In
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag writes that "the imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers - seen close-up on the television screen - and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what causes the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence" (p. 102). After viewing Katherine Bigelow's
Zero Dark Thirty (2012), a cinematic account of the CIA's detainee program and the pursuit and assassination of Osama Bin Laden, I keep asking myself: can torture be represented in film? Is there a way of representing the brutality of something like the US detainee program that could induce more than ambivalence or moral ambiguity? Can torture be presented without utilitarian reservations about its potential efficacy (i.e. endless "what if" scenarios that might erode an audiences moral prohibition against cruelty in pursuit of safety or security)? As Sontag writes, the representation of suffering often produces in the voyeur a bemused awareness that atrocities happen, rather than an embodied and full-throated demand for action. Worse, our sympathy toward those who suffer functions as a mask for our complicity. In other words, we deplore the cruelty, feel for the victim, but accept the inevitability of both. In
Zero Dark Thirty, the means of justice are morally dubious, but undeniably "effective". In an open letter to the Los Angeles Times, Bigelow defends the film by asserting that "those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement, If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhuman practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time." In light of the depth and complexity of the critical responses to the film's representation of torture, this response is anemic at best and naive, if not dangerous at worst. Imagining the camera as a neutral medium that merely documents events without framing them, dismisses the concept that framing choices matter: selection and deflection, highlighting and lowlighting, and so on shape how the audiences are invited to perceive what is depicted (how they will feel and related to the image and narrative on the screen). This is the kind of cop-out I wouldn't accept from my first-year students.
Whether by design or incident, the film does much more than "delve into the thorny subjects of our time". In the first third of the film, the audience is invited into the moral vacuum of the US detainee program, where suspected Al Qaeda members endure brutality and humiliation at secret detention facilities throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The films begins as rising intelligence officer Maya (Jessica Chastain) joins the forwardly deployed operations at a secret site in Afghanistan. Dan (Jason Clark) - detached and cruel - introduces Maya to brutal and abject techniques of "enhanced interrogation." I would argue that the audience is introduced and acclimated to the CIA culture of torture by way of familiarization, fraternization, and ultimately psychological doubling. At first the torture sequences visibly disgust Maya. The audience witness her desire for the subjects to capitulate in an effort to make the violence come to an end. At first, she winces or diverts her eyes as pain is inflicted on the detainees. However, as she become accustom to the interrogations, they begin to become routinized parts of her work-day gathering intelligence. She begins to take a more active role in the interrogations, directly addressing the detainees and, eventually, leading interrogations accompanied by armed personnel in masks who inflict pain upon on their subjects upon her command. Torture, indeed, is just part of the job. While Maya does not revel in dispensing pain, she appears to grow numb to its repetition. Moreover, torture gets compartmentalized from the rest of her professional duties and socialization. The torture takes places in windowless storage units and dark basement rooms that are easily sectioned away from the rest of life on the military bases and detention facilities depicted. The characters exhibit what Robert Jay Lifton calls "doubling", in which people who commit extreme acts of cruelty as a part of their work (the case study for Lifton is Nazi doctors) split into two selves: the professional self (the "Auschwitz self", he dubbed) and the private/public self (the often kind, empathetic persona that the same person exhibits outside of their work environment). The process of doubling explains how people can be acclimated to cruelty as a part of their professional obligations but at the same time be loving and caring people in non-professional settings. In the film, torture is an act that can be compartmentalized from the rest of torture's life and professional duties, it is left behind or perhaps repressed to the dark windowless recesses of an abandoned storage tanker. Like Maya, the audience is socialized into the professional culture of torture where cruelty is regrettable but a part of a national service.
Finally, doubts about the efficacy of torture are removed as it ultimately provides the intelligence information that leads to the assassination of Bin Laden. In fact, Maya and her colleagues bemoan the loss of the detainee program and the damage it did to the CIA's pursuit on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The film confirms that if it were not for the detainee program, and Maya's nearly obsessive pursuit of Bin Laden's couriers and associates, he would have never been eliminated. While I cannot speak to the veracity of this narrative, I can say that within the text of the film, torture is credited for more intelligence victories than losses (overload, misinformation, etc.). Thus, torture is sutured to a narrative of national triumph, while its consequences for the victims and the perpetrators is backgrounded or otherwise silent. Many people have written about torture and depictions of the body in pain (too many to cite here), but one common element of agreement must surely be that to depict torture is anything but neutral. Films can absolve torturers, make witnesses or bystanders out of audiences, stoke the desire for revenge and retribution, create detached spectators, shock the conscience, or invite critical engagement and action. I have seen countless films that depict torture (inevitable when you watch a lot of horror films and follow directors like Eli Roth), and recognize the degree to which as a US filmgoer, shock followed by detachment or bemusement is an easy response. While depiction is not endorsement per se, depiction is by the same token not
criticism. The question is what lessons about the moral standing and use-value of torture can audiences derive from film's narrative? How are we invited to make sense of and evaluate the role of torture in the outcome of historical events? What will we do when we are asked once again to torture in the name of national security, justice, or some other abstract value?
References:
Sontag, S. (2003).
Regarding the pain of others. New York: Picador.
Lifton, R.J. (1991).
The genocide mentality: Nazi Holocaust and nuclear threat. New York: Basic Books.
