At the Buechenwald camp gate stood a niche for the watchdog. A chained beast barked at passers-by, and greedily buried its snout in its bowl of mush. Even though the beast never stood up on its hind paws, one got the feeling after a while that it was really a man. And it was!
Among all the agonies invented by these virtuosos of torture, this appears to me their masterpiece—one which degrades man in his dignity as a creature, in his resemblance to God. But the strangest thing about all this is that the man-dog was not a Frenchman, nor a Jew; he was a German, the former anti-Nazi mayor of Weimar. Since 1933 these hangmen had reduced him to the condition of a brute by means of a patient, insatiable cruelty. Nightmare magicians, they had taken the time to perfect their sorcery. What successful malefice! The mayor of Weimar, literally, had become a dog!
The preceding is from the writings of the great Catholic writer François Mauriac. It popped into my head while watching Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, during a scene set in a Saudi Arabia “black site,” where the CIA operative played by Jason Clarke yanks the prisoner that he is interrogating around on a leash. The jailer’s reduction of man to dog, specifically in the Nazi death camps, was treated explicitly in Paul Schrader’s 2008 movie Adam Resurrected, which I am sometimes convinced that I am the only living person to have seen. With Bigelow’s film, however, I seem not to be the lone person who has had a visceral response to its images of torture—this time as being perpetrated by Americans—or to the very idea of them.
As my friend and concise thinker Adam Nayman pointed out, the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty take up not more than ten minutes of two-and-a-half-hours—or, as it’s known today, standard running time. These ten minutes, however, are already 2012’s most hotly-debated reel of film, even by those who haven’t seen them—to wit, Glenn Greenwald’s shit-stirring piece in The Guardian, a publication popular with self-satisfied upper middle-class Islingtonians, whose headline refers to Bigelow’s film as “torture-glorifying.”
New York Magazine’s David Edelstein, singled out in Greenwald’s piece, put in a “vigorously wishy-washy” appearance on Hardball to further explain himself. Critics, in numbers described by Greenwald as “a small flotilla” in one of his postscripts, descended upon pundit Greenwald’s opportunistic breach of their territory, seeing one of their own under attack by a writer who had, after all, violated a fairly fundamental rule of the critical profession by making claims about a movie without having seen the movie in question.
All of Greenwald’s defensive hemming and hawing aside, “glorifying” is a loaded term, and one that I cannot believe that anyone who’d witnessed the solemn, melancholy, strictly-business acts of strategic degradation in Bigelow’s film would be tempted to use. In Greenwald’s own paper, Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal almost immediately appeared to defend their decision to make “extreme interrogation” a part of their narrative. Elsewhere, in The American Prospect, Tom Carson likened the preemptive condemnation of ZD30 to the activity of “Bill Donohue and the Catholic League.”
Incidentally, as of yesterday, MoMA began a retrospective of the films of the Italian director, poet, and leftist public intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, which includes his 1975 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini’s film is set in an isolated villa in the fascist Republic of Salò, c. 1944, where some fascists have holed-up with a passel of kidnapped young men and women, whom they subject to all manner of systematic debasement, which includes leashing humans like hounds, as well as a heaping helping of coprophagia. If it doesn’t “glorify” torture, Salò focuses on it to the exclusion of most everything else, and it is difficult to imagine it having been made if Pasolini was not on some level—libidinal, intellectual, or a combination of the two—transfixed by torture as sexual parable. But, as with any work of art that deserves the name, the amount of amputation required to squeeze Salò—or ZD30—into readily-identifiable pro- or anti- positions amounts to a fatal vivisection. (Along with the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, Salò was one of the artworks whose prosecution was used to publicly castigate and humiliate the gay community in my hometown of Cincinnati in the mid-1990s, when the Pink Pyramid bookstore was charged with “pandering obscenity” for offering it for rental. I suspect that, while moving ahead with his case, Hamilton County Prosecutor Simon Leis at no point actually sat down in front of Pasolini’s movie with a pan of Jiffy Pop.)
To return to ZD30: I have written before about my susceptibility to the basic premise behind Bigelow and Boal’s narrative: “The reaction of an organization under attack, moving from disorganization to synchronization.” The two examples that I provided in that column, John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945) and Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way (1965)—both concerned with the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor—are actually helpful points of reference in looking at ZD30, which begins with an audio-collage of 9/11 911 calls from the burning twin towers. (Another writhing can of worms waiting to be cracked open, that…)
Certainly the co-opting of these doomed voices prepares one for something other than an only-a-movie “thrill ride”—and today’s Washington Post carries a story on “the new reality of reported filmmaking,” centered on ZD30. The comparison to Preminger comes in Bigelow and Boal’s scrupulous maintenance of the appearance of just-the-facts neutrality, in the director’s much-cited statement that “What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film.” While Preminger achieved this through a studied distance—his medium-long, balanced proscenium compositions—Bigelow prefers to maintain the appearance of haphazardness, a flurried, speed-of-life accumulation of information that the viewer is made responsible for filtering and sorting through.
As for Ford, here is Tom Carson again, writing for GQ, identifying in ZD30’s revenge-lust and concluding note of Pyrrhic victory something of “21st century John Ford: The Searchers gone international.” There is likewise something of Ford in the way that ZD30, in its breadth, finds room for all of the sacrifices and contradictions inherent in sustaining the martial tradition. I am thinking not only of They Were Expendable, but of the end of Fort Apache (1948), which has John Wayne swallowing his distaste for his deceased superior, played by Henry Fonda—a stubbornly-prideful martinet who leads his men into disaster by prioritizing his need to assert his place in the chain-of-command over deference to those with longer experience of his post—so to reinforce the myth of a dead hero that is perhaps necessary to morale, and so not to besmirch the regiment’s good name.
Are such sacrifices worthwhile? Carson’s identification of ZD30’s torture scenes as “tarnishing” is key. There are no inconsequential acts of violence in Bigelow’s film, making it rather like the answer to a recent opinion piece I wrote about the inability of contemporary action movies to restore a sense of moral force, for good or ill, to their action. To return to Mauriac’s description of the former mayor of Weimar leashed outside of Buechenwald—who would deny that there is something beyond the pale in reducing another human to this level, regardless of what they may have done, aided, or abetted? And how many of these same people would argue that the earth isn’t a somewhat better place because Osama bin Laden no longer walks on it? Can either be cleanly separated from the other? There is no easy way to reconcile these ideas, and in its formulation of this tangled, perhaps insoluble moral dilemma, ZD30 does what screen drama should do, demands that we take it out of the theater and into our homes.
Or perhaps not: Only a couple of hours ago, Greenwald, he of the clammy-looking byline headshot, emerged after having finally seen his bête noire, which is tidily filed away under “CIA hagiography, pernicious propaganda.” I scrolled through Greenwald’s blowhard piece until encountering the phrase, “The brave crusaders slay the Evil Villains, and everyone cheers” under the subhed “The ‘art’ excuse,” which doesn’t quite synch with my memory of the film’s final shot; and was further bemused to find the author’s claim in the Comments section that “If it hadn’t been for me rebutting the falsehoods and propaganda of Zero Dark Thirty, nobody would have seen it or talked about it.” I am then forced to report, without having exactly read it, that Greenwald’s latest expulsion of hot air is a long wet fart of fatuously indignant, dunderheaded liberalism from a vamping egomaniac. And, because one bad GG deserves a good one (and speaking of coprophagia!):
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.