Let
the film speak.
With
regard to Zero Dark Thirty Kathryn Bigelow has written that “Those
of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement”.
Slavoj
Zizek writing in The Guardian on Saturday 26th January
responded that ‘torturing a human being is in itself
something so shattering that to depict it neutrally is already a kind of
endorsement.”
“Imagine
a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way.
Such a film would either embody a deep immoral fascination with its topic, or
it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and
horror in its spectators. Where is Bigelow here? ……. Without a doubt she
is on the side of the normalization of torture.”
May
I say in Ms Bigelow and Mark Boal's defense that their film is not in any
way disinterested. Why would any one spend years
investigating the facts, forming them into a coherent narrative and filming
that narrative with enormous care, commitment and craft unless they did so either
for overtly propaganda purposes, which is obviously not the case here, or to
confront the audience with the truth.
Can
the truth can be told with passion and commitment without it being
overtly emotive? Indeed if you trust the truth you don’t have
to ‘over egg the pudding.’ I wonder if Mr. Zizek has seen the
documentary films made when the Concentration Camps were liberated, or those
showing the effect of the bombing of Hiroshima. These
films did not need ‘effect’, or comment. The film makers simply
pointed their cameras and let the plain and simple images do the work. These
films did not ‘normalize’ either Holocaust.
Mr.
Zizek is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities, and a widely published political philosopher. He is
deeply moved by this film. Anyone who is not moved may be
less than fully alive. But it seems that his humanitarian
feelings have overcome his capacity for thought. “With torture one should
not “think”,” he writes. Really? So is this subject
beyond the scope of moral philosophy? We know the Adorno line that
‘after the Holocaust there could be no more art’, but no more thought?
Surely the point of philosophy is that it helps us to think about the
'unthinkable'?
This
film demands that we think, hard, about what we see, and commentators on it
ought at least to be well informed.
He
writes “Much more ominous (than Maya, the main protagonist) is the
young, bearded CIA agent who masters perfectly the art of passing glibly
from torture to friendliness once the victim is broken.”
And
“There
is something deeply disturbing in how, later, he changes from a torturer
in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat.”
I
am not sure what value the beard or jeans signify here, but firstly, the
CIA agent does not ‘change from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed
Washington bureaucrat’, he simply finished this posting and went back
to Langley to work there in another role, probably as an analyst or
section head. Did we miss that he is Doctor Daniel?
Secondly,
this is exactly how skilled interrogators work. In military
interrogation the police procedural Good Cop/Bad Cop personas are often
invested in the same person, the only person the victim has to believe
can save him. Skilled Interrogators know that torture does
not provide reliable results, but there are other ways to break a person than
by physical pain. The Bad Cop will exhaust, humiliate and
disorient their victim, break down their self-image and feelings of
self-worth to the point where the only way the victims can find salvation
is in the eyes of the Good Cop, who is the same person as the Bad
Cop. This is not a dramatic invention. This is
how it works.
Mr.
Zizek asks “If torture was always going on, why are those in power now
telling us openly about it? There is only one answer; to normalize it,
to lower our ethical standards. ”
Do
we really think that those in power have been telling us ‘openly’? After years
of semantic and legal sleight of hand and denial, of inadmissible
evidence and closed courts, of denying rendition and the use of operators
employed by foreign powers to torture, of keeping the prisoners in US bases
silent as long as possible, of punishing lower ranking soldiers as if they had
not been obeying orders from above? Watch Taxi To The Dark Side for a quick primer
on that last. The US and British governments have fought
tooth and nail to keep the facts away from their
populations. Even now the Americans are investigating how Mark Boal
got so much accurate information.
But
maybe they need not have bothered to hide these truths. The
TV program 24 was popular and much
awarded. Its star, Kieffer Sutherland,
played Jack Bauer of the American Counter Terrorist Unit
(CTU). This show premiered on November 6, 2001, two
months after 9/11, and ran for 192 episodes, winning many awards.
Its message was clear. There are no means that cannot and
should not be used if they are necessary to save us from disaster. It
is therefore justifiable to torture anyone, even to death, if the information
gained will save the lives of thousands.
This
stance was admired and adopted by the Bush Administration and, it seems, by
many members of the US military and intelligence
operatives. It must be said, however, that I know
of no occasion in modern history when this justification has been proven
necessary. As someone has remarked; if they
say we need to break eggs to make an omelet, I say ‘show me the omelet.’.
If there was such an omelet it would surely have been on public display
to prove the case. But the popularity of 24 suggests
that the public bought
the argument. And of course it lowered their
anxiety. If there are people out there who are prepared to do
anything, literally any thing, to protect us, then surely we are
safe, or at least safer than we would be it they were not prepared to break
eggs.
Professional
interrogators know that torture does not provide reliable
evidence. Anyone who has read up on the ‘intelligence’ that
triggered the 2nd invasion of Iraq knows that it was offered up
by a prisoner who, after being repeatedly waterboarded,
decided to tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear;
that Saddam Hussein did indeed have WMD, rather than continue to tell them the
truth, which was that Hussein did not have WMD. Most
people being interrogated eventually work out what their captors want to
know.
Coming
back to Zero Dark Thirty, Jason Clarke, who plays the CIA interrogator
seen waterboarding at the start of the film, has said ‘It’s all on the
screen….let the film speak. I think the film does an amazing job of
speaking, if you want to listen.’ (The Guardian Guide 19th January p
18).
Zero
Dark Thirty is the most accurate depiction I have ever seen on the
screen
of the Intelligence gathering and collating process. This takes
time, gathers more than it can process, produces blind leads, is open to
abuse – and betrayal. Short cuts lead to false conclusions.
And means can be used that are deeply immoral, especially where there is
pressure from above to achieve results, and these means either corrupt or
deeply trouble those who undertake them. Or
both. I do not think that this film tries
to justify – or heroify – the actions of those taking part in these
activities. It simply presents them to our gaze.
Mr.
Zizek thinks that “the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can
enjoy the film without feeling guilty.” Well I am a
liberal, and I found this film profoundly and properly disturbing. Liberal
Hollywood, it seems, has difficulty with it too, and the film and its makers
have sometimes been shunned and booed.
I
wonder why the lack of overt political point-making in this film has not
received the same applause and award nomination as The Hurt Locker, the last
film researched and written by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn
Bigelow? If that film is judged by Mr. Zizek’s standards then
should it have denounced the horrors of the Invasion of Iraq, and the hundred’s
of thousands of casualties? Or is the torture of one man on screen
more morally offensive than the deaths of thousands of women and children of
screen?
Mr.
Zizek’s final argument is that we live in a moral vacuum because we could
not imagine a major Hollywood studio film depicting torture in a similar way 20
years ago.
No,
we cannot, because as far we know such torture was not being used by our
Governments then.
And
just how ‘moral’ was the movie industry in 1992?
The films that made most money that year were Aladdin, The Bodyguard, Home
Alone 2, Basic Instinct, Lethal Weapon 3, Sister Act, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and
Wayne’s World. I wonder what moral values we can
see in these. The only film that was in any way critical of the
establishment, and made money, was A Few Good Men, but with
Nicholson, Cruise and Moore in it how could it fail? The only films
I can recall that addressed ethical issues in
any way were Hoffa, Love Field, Malcolm X, and Manufacturing
Consent: Naom Chomsky and the Media. The
only truly politically critical film was Zhang Zimou’s The Story of
Qiu Ju. That was banned, of course, in China, where it was
made.
Of
course modern horror movies are often appalling, and do, I am sure, tend to
desensitize viewers. But Zero Dark Thirty is not part
of this carnography.
So
please, Mr. Zizek, go the movies, take your trained mind with you and
distinguish between art and propaganda, between the disinterested and the
passionatly objective. Take your humanitarian heart with you and be
outraged when films tell outrageous truths, but please don’t blame the
film-makers for telling them. Most of all please don’t accuse them
of endorsing these outrages when they present the facts as neutrally –
honestly – as they can.
