The Politics of Film

 

 

Even within my closest circle of fellow movie lovers we have been arguing over Zero Dark Thirty. It pains me to no end that there is so much controversy surrounding  Kathryn Bigelow's film. She is a director  whose movies I adore and who I am proud of as a woman cinephile. She has not only joined the thankfully growing list of women movie directors (which now includes the likes of  Jane Campion, Liliana Cavani, Lina Wertmuller, Debra Granik, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Agnieszka Holland, Gurinder Chadha, Claudia Llosa, Nora Ephron, and many others), but she has enriched it tremendously with a unique cinematic style.

 

I found Zero Dark Thirty to be an impeccably made film and very true to Bigelow's style of direct,  detail-rich, quasi-documentary filmmaking, where she apparently lets the audience add their emotions and judgment, almost not leading with her own. Almost. It is a tribute to her filmmaking that the  Senate Intelligence Committee has written a letter to the public about this movie and a Senate panel has been set up to examine aspects of the film, when it isn't a documentary film.

 

Unfortunately, I have to agree with the Chairwoman of the Committee.

 

I would not take it to the injurious level of criticism that, for example, Matt Taibbi has made of the film in the January 16th Rolling Stone article, but it's hard not to leave the movie with a sinking feeling of disenchantment that comes from realizing someone whose work you admired (and admire, for Zero Dark is still admirable filmmaking) has made a film that while showing how torture helped in this man hunt, omits to show the inhumanity and moral indefensability of torture. As Taibbi states well:

 

"Here's my question: if it would have been dishonest to leave torture out of the film entirely, how is it not dishonest to leave out how generally ineffective it was, how morally corrupting, how totally it enraged the entire Arab world, how often we used it on people we knew little to nothing about, how often it resulted in deaths, or a hundred other facts? Bigelow put it in, which was "honest," but it seems an eerie coincidence that she was "honest" about torture in pretty much exactly the way a CIA interrogator would have told the story, without including much else."

 The film is a thriller, a spy movie, a war movie, a political movie. There are scenes that are made with such reality and strength, that we hold our breath and clench our fists as if we didn't know the outcome or were standing right there, among the seal team. The night raid scene is truly awe inspiring. The various bomb attacks. So many sequences that are worthy of taking them apart bit by bit in any film class. Not the Maya scenes, however. I  found her the weakest part of the movie and maybe her "centrality" one of the questionable aspects, at the core of the controversy in many ways.

 

Bigelow is one of the best directors around now. It is my hope that this controversy doesn't impair her filmmaking. In her interview with Stephen Colbert, it was clear that it is already taking its toll.