Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

i should say strong political beliefs about the real life events that the movie exploits to no end other than "I think we can all agree torture happened and this shit is heavy"

anybody who pulls some "oh, please leave it to the cineastes" crap needs to realize this isn't just playing in arthouses and isn't trying to

i mean i realize that some filmies get upset when people judge a movie for what it isn't rather than what it is, but when you make a reductive blockbuster out of one of the hottest topics in us foreign policy and call it journalism sometimes you just gotta deal with that

I can still bitch about it though. And seriously, where this film is playing is irrelevent.

not if you're going to complain that people who care more about politics than movies are daring to discuss the movie

part of WHY you have more links to pundits than critics here is that the movie is more interesting as op-ed fodder than crit fodder

I'm not sure that's true but the political links are the only ones that people respond to. Granted, I get most of the links to write-ups about the film from Glen Greenwald's twitter feed, so I'm a bit to blame on that front.

I'm not complaining that people are talking about the film that aren't cineastes, it's just that a lot of these pundits are projecting so much of their own shit onto it (which is possible because, as you point out, it doesn't explicitly say much itself) that they've outright refused to consider what's going on with the movie.

a large part of the problem is that editors tell newspaper critics not to do "politics" in their reviews

so the critics judge the film on formalist grounds that are by nature amoral.

we all project our own shit onto the things we consume, they prob wldn't be understandable without us doing that - y'know, viewer + object = meaning

is what's going on in the movie really that noteworthy? people with a professional stake in america's understanding of foreign policy are mad that america is being asked by hollywood to accept a simplistic CIA narrative - huffing that they don't acknowledge they're being asked to wearily accept a moody simplistic CIA narrative seems silly.

That's true, but a lot of the writing I've linked here from critics has been about the politics of it. J. Hoberman just released a book that deals with how Hollywood and cinema dealt with post 9/11 issues like the Iraq war and terrorism, so when he writes for the guardian about ZDT and it's politics and depiction of torture, he's not judging the film as amoral.

Xpost to Alfred

i would love to see a pundit acknowledge that the insidiousness of the film (as i see it) is that its portentousness allows for people to have conflicted feelings about torture etc while still accepting a dubious Love The Troops narrative of What Happened, For Better Or Worse. But if they just say "ZDT is propaganda bullshit" while ignoring that nuance, I don't feel high'n'mighty about it because they're not wrong.

I saw that aspect differently than you and Zizek.

But I really enjoyed that Zizek article, which I guess is crucial to my griping. It's not about disagreeing, it's about how they're reading what's actually on screen and then discussing it in a banal and unenlightening blog post.

just gonna repost bigelow's read of her own movie

War, obviously, isn't pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.

In that vein, we should never discount and never forget the thousands of innocent lives lost on 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks. We should never forget the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation's safety and security.

Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.

Yes, but what Bigelow says for promotional purposes, or even what she genuinely believes, isn't the end all be all.

"ugh, none of these people know how to read this movie, to deal with what it's actually saying"

"here's how the director reads it"

"well she might be lying and who cares"

No, not at all. I do think there is a degree of "look at how hard these people worked and how some died for it" - though I think the film lays Ehle's death down at her own stupidity - I just think it's more ambiguous than that. I know people who saw THL as a glorious ode to the troops, and maybe Bigelow thought that way when she made the movie, but the end product is, when it's at it's best, a critique of the Noble Warrior mentality that Americans tend to view the military with.

i'm just saying that, if you're going to mock others for not being able to engage with the movie, you might consider that the ambiguity you admire is fairly superficial from an auteurist perspective (from curtis to keanu to chastain, she's implied that being the Good Guy is no fun and not without moral dilemmas) and, from political perspective, arguably mere window-dressing.

and that bigelow herself has reduced it to "sometimes they crossed lines, but"

Well we can disagree about the politics and the ambiguities, and I think it's reductive to say that bigelow's comments are "well they crossed a line, but...". I'm not mocking the people who interpret the film differently, I'm mocking the people who approach this as "hey what about drones and dead afghanis and dead Iraqis..."

how else would you approach it?

By considering the film based on what it depicts and what it is about.

And of course, how it depicts

gukbe, this is a DIRECT QUOTE: "(ubl) was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation."

Also "we're not interested in depicting this military action as free of moral consequences."

I don't see a problem with approaching the men and women presented here as something other than a straight up good or a straight up evil.

if you honestly think anyone is arguing for that binary, you're evading the point

And what point is that?

that while it's emotionally ambiguous about What Happened, it's not politically ambiguous at all.

it's also ironic to disqualify any opinion that the film should have acknowledged more aspects of the us' presence in afghanistan when the cia is complaining the film includes more torture than is relevant and the film infers a timeline between numerous terrorist activities outside The Hunt to argue for the necessity of ubl's death

I think it is politically ambiguous but hey ho.

I also dont think those outside the hunt bits necessarily argue for the need for UBLs death.

Surely it's more ironic to say this film is CIA propaganda when the CIA is complaining about it? Which is not a tack I would take but following on from your comment...

this has all been said before on this thread, but just because a movie allows for more conflicted feels than a rambo movie doesn't mean it's not a rambo narrative

the cia is complaining because it's even more rambo then they wanted

yeah i think this was a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of movie, very hollywood in ideology

I don't see this as a Rambo narrative. I know we've gone over all this already, but I do like that it strongly suggests that torture led to UBL.

sure it throws out enough particular ideas at you as maybes: maybe the degradation of torture is of greater moral weight than any purported utility, maybe getting osama is a pointless distraction, maybe devoting your life to the CIA is miserable, maybe we have no clue what we're doing in other societies, maybe our leaders are half-blind at best -- but there's no maybe about the central plotline: one woman worked like hell on her crazy scheme and the whole thing came off great!

idk if it's a rambo narrative as much as a "let's put on a show" narrative. or one of those misfit dance movies or something

the most interesting tension of the movie is how bad maya's reasoning is throughout, how little she has to really go on and how absolutely fanatically certain she is, how frankly right all of her detractors sound in their moment (ramirez, chandler). and of course we know "she" was successful irl. apart from the torture, this might be the creation of boal's that i think is worst.

it's all a bit Sarah Lund

in rambo, a nutty maverick fights government bureaucracy to Avenge American Lives and Win A War that would otherwise go on interminably. I would argue the narrative of ZDT is fairly similar even if it's more emotionally conflicted

I think the "whole thing came up great" aspect is debatable. I linked up thread to the Taibbi piece where describes how the raid avoided the Michael Bay flash and yet he still had a "fuck yeah" moment, which just seems bizarre to me. I certainly felt a bit queasy by the end, and most of the people I saw it with didn't seem to find it terribly exhilarating or at least triumphant, and I saw it with a bunch of soldiers and probably a fair number of people that work in defense.

I guess Hoberman got pretty close to what I did at the end: Is Maya, like Ishmael, the lone survivor left clinging to the flotsam of the Pequod? Is she condemned, like Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers, to "wander forever between the winds"? What did it cost the girl (or Obama) or America to kill Bin Laden? Zero Dark Thirty slakes a thirst for vengeance and leaves an aftertaste of gall.

It's hugely conflicted compared to Rambo, with its "do we get to win this time" aspect. There's certainly a degree of that and Dirty Harry maverick-ism going on, but I don't think the film portrays it in a positive way.

so you agree it's a rambo narrative

Outside the homeland, Zero Dark Thirty has a great potential to play as an anti-American propaganda piece.

I think there are elements of that, though I would never call it a "Rambo" narrative because that's disingenuous. Rambo is all about a man of righteous purity and nobility killing Vietnamese and Russian soldiers for our excitement, and when the film pretty much explicitly states that this is about "winning" a lost war, it's a blatantly pro-American Imperialism work. I think Maya has that element of self-righteousness in her, but the film doesn't present that in a necessarily positive light.

gubke, this is how absurd it's getting

just because a movie allows for more conflicted feels than a rambo movie doesn't mean it's not a rambo narrative

― da croupier, Friday, February 1, 2013 5:21 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's hugely conflicted compared to Rambo

― Gukbe, Friday, February 1, 2013 5:44 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we don't actually disagree on the content of the movie at this point, you just think that the Searchers-osity is way more important than the people who have beef with what that Searchers vibe is being put on top of.

Well I think you're stacking the decks when you say it's a Rambo narrative is all. I think it's pretty absurd to compare the two actually. I guess I'm not sure what people are thinking when they complain about what's beneath that Searchers vibe.

if every narrative with a plucky protagonist bucking the bureaucracy to get what s/he wants is a "rambo narrative" then like, i dunno UHF starring weird al yankovic is a rambo narrative