Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to her much acclaimed film The Hurt Locker (2008) was the fictionalized retelling of the historical record of the CIA’s manhunt for Osama bin Laden Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Bigelow, who was the first woman to ever win the Best Director Oscar for The Hurt Locker, was at the peak of her powers when she made Zero Dark Thirty. For her film of obsession, trauma, and revenge she adopted the same shaky-cam realism as she used on The Hurt Locker to imbue Zero Dark Thirty with the authenticity of a Cinéma vérité documentary.
This highly affecting illusion of reality is part of what makes Zero Dark Thirty the most controversial film of Bigelow’s career. Bigelow presents scenes of torture with none of the stylistic trappings of a contemporary horror film, preferring the images and sounds to speak for themselves. Allegations that Bigelow is pro-torture continue to dominate the discourse around Zero Dark Thirty more than a decade after the film was released. But including frank depictions of torture is not an endorsement, and this gets to the very heart of what Zero Dark Thirty sets out to do.
With Zero Dark Thirty Kathryn Bigelow does two things simultaneously. First, she shows to what lengths the United States government went to in order to “carry out justice” after the attacks of 9/11. Secondly, Zero Dark Thirty looks at the parallel narratives of the individuals who realized this “justice”. The fictional character of Maya (Jessica Chastain) is a protagonist whose ideological motives are supplanted by a personal need for revenge after a fellow operative is killed in a suicide bombing. As historical events unfold in Zero Dark Thirty the motives of governments and individuals seemingly blur until that final cathartic moment when all sense of purpose is lost.
The idea of torture within this narrative framework takes on the role of a kind of ritual wherein the personal and the political find a violent synthesis. Are the deeds and motives of the CIA and its operatives all that different than those of the terrorists that they have been charged with apprehending? This is the central question of Zero Dark Thirty. To allege that the film is pro-torture is to miss that point entirely.
This existential reading of the film is further supported by the fact that, unlike most films that pit terrorists against U.S. government agents, Bigelow never pretends to know what the terrorists are thinking, doing, or feeling. All that she and Zero Dark Thirty rely on are the facts of the case as the U.S. public knows them. Fiction enters the picture only as a means to interrogate the motives and practices of the CIA and the Bush administration. The duality of Zero Dark Thirty may seem simple, but the film remains Bigelow’s most nuanced and complex film to date.
