Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

The reverend Billy Graham once said of the The Exorcist, “There is a power of evil in the very fabric of the film itself.” He may have been right, insofar as there is something embedded within that film beyond its plot and its shots and its cuts. It exudes something sinister. It sinks its audience into a world in which their assumptions of victorious good and the armor of faith — the film was released into a still extant Christian America — comes under merciless attack. People vomited and passed out in theaters, and walkouts were common. Its psychic impact was so powerful that some theorized the film was a part of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program, that it was a tool of psychological terror unleashed on a population reeling from the Vietnam War and the social dissolution of the early 1970s.

There is something similarly potent about another film that came out for decades later, one explicitly shaped in part by the CIA. Zero Dark Thirty was released into an environment distinct from that of The Exorcist. By 2012 the chaotic paranoid thrum of the Post-9/11 2000s had given way to a cynical exhaustion following the 2008 financial crash. The Iraq War had veered sideways into an insurgency and then settled into an MIC bribery scheme that people just kind of forgot about. Many were calling for the government - now under the command of the Obama administration — to reign in its international adventures and focus on the home front. The optimism — one-sided though it was — that accompanied Obama’s election had dissipated quickly. Protestors occupied Wall Street. Osama Bin Laden remained at large. An anti-establishment populism began to boil.

It’s no surprise then that CIA “consultants” jumped at the chance to help shape a narrative that depicted them as dogged professionals just trying to do their job under pressure like everyone else, first via Mark Bowden’s hit book Zero Dark Thirty and then its film adaptation. Perhaps that’s why the film that Kathryn Bigelow created is characterized not by spiritual horror in the vein of The Exorcist, but by a feeling that slowly corrodes the soul rather than attacks it. A feeling of real emptiness. And I don’t mean that as a criticism. Therein lies the film’s genius, and quite possibly its malevolence.

The discourse upon the film’s release centered around its depiction of torture. There is a graphic depiction of torture at a CIA black site in the opening act, and the narrative does seem to suggest that it leads to a tip that gets the dominos falling toward the eventual raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. What made the reaction so fascinating at the time was how two-sided it was. The film commentariat first praised the film for its “honest” portrayal of the brutality employed the CIA as it executed the War on Terror. Then there was this rapid shift to howling at the film for endorsing that some brutality, especially as people became more aware of the CIA’s involvement in the production. A weird cognitive dissonance rattled the brains the Hollywood press during the early 2013 awards season, and then they seemed to settle on an “it’s good but awful” consensus usually given out to things like distasteful but artfully made horror films. People were eager to just not talk about the film at all. And so it slipped into a kind of obscurity. You’re unlikely to see it on any cable movie channel on a Sunday afternoon.

I’ve never been satisfied by the pat declaration that torture doesn’t work. That just doesn’t pass the smell test, and techniques that have been practiced for thousands of years by just about every society on earth likely provided at least some utility. But it’s also true that it’s a crude tool in a power structure’s toolbox, a blunt instrument that’s typically employed due to a real or perceived lack of other effective options. The black site scenes in Zero Dark Thirty are ugly, and ugly to an extent that would lead one to question why the CIA “consultants” would sign off on them. But that emptiness takes hold when you realize that these scenes don’t really justify or condemn anything. They’re just process, like a training video forced on new employees at a meat processing plant.

And so perhaps that is the evil in the film, though it’s not of the same kind as Billy Graham felt slashing at the soul throughout The Exorcist. It’s the very “documentary” approach of Zero Dark Thirty — so desperate to observe rather than present — that both provoked such unusually equal-weighted moral interpretations and led . The film is cold as an ice pick, and it’s the moment when you recognize its potency that you’re moved to run away from it.

When Hannah Arendt spoke of the “banality of evil,” one thing she keyed on was the remove created by bureaucratic systems, the ability of an operator to sublimate their actions into the amoral gears and pulleys of a machine that by its very nature dissolves moral accountability in favor of task-based efficiency. Whatever tug-of-war went into the molding of Zero Dark Thirty as a procedural dispensation on one of the greatest manhunts in history creates an abyss. Evil as Nothingness. Whether by choice or by chance, the film expresses violence as a affectless continuum. Any tidy narratives we perceive in world events are just that, perception, and human violence is just another facet of the cause-and-effect eternal churn of death that runs through the whole of the natural world. The arc in the feels anticlimactic because it is. Nothing functionally changed in world affairs the night Osama Bin Laden died.

Bigelow’s career as a major filmmaker more or less ended after Zero Dark Thirty. Even after becoming a cause celebre in Hollywood following her Best Director win for The Hurt Locker - the first woman to win that award - the industry seemed eager to move on from her. After the initial adulation of the film had been tamped down by internet backlash, it made barely a wimper at the Oscars, where it picked up a single award for Best Sound Editing. The next year saw a flurry of op-eds attacking Bigelow for sins against the industry such as refusing to mentor aspiring female filmmakers and staffing her crews with too many white men.

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Bigelow had always been a masculine filmmaker, with a potent fascination with male protagonists living on some version of the edge. From the predatory vampires of Near Dark to the surfer bank robbers of Point Break to the adrenaline junkie bomb defuser of The Hurt Locker — not to mention her marriage to Jim Cameron — her sympathies clearly lie with disagreeable rogues. While the script of Zero Dark Thirty hits some requisite “yass queen” feminist notes — “I’m the motherfucker who found this place, sir” — Bigelow’s camera is clearly attracted to the various men that Chastain’s character reflects off and imitates. These include the boyishly playful dude-bro Navy SEALs, and the film’s best character, Jason Clarke’s CIA interrogator — a sort of warrior monk capable of terrifying levels of disassociation. Part of Maya's journey is her gradual ability to strike the posture and pitch of the various strong men around her. She desperately wants their respect, and it’s cathartic when she gets it.

Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t hate the spooks who hunted down Bin Laden, and perhaps that’s why those who immediately felt its brilliance also felt there was something nasty in it that needed to be squashed. But one can separate the players in a game from the game they’re playing, and I think that was more Bigelow’s angle here. When the real life Bin Laden raid happened during the film’s development, it seemed as if fortune had gifted tidy ending. Bigelow added the raid as the film’s last act, and it’s a masterpiece of action filmmaking. But like so many of the "great feats" of the West's current regime, the real life act was hollow, and the hollowness echoes onscreen.

Is there evil in Zero Dark Thirty? Quite possibly. But whatever evil there is lies in the film’s utility as a mirror, one of the most important roles of real art.