Zero Dark Thirty.

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 26^th 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 2^nd 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 19^th 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.    

‘It’s all on the screen….let the film speak.  I think the film does an amazing job of speaking

Pick of 2012?

OK, so I have been busy, exercising exit skills from my two parishes, retiring,  moving home and country, and spending the second half of the year living 50 minutes from the nearest cinema.     

So I have not yet seen Argo,  The Master, Rust and Bone, Amour, The Life of Pi. The Hobbit,  7 Psychopaths or Quartet. 

Nor have I seen any of these BFI top films of the year,   Tabu,  Beasts of the Southern Wild,  The Berberian Sound Studio, Moonrise Kingdom,  Beyond the Hills,  Cosmopolis,  Once upon a time in Anatolia, or This is not a film.

On the other hand I have managed to catch (listed in no particular order)

Anna Karenina, The Bourne Legacy,  Brave, Coriolanus, Hope Springs,  Shadow Dancer,  The Hunger Games, Looper,  Skyfall, Prometheus, Pirates -  an Adventure with Scientists,  Chronicle,  Great Expectations, A Dangerous Method, Hugo, The Artist, Puss in Boots,   The Dark Knight Rises,   and  The Avengers Assemble.   

I think all of these have much to commend them, and I have omitted a few others that seem to have had little to commend them.  

And what a varied bunch they are.  

Four literary adaptations;  Tolstoy treated with verve and confidence in Anna Karenina, a first rate Shakespearean Coriolanus,   a workmanlike Great Expectations, an honest and respectful  teen trilogy opener of Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games;  

three sf movies, Chronicles, Looper and Prometheus, each of which revisited old tropes, be they found footage, time travel or the Alien world; 

three children’s movies that also appeal to adults, in Brave, Pirates and Puss in Boots; 

two great action flicks,  Skyfall  hitting the heights and Bourne Legacy offering a new direction and star,  

two films about film-making,  Scorsese’s Hugo, and The Artist – an Oscar wining black and white silent movie!

An intelligent and informed British political thriller,  Shadow Dancer;

a typical – and typically good - British ensemble comedy, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (is that right?);  

an engaging treatment of mature married love – and its difficulties, in Hope Springs,

and two block-buster comic book franchise movies The Dark Knight Rises and Avengers Assemble, each of which honoured their respective heritages.  

I guess you will have seen most of these, but maybe Shadow Dancer deserves special mention.     Concerning  IRA moles run by MI5 in the 1990’s, this is  adapted by Tom Bradby, who was ITN’s News Correspondent in Belfast between 1993 and ‘96,  from his own novel.  It has the same informed darkness as his Red Riding TV trilogy, directed by  James Marsh, who also helms this movie.      This has an outstanding cast, starring Andrea Riseborough, (so brilliant in TV’s  The Devil’s Whore, set during the English Civil War), Clive Owen and Gillian Anderson (who now seems to have made Britain her home again), plus Aiden Gillen  (The Garde),  Domhnall Gleeson, (Anna  Karenina), and Brid Brennan (a stage and tv actor previously used by Marsh in Red Riding).   It rings true to the horrific history of the Troubles, in which everyday Irish domestic life was played out against a constant backdrop of potential violence that could, and did, so easily and unexpectantly explode, and where even family loyalties were often under deadly questioning.       Sadly, this film is still relevant today, as the British government’s involvement with ‘extra-legal’ activities in these years is comes more into the light.     I recommend it.

The observant will notice that I have not commented  A Dangerous Method,  the Freud/Jung story centering on their relationship with each other and with Sabina Spielrein,  starring Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Kiera Knightley.   That is simply because I am still puzzled by it,  questioning its accuracy and therefore its integrity.   The director, David Chronenberg, does not always fill me with confidence, despite his many remarkable films, including Eastern Promises, A History of Violence, eXistenZe, Videodome, The Fly, and Spider.      Must see again.

But please note, in this Olympic year, how many great British movies were released,  plus  those using major British talent in front of the camera, directing, or in the production teams.    Skyfall, of course, and Prometheus,  Anna Karenina, Coriolanus,  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Pirates,  Great Expectations,  Brave, and   Shadow Dancer.

And let’s name check  some of the leading British actors seen on screen this year and not mentioned above; Judy Dench, Daniel Craig,  Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson,   Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave,   Emma Thompson, Billy Connelly,  Helena Bonham-Carter, Robbie Coltrane,   Rachel Weitz,  Hugh Grant,  Imelda Staunton,  Trevor Hiddleston, Christopher Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman,  Tom Hardy, Idris Elba, Martin Freeman,  Ian McKellen, Maggie Smith,  Tom Wilkinson, Carey Mulligan….. honestly,   the list just goes on and one.

Apart from those mentioned above I really want to catch up on the following Britflics,

Dreams of a Life, Carol Morley’s requiem for Joyce Vincent 

My Week with Marilyn

Nine Muses, Akomfrahs meditation on immigration – and The Odyssey

Patience, (after Sebal’s The Rings of Saturn)

Shame,

Best Laid Plans,  (Of Mice and Men, but in Nottingham, directed by David Blair, who shot  TV’s The Lakes, The Street, and The Accused, sadly without a Jimmy McGovern script, but with Maxine Peake, who is reason enough for me!)

Trishna,  (Hardy’s Tess, set in India)

Wild Bill 

We Are Poets;  a documentary about the Leed’s project Young Authors   going to Washington  for the Brave New Voices slam-fest

The Angels’ Share,  Ken Loach

Man with the Jazz Guitar, Bio of Ken Sykora,  musician and radio eccentric

In the Dark Half

Now is Good

The Sweeney

Twenty8k

Sinister

Ginger and Rosa, by Sally Potter,

Cockneys vs Zombies,  which is, I am told, exactly what it says on the tin, plus Honor Blackman and Richard Briars.   What’s not to love?

And, just released,  McCullin,  a pictorial biography of Don McCullin, the brave and brilliant war photographer.

Outstanding DVD re-releases of the year? 

Little Big Man

Silent Running

Dark Star

Lawrence of Arabia

Rumble Fish

Pasolini’s  Gospel

Carlos Saura’s Flamenco trilogy,  Blood Wedding,  Carmen, and el Amor Brujo

The DevilsThe Conformist
Bob.

And the BBC’s  Hollow Crown,   terrific Shakespeare, fabulous casting and filming.

So here’s to 2013!  Happy movie going to you all.

Bob

Grace and Danger. Tree of Life and Theology

In Terrence Malick’s  film The Tree of Life we learn of the death of a 19 year old boy, known as RL.   Most of the film in concerned with his elder brother, Jack, and the spiritual crisis he experiences on an anniversary of RL’s death.  But at the beginning of the film we are with his mother, and her immediate response to this tragedy.  She loves God,  and has been taught that ‘those who follow the way of Grace come to no harm.’   She believes that we have to choose between Grace and Nature,  nature ‘red in tooth and claw’.  But her teenage boy was full of Grace, and he has come to harm,  he is dead.

The mother questions God, but God makes no verbal reply.   Instead Malick offers us a visually spectacular 15 minute sequence telling of the creation of the Universe, the formation of planets and the emergence and evolution of life.    Some find this section of the film incomprehensible, or irrelevant.    Having seen and discussed this film many times I offer this, my response to it,  putting these words into the mouth of the Creator.

Your child has died.  He was 19 years old.  This is tragic.  Because you love your child you scream and grieve and weep and rage and question.     You question me, asking

Why?

Did I know?

Where was I?

What do you mean to me?

Let me answer you.

You conceived your child in love, carried him in hope, birthed him in joy and pain.    You were pregnant for nine months.    I waited nine billion years for life to be conceived on planet Earth.   And four billion years more before it could give birth to you, my children, made in my own image.    You too were conceived in love, carried in hope, birthed in joy and pain. 

Life itself is my Creation gift to you, and it takes time.   Just as your beloved child grew slowly, cell by cell within your womb, my universe also grew slowly.     I spoke and the Universe sprang into existence, and then particle by particle, photon by photon, atom by atom, element by element, grain by grain, it grew within my womb. 

My womb?     Where else?  There was and is nowhere outside me, beyond me, outwith me, so the only place my universe could be is within me.    That genesis created everything you see and know, and everything you cannot see and will never know.    

Gravity was in my left hand and randomness in my right,  and these tools brought order out of chaos,  and then life out of the inanimate.      I created my Universe to live and to bear life itself, and more – life that is in my own image, the image of love.     Giving, self-giving, compassionate, forgiving love.  Love that cares,  love that hurts and grieves.    Grieves because there is no creation without destruction and no life without death.   That is the story of this Universe.   

Every atom in your body was created in the furnace at the heart of some distant sun.    Hydrogen and helium, the only atoms in that first moment,  had to be remade there, fused together under unimaginable pressure to form oxygen, carbon,  nitrogen, iron, calcium and phosphorus,  potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium.  You need all of these elements to simply be.    These suns burned for billions of years and then they had to die, burn out, explode and seed the interstellar space with these new atoms.    Atoms that gathered under gravity’s gentle push, gathered and clumped, formed dust clouds, then rocks, asteroids and planets.    

How many planets have to form before one can be a cradle for life?    The number would be meaningless to you, as would the trillion of minute actions and reactions needed for these earth-bound atoms to be combined and recombined, to mutate as randomness did its amazing work,  countering entropy by bringing order out of chaos, complexity out of simplicity, forming chemical compounds, amino acids, bacteria,  single and multi-celled beings;  all your ancestors.    Some think that evolution is not miraculous, but that is only because they want miracles to be instantaneous.    My Creation miracle took thirteen billion years, and turned hydrogen and light into love.   Is that not miraculous enough?

You were taught that you must choose between Grace and Nature.   That is a false dichotomy.    You thought that your child could escape the dangers of Nature by choosing Grace.    But Grace needs a natural form to inhabit.   Grace needs the cradle of Nature to find a home in.    And do not presume that you are the only living things capable of Grace.

You are compassionate. You feel the pain of others.  The suffering of others stirs deep feelings, often of anger, in your hearts.   Of course you want a world where there is no suffering.  Sometimes when you see suffering you call it evil and are angry with me.  

How can a loving God allow such suffering?      So they blame me for allowing harmful as well as beneficent bacteria to evolve, or for allowing the movement of tectonic plates to cause earthquakes.   Some would like me to temporarily suspend the laws of gravity when falling objects hurt, or when falling hurts bodies.    Some people seem to want fire that does not burn, water than does not drown.      To eat without killing.   But do you think that if I could have created you, and your beloved children, without suffering and death being part of it, without Nature being as it is, without your Universe being as it is, I would not have done so?   

I also have to live, like you,  with the necessary randomness that makes life possible and unpredictable.    Randomness and gravity, my necessary creative tools,  mean that life is fraught with  danger.   Maybe that danger makes it precious.   Would I not have spared myself the waiting, the dying, the grieving, if I could?   

If you look at Nature and hate it, and me, if you blame me and fear me, reject me for the death and loss and destruction you see in the world,  then before you condemn me, consider this.   It has taken your kind half a million years to learn how to take atoms apart.    How long do you think it would take you to put them back together, to create them, to create enough to make your own Universe,  and to breath life and love into your creation?    How long would it take you to make a Universe in your own image, because you despise this one, made in mine?

You husband is an inventor, proud of the patents for his devices.   I am proud of my devices too.    Your eldest son is an architect.  He knows that form has to follow function. 

Function dictates form.      Otherwise building fall apart.     I am the architect of the Universe, and it also has a function.    Love is that function; to love and to be loved.  

This Universe has become aware, and has learnt to love.   It took thirteen thousand million years for you to learn this, in your tiny corner, but in all that time my Universe has not fallen apart.    It is well made.    And just as your child grew from its conception as a single cell, with no interference from you, save sustenance, my Universe grew from a single moment, just one event, and grew to what it is, with no interference from me, save sustenance.  As it is, it was from the beginning.

O yes, I know some believe I could create this Universe and all living things in days, not billions of years,  and  make you out of mud in an instant.   They wonder why I did not make a Universe in which there was no suffering.   Maybe I could have done so.   It would be a different Universe.   And in such a Universe would you be truly human?   Would you have your capacity for costly love, for compassion, for Grace.   Would you be made in my image?   Would you be so intimately connected to the whole of creation?      And could I be truly incarnate?    At One with you?   

Your beloved son has died, and you grieve.  How many of my beloved have I seen die?     If you believe that I love, then you know that I grieve for your boy too, and for every living thing.     You live today in the shadow of his death.   Because I gave you the capacity to choose love and Grace I had to also give you the capacity to turn away from them.   So I too live in the shadow of death.   The death of the Cross, of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, of the Gulags and the Killing Fields.    I live in the darkness cast by the fear that lives in the heart of every child, every woman, every man subjected to abuse, to violence, to hatred.     These are not my actions, but yours.

You grieve for what you value.     So add this to the value of your boy.  In him his elder  brother, Jack, found me.   Found the love and trust and forgiveness and Grace – and the creativity – that are my image.   For RL, his brother, your child and mine, lived and lives in love.   All who live in love live in me.  And I live in them.    In all eternity.    

Because you love your child you grieve and weep and rage and question, asking

Why?  

Because there is no other way.

Did I know?  

Yes.

Where was I?  

With you.  Within you.

What do you mean to me?  

Everything.

Angelmaker

Angelmaker.  A novel crying out to be filmed.

Nick Harkaway’s  debut novel, The Gone Away World,  blew me away.   Once I had opened it I read nothing else until I reached the end.   The Gone Away World was witty, erudite, moving, fantastical and demanding.    Sadly, I cannot imagine how it could be filmed.  CGI has an amazing capacity to put visual wonders on the screen,  but the crucial action in this  novel has to take place in our heads, as we come to terms with the philosophical conundrum at its heart.  If you have read it you know why; if you haven’t, give it a try.  

When I  finished Harkaway’s first novel  I started waiting impatiently for his second.   Now it has arrived.   It is called Angelmaker and it is just as witty, erudite, moving, fantastical and demanding as its predecessor, but this time the narrative is imminently filmable.    

Joe, a peaceable giant of a clockmaker, is reluctantly recruited by a sprightly nonagenarian  ex-spy into a battle to save the world – or maybe the universe.  As the forces of Law are out of order he has to use not only the technical skills inherited from his grandfather to find and defuse a machine, designed to save humankind but in danger of destroying it,  but also the goodwill of the London underworld his father once ruled to fight the forces of darkness.   On the way he discovers that his dark side isn’t so dark, and that he has earned the love of a good, albeit unconventional, woman.    

Nick Harkaway is one of David Cornwell’s sons.   Cornwell, of course, writes as John le Carre.    Nick’s genes or nurture have given him the ability to write well, research deeply, and create fully realized characters.   But Angelmaker shows another aspect of the Cornwell line.   There is righteous indignation here.     In le Carre’s  spy novels there ran a deep current of outrage,  a disillusionment at the way good men and women were used in that war and then betrayed by the State, or misled into  believing that the cause they spied and fought for was just and moral.    That disillusionment was perhaps written out most starkly in The Secret Pilgrim.   When the Cold War ground to a halt le Carre lacked a subject that engaged this moral passion.  He wrote some competent thrillers, The Night Manager, Single & Single, et cetera, but it was not until The Constant Gardener that he blazed again.       Angelmaker is not a campaigning book in the way of  The Constant Gardner and The Mission Song, but there are still glimmers here of le Carre’s  sharp indignant edge.  

Harkaway has included agents of the State in the cast of Angelmaker, and his hero comes to see that despite their protestations ‘the end does not justify the means.  The end never comes, the means just carry on.’   As we now know, the means justified or ignored by the highest powers include lies, rendition, torture and murder.  

So there is a beating moral heart to Angelmaker, but there is also a lot of fun in this  picaresque, almost Dickensian, 21^st century Steam-Punk fantasy, crammed full of juicy dialogue delivered by male and female characters who leap off the page and would surely leap off the screen if embodied by some of our fine British character actors.    It is a Casting Director’s dream.     So I hope that some literate film-maker is looking hard at Angelmaker.   Do read it, see if you agree, and if you do, why not start a whispering campaign? 

Angelmaker  by Nick Harkaway is published by William Heinemann.  London.

Bob Vernon.