Emily Bazelon—“Torture is bad, but it does make for riveting cinema”

Oy vey. I may have to see Zero Dark Thirty, the “controversial” new thriller about the murder of Osama Bin Laden, just to make my way through all the bullshit that’s been piled up around it. Over at Slate, Emily Bazelon contributes a profoundly disappointing take on the film, which, unlike me, she has seen. Bazelon presents herself as someone who is opposed to torture because it’s morally wrong, regardless of any question of its efficacy for obtaining intelligence, yet somehow can’t help thinking that the movie is really cool, even though the argument the film makes about the real world—that “rough treatment” as Bazelon frequently and evasively describes it—resulted in the assassination of Bin Laden is false:

To get where she wants to go—and god knows why she wants to go there— Bazelon has to make a number of very sharp shifts and turns. Why it is not “condemnably wrong” to make a movie that claims that torture was used to obtain the information that led to the assassination of Bin Laden when in fact that was not the case? Well, apparently, it’s all the fault of those liberals. You know the ones, the little babies who want to believe that torture never produces useful intelligence. Beating up aggressively albeit irrelevantly on those sissy-britches who can’t admit that sometimes torture does work—or, at least, can’t admit that you can’t prove that it can’t work—gives Bazelon a self-congratulatory moral glow that I found seriously off-putting. She’s the tough one here, the one who’s not afraid to face the facts, even though the “facts” she congratulates herself for facing are false.

As she tells us, Bazelon identifies with the heroine of the film, CIA analyst “Maya” (Jessica Chastain), who is first a witness and then a participant in the torture of “Amar” (presumably, a scumbag): “Maya is left alone with Amar. He begs her for mercy; she tells him, “You can help yourself by being truthful.” Now we know for sure that she has steeled herself to be cold and hard—that she’s consumed with tracking down Osama Bin Laden and is willing to do whatever it takes to find the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks.”

So, apparently, torture itself is wrong, but the willingness to use torture—to be “cold and hard”—is somehow good in and of itself.* And even if it isn’t, “the scenes with Amar are as riveting—as pure cinema—as they are disturbing.”

Afterwords
We all go to the cinema to see riveting scenes of over the top violence—at least I do—but we ought to know when we’re being manipulated. How would Bazelon respond to a film about a Nazi, or a communist, or an Islamic fundamentalist, learning that one has to be “cold and hard”? I have no admiration for those who congratulate themselves on being ruthless.

Zero Dark Thirty was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose earlier film The Hurt Locker picked up six Oscars back in 2010, which is a lot. Apparently, the Academy was so desperate for someone to “say something” about the war in Iraq that they handed out six awards to a film that did not say anything about the war in Iraq. The Hurt Locker was determinedly apolitical, telling the story of a war-loving first sergeant whose aggressive self-confidence makes him both an inspiration and a danger to his men, because he’s driven, not by the “mission” but the danger. The fighting never ends, because he won’t let it. Such men exist, but they exist in every war. The Hurt Locker told us nothing about the war in Iraq, and, it appears, Zero Dark Thirty tells us lies about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.