Zero Dark Thirty- Page 2

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 2:41pm

well then I still don't know why they wouldn't show the face. And they showed Obama on tv only, but they never had a direct meeting with him about the whole thing. wtf

[PalJoey]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 2:47pm

What's most fascinating about the film is the gulf between what she attempted to do and what ended up onscreen. She wanted to make a picture that was so unassailable in its portrayal of what happened that it would anger everyone on the left and the right.

But she ended up getting so much wrong that it was far from an unassailable portrayal of what really happened, and just another Hollywood melodrama.

Here's an interesting critique of it by a defender of the enhanced-interrogation techniques. It is almost as if he is disappointed in an entirely different movie than the one that disappointed other critics and critics of the use of torture:
CIA veteran on what ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ gets wrong about the bin Laden manhunt

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:06pm

thanks for the link, PJ.

My friend and I must be sadists, because we didn't think the "torture" in the film looked that bad. oy. I guess that's from seeing Hostel!

I think police use a mild case when trying to get info out of perps. I think they keep the person awake and deprive them of food until they talk. Couldn't the CIA do the same?

[strummergirl]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:06pm

"She wanted to make a picture that was so unassailable in its portrayal of what happened that it would anger everyone on the left and the right."

It seems she and Boal (let's not forget him since his Screenplay is still nominated) still got that based on the Rodriguez reaction and the different reactions to whether or not torture is shown as the catalyst. Then again, I saw no melodrama whatsoever on the screen and never felt like I was being told whose side to take. Even when Maya has a hunch about the compound I felt like there was good reason for her colleagues to be skeptical and ask for more proof beyond the number of men and women in the compound.

[strummergirl]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:10pm

Jane, Ammar, the detainee abused at the beginning, did give some information up after Maya and Dan lie to him in a face-to-face talk that he gave information beforehand that stopped an attack (that still happened after they tried to get him to talk when he was tortured) thanks to the fact he was suffering from sleep deprivation and also that he had no idea if the attack ever happened beyond what they told him.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:17pm

It's not surprising the Bigelow thinks that "unassailable" means "angering everyone."

[Kad]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:23pm

Namo, I'm a bit curious as to what you find propagandistic in the film- and toward what?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:29pm

It's propagandistic in the way the point of view makes the torture so every day. Sure, Jessica looks queasy when she is observing her first torture but she sucks it up and proves to everybody that she is just as tough and can-do and gutsy as James Cameron with his big movies as the other torturers in the movie. I hated the way they used Obama's "we don't torture" more as an indictment of not torturing than as a critique of Obama, the torturer.

Updated On: 2/9/13 at 03:29 PM

[strummergirl]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:40pm

Interesting read of the scene and I read some interpretations that felt that way (notably Peter Bergen). I thought it was simply a scene where they look out of their window to the outside world of their work (Candidate Obama portrayed as the 'outsider' in the press at the time adds to it). It's an anvil for what is about to change for them in their pursuit but I thought Dan telling Maya to not be the last person holding a dog collar pushed more of a personal point, because I felt like that character had enough.

The whole banality of it seems true to life and of the period before the PR backlashes of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. It becomes an everyday occurrence in the beginning because they are given the latitude of knowing that so-and-so detainee is 'never coming out'.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:42pm

I also worry that this largely invented narrative will be seen as the definitive account of the history. Similar to the way I really don't ever want The Normal Heart to be seen as the definitive narrative of the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

[strummergirl]

Posted: 2/9/13 at 3:57pm

Well, I definitely want stuff of the era to become declassified but who knows how long that will take. I think even Argo's whole story took years to be declassified and that whole event was post-Freedom of Information Act.

You can never tell what will become definitive and endure. I am sure Mark Felt's interactions with Woodward and Bernstein did not have him in the parking garage saying, "Follow the Money", but that endures from All the President's Men. Watergate was more complex than the Washington Post news pursuit of it. I am also sure when Marxist Gillo Pontecorvo made The Battle of Algiers (and if we want to talk about a film where its portrayal of a historic event and guerrilla journalistic approach is carrying a government's water that film is far more problematic than Zero Dark Thirty, though more brilliant ten-fold) he did not expect the film to be screened at the Pentagon to observe for Americans to study low-intensity conflict and special operations for its portrayal of terrorism. Algeria's war on independence from France was more complex than that.

I also just hope more filmmakers come out with stuff on the War on Terror since Hollywood seems way too cautious about it so it has mostly been documentarians doing the work, with No End in Sight and Standard Operating Procedure among the great ones. Maybe in the next decade.