Zero Dark Thirty centres on the CIA’s decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks. As such, it includes a number of torture scenes of people detained by the CIA, believed to be members of Al Qaeda. The central character Maya is portrayed as the driving force behind the lead, which eventually directs the US to the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden was hiding, and the film ends his death as a result of a special operations mission. The film was critically acclaimed, including being nominated for Best Picture in the 2012 Academy Awards, although it eventually lost out to another CIA tale Argo.
However, the film was controversial at the time of release in the way it suggested that the torture of detainees was integral to finding Bin Laden. There was also speculation that the filmmakers were given too much access to the CIA.
The film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, is known for her use of realist cinematography: she positions the camera as a “boots on the ground” eye through which we experience the events depicted, as if we were there. Bigelow’s camera techniques help with this process – with the use of hand-held equipment and quick, fast-paced editing.
The character of Maya, a CIA analyst played by Jessica Chastain, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the role, also plays into this realist world-building. She is a professional counterterror agent, and torture is framed as part of her role. The torture is not a pleasant aspect of the job, the film seems to suggest, but it’s a means to an end in extracting the necessary information.
Maya humanises the use of torture in the film. At first, she, presumably like the audience, is reluctant to participate in torture. In the very first scene of the film, the main torture scene, the editing makes heavy use of cutaways; the camera moves from the victim to Maya, showing her discomfort and shame, thereby manifesting our own discomfort and shame. Maya stands in for the audience as we also experience this reluctance to torture and are confronted with the nastiness involved. As Maya moves from witnessing the torture to participating it in (by handing a bucket of water to the main torturer), the audience is pulled into participating alongside her.
Her character, and the relatability she inspires, epitomises the symbolic “this hurts me more than it hurts you” mentality of American post-9/11 torture. If we understand what torture looked like (or possibly looked like), framing it as an unpleasant, but (perhaps) necessary history becomes simple.
Bigelow has famously called her film a “first draft of history”, and the realism she employs helps to place the audience in a journalistic role from which to observe history unfold. Zero Dark Thirty is not a documentary, but the realist film techniques help lend the film a sense of objectivity. The context in which the film was created also plays into this fogginess of truth, with its production and release occurring very soon after the events it depicts.
In fact, Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal were actually working on a film about CIA failure to find Bin Laden when the news of his death went public. The speed with which this film was made is unprecedented in terms of global events being turned into cultural texts: there were just 19 months between Bin Laden’s death and Zero Dark Thirty’s theatrical release. It is very easy for people to merge the history and the film into one, even giving it a semi-documentary status, especially the further away we get from it.
Although the CIA did not hand over classified materials to the filmmakers, the CIA Office of Public Affairs was certainly involved. The filmmakers were welcomed to the CIA campus at Langley and had conversations with the operatives involved in the hunt for Bin Laden. This gives the film a veneer of truthfulness – that they must have been getting at least close to the truth, or the CIA would have corrected them.
Although the film is merely the tip of the iceberg in unearthing American torture post-9/11, the realist way the film presents use of torture suggests it is generally coming from the right direction. Cinema is a way of promoting a version of events that presents as real but cannot ever be proven to be true or false. At the start of the film, a title card flashes up with the words “based on actual events”, the word choice of which allows organisations like the CIA to claim that as a mere film, it cannot possibly show the entire story, so any inaccuracies are written off as narrative mechanisms and unimportant. By occupying this space between fact and fiction, the film works to assign legitimacy to its interpretation of torture as effective and important in the hunt for Bin Laden.