Zero Dark Disagreement

Last night I went to see the new movie "Zero Dark Thirty", about the CIA's ten-year hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Directed by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow, the movie has been generating a lot of Oscar buzz, so I was excited to see it. [Quick review: I thought it was really well done. There were a couple of parts where the movie felt like it was dragging (understandable since the movie is 2.5 hours), but the rest of the movie was so tense those boring parts were almost a relief. The last thirty minutes are especially suspenseful, even though you know how it ends. At one point I could hear the woman behind me mutter, "I'm so nervous!" to the person she was sitting with. If had been the first time she had talked all night I would have turned around and agreed with her. (It wasn't, so I went with shooting her a dirty look.) I tweeted this last night, but it was the first movie I have seen in a while that when the credits started rolling the entire audience audibly let out an exhale because we had all been holding our breath. I don't want to spoil too much of it, but let me just also say there were some creative casting choices and they worked really well. Don't know if it is the best picture of the year, but it deserves to be in the conversation.] However, the chance this movie could win an award are not what most people were talking about.

In the weeks leading up to its release, many people had begun to rail against the movie as being pro-torture. Critics say Bigelow had made the scenes where interrogators were trying to get information from detainees through methods like sleep deprivation and humiliation too central to the story and made it appear as though they were the key to the entire operation. This has raised objections from both sides of the aisle, with conservatives saying it makes America look bad and liberals saying it glorifies techniques America shouldn't have been doing in the first place. (So, ironically, these groups agree, the just don't agree on why.) There was even some talk that the pro-torture slant of this movie was the main reason Bigelow was not a finalist for Best Director this year, something a lot of people figured she was a shoo-in for just a couple weeks ago. For her part Bigelow recently wrote an op-ed piece in which she pointed out that portraying something in a film should not be misconstrued as endorsing it. With all the controversy swirling around, I was very interested to see whether or not all the fuss was warranted. I have to say that from my point of view I did not get a pro-torture vibe at all.

[**Spoiler Alert: I'm going to talk about something from the movie now, so feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don't want to know anything. I don't reveal too much, but if you plan on seeing the movie for yourself, better safe than sorry.** Here's the main reason I feel this way - in the movie the torture techniques didn't even work. According to the movie it led to one piece of information, but that information was worthless without several other facts on top of it which were uncovered through a variety of other methods of interrogation, such as bluffing, extended surveillance and good old-fashioned bribery. In other words, it was just one piece of a very large puzzle, which I can only assume is how it was in the real operation. If Bigelow was intending to make this movie portray torture was the best thing ever, wouldn't she have made it more effective? For example, one guy would have cracked in the first 10 minutes, instead of taking months to give interrogators anything to work with. Also, the characters administering the torture also appeared to be conflicted over whether or not what they were doing was right. I'm just saying that if you are for something you don't usually raise a moral dilemma. This movie clearly acknowledge that detainees were tortured and that occasionally it worked, but I never felt like it endorsed that behavior in the slightest.]

Still, the main thing I walked away from this movie was the reminder of just how easy it is for two people to watch the exact same thing and come away with totally different reviews. We all bring our own biases to everything we read, watch or hear. I'm no different - because of the controversy I probably paid more attention to the torture scenes than I normally would have, which may have built up my expectations of how graphic there were going to be. Thus, anything short of how bad I had imagined they were going to be would be a letdown. However, the person I saw the movie with didn't know about the debate surrounding the film and he also didn't come away thinking the movie endorsed torture. So, this could be one of those situations where the people doing the objecting are actually revealing more about themselves than what they really have a problem with. If you want to complain about something just say it and don't try to shoehorn it into a conversation about a movie. I know certain people feel the need to insert their own agenda no matter what everyone else is talking about, but the people whose noses are all out of whack over this movie need to remember it's a movie and if they want to watch something less controversial they can always go see "Les Mis". But considering some people will be on TV the next day complaining about an anti-rich message in the film that no one else saw, maybe they should just stay home and read.