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.
Welcome, you two, to the movie blog world!
ReplyDeleteI think the film hardly depicts torture as either effective or necessary. The initial acts of torture are unable to prevent the bombing they're supposed to hep avert, it's only through deceptive, non-'enhanced' interrogation that Maya first learns of the suspected courier. Subsequent information about him is gathered from people who had been tortured (as the first informant had been) but the film presents no reason that torture was necessary to get that information. In fact, one of the key bits of information is deduced from the fact that a suspect lied about the courier under torture (it is therefore torture's lack of efficacy that makes it useful).
But even then, the interrogations lead nowhere. The trail goes cold for years (long before the torture program is ended). The courier is only found after a picture is dug out of an archive, and old-fashioned sleuthing is used to track the man down, ultimately to his house in Abbottabad.
All of this is more or less truthful, certainly by the standards of films "based on" actual events (emphasis belongs on the "based on" not the "actual"). The CIA did torture people in the hunt for bin Ladin and to not acknowledge that would be a disservice to history. Whether or not any useful information came from the torture program, or from anyone who was tortured seems to be debatable, but Bigelow's depiction here doesn't seem to be an unreasonable account of events.
Of course, the question of torture's effectiveness as it relates to its morality is one of the central questions the film (and the debate around it). Too much of the criticism from the left I've seen sidesteps the issue of morality altogether and simply takes it on faith that torture can never be useful, as if a thing can't be effective and still wrong at the same time. This necessarily makes the fact that torture is wrong irrelevant, and the choice we make not to torture not a moral choice, but merely an expedient one. The fear seems to be that if it is allowed to be said that torture works, then the anti-torure argument will lose, because the dictates of morality cannot withstand the imperatives of national self-interest, or vengeance. It's apparently easier for the left to assert the torture never works than it is for us to win an argument against political utilitarianism.
I do agree though with your analysis of the way Bigelow puts the audience in a position of sympathy with the torturers. This begins with the opening of the film, the black screen accompanied by voices of actual victims and first responders at the World Trade Center. Bigelow clearly wants to put us in the state of mind that Maya would have been in to go along with torture, to play on our desire for revenge and ask us exactly how far we are willing to bend our laws and morality for the sake of avenging those voices. This is what she means by 'depiction is not endorsement'. She shows the actions, gives us her sense of the thinking of the people behind them, but does not herself judge, that's our responsibility as the audience. The ambiguity of the film's ending, its distinctly non-triumphant tone of 'is this all there is?' captures the kind of ambivalence Bigelow wants to leave us with, where we walk out of the film not thinking how great we (the US, the torturers) are but rather about the things we sacrificed to kill this man, and whether it was all worth it.
Sean - It is great to get your perspective on the film. Thanks for the engagement. It gives me a little more perspective about alternative interpretations of the film's position on torture (particularly that the judgment is the audiences responsibility). I wanted to avoid enacting the standard liberal critique of the film, but instead to ask if the film might position the audience to humanize the torturers to such an extent that they might lose sight of its morality. I think you are correct that many of the left's critique sort of put all their eggs in the "torture doesn't work aspect of the argument," which is perhaps the wrong strategy. I had not considered the productive value of ambivalence and the precarious role of the filmmaker in trying to cultivate critical insights (the final question of was it all worth it? is interesting). Where I find the film troubling is how its lays out conditions that explain how one might be compelled to torture? That is, I am not sure it gives the audience enough to make sense of it without in some way believing it was reasonable for anyone in that professional position, in that geopolitical climate to commit themselves to "any means necessary." I may not have enough faith in the audience or I might be to willing to reject a sympathetic lens. So, I am going to think about your argument a little more and come back to this conversation soon. Thanks and I look forward to more conversations and debates!
ReplyDeleteThanks, I'm looking forward to reading more from you all in the future. I've been chewing on this movie for weeks now, but haven't had the time to get anything written about it, thanks for giving me the impetus to ramble out a few of my thoughts on it.
ReplyDeleteI see what you're saying about the film making the pro-torture case, to some extent, I think that it has to in order to address the questions Bigelow is most interested in asking. She has to present the point-of-view of the torturers as valid in order for the 'is it worth it' question to have any meaning. Anything less than neutrality (for lack of a better word) would be stacking the deck.
I wouldn't say she presents them sympathetically, or at least not their actions. But you can be sympathetic to a person, attempt to understand their point-of-view, without condoning everything they do (depiction is not endorsement again). Raging Bull is the first example that comes to mind of a film that sympathetically portrays and humanizes a truly despicable human being, there are, of course, many many others.
I think Bigelow wants the audience to understand why we tortured people, but that's not the same thing as wanting us to understand that we should have tortured people. Perhaps she did overestimate her audience in doing so, given the (as I see it) misinterpretations of the film on both the left and the right (the Cheneys apparently see it as a vindication). I do think its interesting that almost every "the film endorses torture" argument I've seen comes from political writers (almost all of who I respect and admire greatly: Dan Savage, Chris Hayes and so on), whereas the film critics (amateur and professional) I read almost universally see the opposite. I haven't seen much reaction from 'regular' people. Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone claimed the audience he saw it with greeted the ending with triumphant whoops. My audience, on the other hand, was completely silent, seemingly stunned. The movie is now the biggest hit of BIgelow's career, I feel like I should have a better idea of the general audience's reaction by now.
The ethics of audience reception is an interesting question. Michael Moore did make a good point when he argued in the Huffington Post that film should not be shamed because the dominant audience is not capable of interpreting the nuances of the film. He sees the film as showing the cruelty of torture in all its horrific technical detail. I agree with him in terms of how evaluate the audience question: that it is not the filmmakers fault if audiences are too blurry eyed and nationalistic to see the complexity of torture. (Patton is a fairly unsympathetic depiction of vicious war-mongerer, yet the film had a special place in Nixon's heart). I'll say that I was relieved that the audience I was a part of did not whoop and cheer at the end of the film (which I was worried would happen), which I think does speak to complexity of perception.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that film critics seem to differ from political writers in their interpretation of the film. Perhaps they read the film as just another piece of political discourse that can be picked up and circulated by neoconservatives as a vindication despite the intent of the filmmaker (I'm also thinking about conservatives that embrace Cartman's loveable racism and miss Parker and Stone's irony and irreverence). Perhaps the issue of torture is too close their political commitments than a more dispassionate portrayal of the torturer's mentality is commensurate with endorsement. Zizek (I know, I know), did make an interesting point about the risks of normalizing torture when he asked if we would accept a similar portrayal of the Holocaust (mulling over the technical details of industrial mass murder) or rape (asking us to consider the complexity of rape and the mentality of the rapist dispassionately). I haven't decided if the comparison is fair, but it is illuminating.
I would add this: would we see a film about torture from the perspective of Al Qaeda an endorsement? What if the filmmaker argued that they were trying to show the complexity of torture by depicting how it was experienced by the detainees? Could the filmmaker make the argument that depiction was not endorsement or sympathy? Would this film be considered an endorsement of Al Qaeda rather than something illustrating the complexity of torture? I don't know the answer to this question or if it is comparable. But, I ask this because it highlights a different way of thinking about audiences: what is the potential for audiences to read depictions of torture outside of ideology of the war on terror? It might be easier to understand the mentality of the torturer than that of the victim (a victim prefigured as the enemy), making the hypothetical film suggested above a lot more difficult to make than one that gives us torture from the perspective of misguided CIA agents.
Perhaps its not that film is a humanizing portrayal of people with dubious ethical commitments that results in endorsements of their activities, but that maybe the film doesn't actually give us the complex view of torture Bigelow thought she was giving us. Perhaps it is also not that the film endorses torture, but that it normalizes torture to get to the question of "was it all worth it"? I keep asking myself if the "juice was worth the squeeze," so to speak. I am willing to concede (happily) that your interpretation of the film has altered how I read the film. I am still unsettled and keep debating the film in my head. Maybe that alone is evidence of Bigelow's success. I, too, have been mulling over this film over the past two weeks, trying to make sense of it. I am interested to see the debate continue to unfold as the Oscars approach. Perhaps then we might get a better idea of the audiences reaction.
- CK
I think film writers and political writers are trained (either formally or informally) to prefer two different types of stories. Politics requires specificity and argument, whereas those things can be off-putting and denigrated in art, which favors balance and ambiguity. If you're writing an editorial, you don't want the audience to make up their own mind, you're trying to persuade them to your own point-of-view. Political analysts are trained to avoid contradiction, as that's the sign of a failed argument, whereas artists tend to embrace it. Thus a film like Zero Dark Thirty, which does contain a pro-torture argument (as well as a contradictory, anti-torture argument) is seized upon as evidence for whichever side the editorialist wants to argue.
ReplyDeleteA theory: the film contains A (torture good) and B (torture bad). For the political writer, the very existence of A is enough to invalidate the film as a whole, because suggesting that torture can be good is anathema, thus the film becomes only A and any other (contradictory) parts are ignored. But for the film writer, trained to embrace contradiction and read the film as a whole first and only then analyze its parts, the film remains A+B and privileging either part seems bizarre and wrong-headed.
Or perhaps it's simply that those with an agenda will tend to read whatever they want into any given text, and that the goal of arguing against torture is more valuable to them than an aesthetically honest act of film criticism. Thus Zero Dark Thirty and its director are sacrificed to politics, perhaps a reasonable trade given the much greater evil of actual torture vs. an Academy Award nominations and a few bad reviews, though I doubt that any anti-Bigelow Op-Eds will change anyone's mind about anything.
As for Zizek, the less said the better. I'd suggest that there are countless films throughout history that put us in the mindset of evil people: Raging Bull asks us to sympathize with a wife-beater, Psycho with a delusional murderer, Hannibal with a suave serial killer, The Battle of Algiers with terrorists and so on. François Truffaut suggested that it was impossible to make a truly anti-war film because the camera tends to glorify, to glamorize anything it films. I don't know that that's true, but its an interesting idea.
As for other cinematic approaches to this same subject: Taxi from the Darkside, a documentary (I haven't seen) directed by Alex Gibney (who has criticized Zero Dark Thirty) is apparently a story of torture told from the point of view of one of its victims. But in this case the deck is stacked: the victim is an innocent cab driver who got caught up in the CIA's net. It takes no great moral courage to say we should not torture innocent people. Errol Morris made a documentary about Abu Ghraib that I also haven't seen, I don't know how nuanced its examination of torture is, I suspect he's as interested in the photos the torturers took and what that says about our camera-mad society as anything else. The series 24 stacks the deck in the opposite direction, with a clear charismatic protagonist torturing people only in instances of clear, immanent, massive threat (a nuclear bomb set to go off in Los Angeles in a matter of hours, for example). In that show, we trust that our hero is making the right choice between one act of torture vs. several million innocent lives. Zero Dark Thirty is much more complex than any of these, and thus invites misinterpretation.
I suspect the Oscars will go whole-heartedly for Argo, which I haven't seen yet but which I assume deserves much more abuse than it's received from the left (glorifying, Hollywoodizing, imperialism, reducing the Iranians to shouting mobs of angry beards, etc) and certainly more than Zero Dark Thirty has received. Is it because no one takes the Ben Affleck movie seriously whereas Bigelow is an Award-Winning Serious Artist? Doesn't that make Argo much more dangerous because it's "evils" are more readily accepted and internalized by its audience, whereas Zero Dark Thirty with its alienating technique (lack of characterization, attention to procedural detail, dramatic leaps in time and place) demands concentration and engagement from its audience?
ReplyDeleteI plan to see Argo this week, but I suspect you're right (in light of Argo's acclaim at the SAG awards last night). I do not find Zero Dark Thirty to be an Islamaphobic text, but I am anticipating that I may not find the same thing true of Argo based on some second-hand reports. I hope you post your thoughts when you see Argo, I am sure I will.
ReplyDeleteAll my criticism aside, Zero Dark Thirty is probably one of the most thought provoking movies I've watched in the past year (hence my obsession with talking about it). I agree perhaps a vast majority of the misinterpretation (particularly by non-film commentators) stems from its complexity and because the contemporary setting (I am likely to read it through my own ideological lens). Argo's escape from scrutiny is a concern. I think Bigelow's artistic reputation makes her movies a lot more likely to be transcoded into political discourse, whereas Affleck's project seems to be more in the "just a good film" category. Could be Affleck, or it could be the distance of the Iran hostage crisis?
Yeah, it's weird that Bigelow has achieved this status: for years she was "just" another action movie director (Point Break, Strange Days, K-19: the Widowmaker, but somehow with The Hurt Locker she became a symbol for a certain kind of leftist infiltration of the mainstream: the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar, with a film about a war in the Middle East. I think that fuels a lot of the hostile reaction to Zero Dark Thirty: as a symbol of the left, she's not supposed to make "ambiguous" movies (never mind that The Hurt Locker comes from much the same POV as Zero Dark Thirty, depiction of the war with no clear judgement for or against it).
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