Zero Dark Thirty

The first moments of Zero Dark Thirty are a black screen, as dark as a shroud laid over your eyes. All the audience hears are spectral voices howling in a void—the lost calls and dead signals of the victims of 9/11, a Greek chorus of horror and fear. It’s a smart decision on the part of director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal to avoid the all-too-familiar stock images of the planes crashing or the towers crumbling. Do those pictures even shock anymore? Have audiences finally numbed to the pain they evoke? Perhaps they are now nothing more than visual markers of a bygone era, like footage of the moon landing or Jackie O. clutching her husband’s limp body. But the black screen and the disembodied voices, these are panic and terror alive and well, restless spirits not easily calmed. Isn’t there a superstition that those who die violently become ghosts?

If these opening moments evoke a kind of purgatory, what follows can’t be anything other than hell. A man is chained in a sun-blasted shack—location undisclosed, but it sure as shit ain’t Florida—undergoing a brutal interrogation. A CIA agent makes it clear that every lie will produce pain, but equally clear, if unspoken, is the fact that a lie is defined as whatever the CIA agent does not want to hear. Maya (Jessica Chastain), another CIA agent, stands back and watches her colleague prepares to water board the detainee (dog collars and hot boxes soon to follow). Shaken and unnerved, her discomfort is meant to stand in for the audience’s own queasiness at what we’ve just witnessed. Consider it as a kind of relief valve on the scene, which would otherwise prove to be as torturous for the viewer as the victim. There is sanity in the world, we are told by the horror on Maya’s face. There is still moral righteousness. And then her colleague orders her to fill a bucket of water to pour on the man’s face, and she obeys after only a slight, startled pause. This is the last time we will see Maya waver.

In Bigelow’s last film, The Hurt Locker, a shell-shocked soldier froze up in the grocery store, momentarily paralyzed by the limitless possibilities of the cereal aisle. By contrast, Maya, with her fiery hair and flinty confidence, projects a moral certitude at odds with ambiguity and self-questioning. Her confidence is beyond question and her determination beyond doubt. She is the self-described motherfucker who finds Osama bin Laden’s hideout. Make no mistake, Zero Dark Thirty is a revenge story, and its star is a Hamlet without hesitation. Unlike a more traditional revenge tragedy, however, there is no sense of the cost of Maya’s all-consuming quest for retribution. She acknowledges, with no sign of regret, her lack of friends and personal life. The only suggestion that she ever had any existence beyond her life as a relentless Osama-seeking drone is a computer desktop image of her holding a young girl. Is it her sister? Daughter? Niece? No answer is offered, and it seems likely the film has none to give.

As a procedural focused solely on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty clings to the shield of journalistic objectivity. Of course, the filmmakers are adamant that they are not making pro-torture propaganda (Bigelow professes to be a pacifist). However, the film’s failings have nothing to do with its views on water boarding, but rather how its supposedly detached perspective is too feeble to survive the moral challenge posed by torture—a flaw it shares with much of the western world in the years immediately following 9/11. Its much-vaunted journalistic integrity consists largely of funneling government reports and testimonials into a concise, gripping narrative (it’s easy to be objective when you acknowledge only one possible viewpoint). A brief quotation from an Obama speech reminds viewers that the current administration has disavowed torture—although one might ask how the closure of Guantanamo Bay is coming along—and with that the issue is allowed to recede into the background. The collared detainee we saw paraded around half-naked through his own filth reappears later in the film, healthy and clean, sharing a meal with the CIA agents and meekly offering up information. The effect is not unlike that of a magician bringing out the woman sawed in half earlier. See? Everything is fine. No harm done.

No. Fuck that. Harm was done. Much harm was done, to the innocent as well as the guilty, to perpetrator and victim alike. It all comes back to the Greek chorus of 9/11 victims that announces this revenger’s...well, not tragedy, that’s not right, what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right. Triumph. Zero Dark Thirty is a revenger’s triumph, and there’s a reason why that phrase should writhe and boil in your stomach like rancid meat. The tragedy of revenge is that violence compounds violence until all who partake are destroyed. The triumph of revenge, on the other hand, is a fantasy in which those who wield violence with righteousness will succeed over their foes (Maya even speaks as if she is on a mission from god at times). The key to the illusion is that the torture is placed in the past, neatly bracketed between the 9/11 attacks and the death of Osama. Everything before and after this brutal decade is deemed irrelevant, as if killing Osama somehow eradicates the moral stain of what led up to that moment. Torture becomes part of the post-9/11 madness, a vicious tool for vicious times. With the killer caught and the crime avenged, the curtain closes on these horrors and those terrified voices from the beginning of the film are at last silenced. More than a story of revenge, this film is an exorcism.

The Hurt Locker

You almost begin to pray for explosions. Not out of malice or sheer bloodlust—you just want an end to the maddening tension that permeates every moment. And once in a while, there is the release of an explosion or some gunfire or even a few punches to the gut exchanged in the midst of some drunken macho horseplay. But again and again you return to that same nerve-rattling tension, that same suspended moment. There’s always the knowledge that you’ll be dead the moment you hit the ground, but for every second you’re in the air, you might as well be immortal.

The Hurt Locker, a steely-eyed new film directed by Kathryn Bigelow from a well-observed script from Mark Boal, is all about the addiction of war as an experience, examining the heavy psychological toll exacted by continual exposure to your own imminent death. This is war as a state of mind. You carry it with you wherever you go.

Set during 2004 in Iraq, the film narrows its focus to a single Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. After losing their team leader during a mission, JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) find themselves saddled with Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner), an arrogant veteran EOD soldier who claims to have defused more than 800 bombs. Reckless in his confidence, James exposes his teammates to unnecessary risks without a second thought. He simply acts—effectively, as it typically turns out, but with little regard for safety.

Some of the conflicts that arise in the group as a result of James’ brash behaviour might seem familiar at first: Eldridge is a brittle, inexperienced soldier, crumbling under the constant strain, while Sanborn clings to regulations and rules as a bulwark against James’ more impulsive methods. But Sanborn’s by-the-book demeanor masks incredible anxiety and fear, and James’ cocksure attitude is similarly a façade of sorts. Even though initial appearances make it seem James is just an arrogant young twerp on a short march to the grave, it soon becomes evident that he is not only a good soldier, but also one who cares for his comrades, despite his recklessness.

In many ways, in fact, he is held up as an exemplary soldier (his superiors make much of his impressive record), and that is ultimately what makes his character so pitiable. As he excels at war, so he fails at domesticity. During one of the few scenes that occur outside of Iraq, we see him standing in a grocery store, staring at a daunting wall of cereal boxes, hesitating. Where is the bold confidence of the soldier who defuses a bomb in the still-smoldering wreckage of a car, unconcerned with the likelihood of his own death? When James tries to describe his relationship with the mother of his son, there is a helplessness and confusion that suggests war is, like any other drug, an escape from the bewildering problems of normal life.

Many of these concerns are more general and not tied to any specific conflict, but by limiting itself to this one group of soldiers the film provides some interesting insights into the Iraq war. For the EOD unit, everyone and everything is a potential threat. When they walk into a bomb scene, each scrap of litter potentially hides an IED, and each onlooker possibly holds the detonator. And if you have to treat all Iraqi citizens like enemies, is it any wonder when so many turn out to be exactly that? At one point, a standoff ensues when a taxi bursts through a military barricade onto a bomb scene. As Will points his gun at the head of the driver, the two stare in a sudden and inexplicable test of wills. Is this man really hoping to attack the American military? Or, merely frustrated by the sight of the army, did he choose to defy their presence and carry on with his normal route, only to find a gun aiming between his eyes? After he backs down, soldiers yank him out of his car and drag him away. “If he wasn’t an insurgent,” Will jokes, “he is now.”

The Hurt Locker represents something seemingly contradictory: an intelligent action film. We’re so used to seeing action filmmaking as purely mindless diversion that it’s startling to see a director of such intelligence committed to the cause. Yes, this film is visceral and exciting, but it’s also attentive to the consequences—both physical and psychological—of its violence. At this time of year, you could walk into any multiplex and stumble across countless imagined disaster scenarios, with buildings bursting into computer-generated rubble left and right while corpses fall like rain drops. Action is a dirty word in these cases, signifying films in which violence and carnage is envisioned as a child’s game. Bigelow prefers to describe her films as “experiential,” which only makes clear the divide between her and the mainstream of action filmmaking. In a film like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, you feel distanced from the action, but in The Hurt Locker, everything feels intensely immediate. You pray for that explosion to come and relieve the tension because this is happening not just to James, but also to you, and like that soldier, you can taste that same seductively self-annihilating adrenalin.

It’s tempting to see Bigelow’s film as a corrective to these mainstream action movies, even though that does a disservice to the complexity of her intentions and methods. When I think back to the first explosion in the film, I don’t think of the blast itself, but rather gravel rising in slow motion or rust shaking off of an abandoned car. Such images capture the brute force of the blast in a way that is not only more poetic, but also more tangible and meaningful, than the usual cliché of sending some debris flying at the camera. Who needs IMAX when you actually have a good director?