile because he is nothing if not a team player.

This is a good article on the film. And Matt Taibbi was right. And if, like Andrew Sullivan, you think the approach to torture is anything but central to the story, and anything but an explicit endorsement of torture as a means of getting shit done, you are lying to yourself. It is ugly on purpose, and manages to pack a great deal into every frame of suffering, but the punchline remains that it worked and would have continued to work if that Damned Obama On The Tv In The Background Hadn't Changed Things, but thank goodness we got enough out of them before that. Which is both unfair to Obama's placid embrace of extreme measures and to the key drivers of change in strategy with respect to interrogation, which were most certainly not driven by public opinion on the ethics of the matter. Needless to say, according to all credible accounts it is entirely inaccurate to say information from enhanced interrogation was responsible for the successful killing of Bin Laden.

The sequence of the raid is pretty good, especially the errors. I would like to see what this movie felt like when it was originally pitched without a "happy ending".

There are few I trust more on subject matter such as this than Lizard King, so color me excited to see this film.

Also, hmmm, so torture figures in big. WELL GEE, THEN.

Does it have Bill Paxton as a redneck vampire saying lines like "Well, I'll be damned - shitkicker heaven"? No? Alright then. Good review.

Finally saw it. Let's start with the good: Jessica Chastain and the final raid sequence. Chastain is terrific throughout. The raid sequence I found literally nail-bitingly intense.

Primed as I was by the controversy (and this thread) to gauge the depiction of torture, it ended up barely registering for me, because everything up to the scene in which they're circling in the car looking for Sayeed is disjointed, often dull, and ultimately pointless. The movie takes place, in effect, over the course of eight years, yet hardly anything happens in that time. Oh hey, a lead! Oh, it's going nowhere for the next six years (as is explicitly called out by various characters at various times). Oh, another terrorist attack! It sure is important to keep looking for terrorists. And another one, which actually affects our heroic characters! But the plot is moving forward at such a snail's pace despite the frequent and large jumps ahead, it's hard to feel like any of this has any relevance. Hey, this lady was blinded by her own confidence in her intuition that a possible lead was critical, and then she got blown up! I sure hope you all started to worry for Our Hero who is also blinded by her own confidence, unless you saw that incredibly obvious move coming a mile away and then the movie went on for another like six hours anyway.

Here's what I'll say for the torture. To me, Chastain's character is just a stand-in for America. It's the only way to explain the pointless meandering through eight years of not much happening on the way to the real meat of the film. So we get the living embodiment of our changing national attitude in the wake of 9/11, from the gung-ho, torture everything in sight so long as we get our man of the 9/11 aftermath and Bush's second term (even if we, like Chastain, are a little squeamish about it at first) to the more-conscious-of-our-reputation-on-the-world-stage approach outwardly pushed by Obama. Chastain's character literally has no life before the hunt for bin Laden, as we learn near the end: she is born of the desperate search for one man and still lives only for it, even as time and changing circumstances cast in an increasingly poor light the zeal with which we hunted in the early days. And what does she lament at the end? With Osama died her only purpose in life, and with him any last illusions about the moral simplicity of the War on Terror, now deprived of its clear-cut villain, and the world doesn't look all that much better.

I mostly enjoyed it. The performances are pretty great across the board. It's terrific to look at. The final act is riveting. But it's hard to get past the fact that Homeland did better everything that happens in the first two hours of this movie. A feature film can't accommodate an in-depth, interesting look at the path to finding bin Laden and also the raid that took him down. ZDT tries, and fails, to split the difference.

So ends my undergraduate-level film criticism.

I wouldn't say the torture barely registered, however I cannot lie that after 24 and Homeland it likely did not carry the impact it perhaps was meant to. I wish the trailers had not used two of the best (albeit theatrical) monologues from the film ("We are failing" and especially "I'm not your friend").

I also have to agree the part with the potential doctor informant was broadcast from a mile away and could have been handled much better, especially considering how well the Marriott scene was presented (among others scenes).

I also have to say the spunky/obsessed aspect of Chastain's character was sort of belabored and obviously exaggerated for cinematic effect, although was highly entertaining cinema in many parts.

Despite any nigglings I have about the film, I sincerely enjoyed it overall. The final raid is some of the best film I have seen in years. I doubt a more convincing and riveting depiction of a military operation has been filmed prior. It's goddamned good and worth the price of admission alone.

"Who here's been in a helo crash before?"

I was a little bit surprised at how Andy Dwyer that character was.

I liked the movie, as a film. As a history lesson it was John Yoo's wet dream.

The torture presented was organized and friendly, handled by good looking PHD's who play with monkeys and don't cause any long term harm. Everything is videotaped for posterity. ZDT treats torture like a magic spell. Once a terrorist has been tortured, he tells the accurate truth about everything forever.

I think it actually goes beyond showing torture as an regrettable but acceptable fact of war. It actively leads the protagonist (and the viewer) down the path where she takes an active hand in the torturing. Until, of course, that faggoty Obama took away their ability to torture. The CIA official who oversaw the program says ZDT went beyond what actually happened.

Its just a shame for Jose Rodriguez that he destroyed the video taped evidence of how humane his program was.

All counter-factuals about torture were left out - nicely summarized here by Hobocaust -

Torture here is used very much in the same way that it is used in countless Action Movies - Action Hero sticks gun in henchman's mouth and henchman immediately gives up Villain's Hideout - Heroic Gunfight ensues.

Again, I thought the movie was pretty good*, but I am a sucker for procedurals, and this was a mostly sober 2Hour and 40 Minute procedural. Just make sure you don't take a seat in front of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Yoo or any number of torture fans, the jizz is going to fly.

*Near Dark and Point Break are better, LK is out his mind.

Just saw it. I agree with LK in that it's Bigelow's best: riveting, disquieting, and challenging. The hunt is depicted as tedious, unpleasant, and possibly not even justifiable.

I have other unorganized thoughts, but they explicitly reference the movie, so I'll hide 'em.

I think the movie was clear that torture was "bad". But a recurring theme stated explicitly by the characters, most memorably Chastain's superiors, is that the detainee program and their ability to work on them was an important capability that got results. These were people who accepted the burden of doing bad things because they worked, hence my reference to Jack Nicholson's (deluded but enjoyable) rant in A Few Good Men, except there the atrocity being sanctioned (by the character, not the movie) was institutionally-enforced hazing and brutalization of its own soldiers.

I think you're right that the Obama scene has a lot of nuance, but in the context of other things in the "changing political climate" portion of the movie I'd say it's supposed to present on the one side the systemic question of how the US is going to get things done without its detainee (and torture) program, and the human question of how it feels to be the highest person who "followed orders" and has blood on their hands, and is on the verge of being hung out to dry. Of course, that last part didn't really happen because Obama traded that horse away, if indeed it was ever more than a rhetorical flourish.

I don't think being clear-eyed about that Nuremberg dilemma is a problem for the movie. It is simply the impression, unsupported by evidence, that torture gets results and directly contributed to Bin Laden's capture that I believe ultimately damages the movie's credibility, because it is building on the realistic style of the film to create an alternate, misleading version of both the UBL history and the broad evidence of torture across time. To a lesser degree than Hurt Locker, I don't understand why she takes that kind of creative liberty; again, I wonder what this movie could have been with its originally proposed ending (but I also kind of cringe, lest it be a stab in the back) or with a clearer line around what was actually getting things done vs. what was mere retroactive self-justification by characters.

Greenwald gives this movie an extra going over today in light of it's Oscar snubbing but I enjoyed his embedded quotes and links to other articles more than the piece itself so here you go:

http://www.reverseshot.com/article/zero_dark_thirty

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/12/28/why-zero-dark-thirty-divides-the-media-in-half/

Apologies, if these are already linked I haven't actually read the whole thread or seen the film just loosely followed the controversy.

And the original Greenwald: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/25/zero-dark-thirty-cia-oscars

Author of book on soldiers and torture says Zero Dark Thirty's depiction of torture will impact the torture debate for years.

That young and inexperienced soldiers in the field might look at "24" as a training manual is disturbing, but surely more disturbing is the role fiction plays in shaping the opinions of policy makers who should know better -

That's "24" which even Anonin Scalia knows (?) is fiction. How ZD30, with its supposed verisimilitude and serious tone is going to figure into current and future debates about torture, away from moral and best practices and further into media fueled fantasy.

I think it's hard to consider something rooted in Scalia's delusional approach to legal theory as a sound starting point for criticizing entertainment. If it wasn't 24 it'd be mandatory broccoli.

Jesus that quote is depressing. I have no idea how I hadn't seen it before now, so thanks I guess. Although I would be interested to see some of the other ways that 24 has shaped Scalia's arguments.

"Interpret the commerce clause narrowly OR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!"

True, I didn't want to quote the whole article, but -

I'm pretty sure ZD30 has already "settled" the debate about the role of torture in the capture of UBL and has probably irrevocably changed the debate going forward.
I don't give a crap about the Oscars, but I would say ZD30 is a much better movie than Argo, the difference being that Argo's exaggerations and simplifications are unlikely to affect Real World policy.
I don't blame Bigelow for using movie tropes in her depiction of torture, but rather for slapping the words "True Story" on her picture while failing to present any counter-factual about the actual effectiveness of torture.