Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Kathryn Bigelow
English
Kathryn Bigelow’s mostly redundant Zero Dark Thirty (2012) begins with one of the most repulsive opening sequences in cinema – an assembly of American voices from the World Trade Center and the flights that crashed into it minutes prior to and after the incident. That the scene emphatically introduces the film as an American narrative is not even remotely as problematic as its cannibalization of what is a most private moment to oil its genre gears. Presented without visuals, with an apparent intention to de-sensationalize the event, it does exactly the opposite and provides – not unlike the war on terror itself – a convenient, ahistorical, faux-humanist inciting reason for the film to dive headlong into act two. “The history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception”, wrote Paul Virilio, and Bigelow’s film is a extended demonstration of how the Get-Bin-Laden enterprise was essentially a manipulation of the logistics of perception. The film’s major theme of the centrality of “seeing” and the predominance of the image over material acquisitions in war dovetails with Bigelow’s signature aesthetic, which consists of strings of POV shots emphasizing spatial integrity and a Realism fetish that approximates Jordan and India to Pakistan and Afghanistan. There is something of interest, of course, in the progressive defeminization of Maya (Jessica Chastain), which results in a portrait of wartime masculinity as performativity. The rest of the film, however, reinforces cinema’s status as, to quote Virilio again, “a bastardized form, a poor relation of military-industrial society”, especially the final showdown, where the attempt to make cinema as exciting and visceral as “the real thing” becomes a parody of itself. History as commodity. War as entertainment. Don’t worry if you don’t know what happened at Abbottabad that night, it’s on DVD.
January 14, 2013 at 1:02 am
While I think that the film itself is very faulty because of the issues of warfare as spectacle and the hunt and killing of Bin Laden as a worthy thing to do, I also think that it’s very well done and it has some interesting moments, specially regarding the bombings inside the USA compounds.
Nevertheless, I can’t actually think of a real reason as to why people are praising it so highly, besides the fact of:
FUCK YEAHHH AMERICA, WE KILLED BIN LADEN BIATCCHHHH
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February 3, 2013 at 7:50 pm
Aye, Jaime. I found it weak even as a piece of genre cinema (unlike THE HURT LOCKER)
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January 14, 2013 at 1:42 am
What did happen in Abbottabad that night i don’t watch the news? According to the film they got a free show.
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February 3, 2013 at 7:51 pm
Chris, it doesn’t matter now what happened there, does it?! History is written already!
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January 14, 2013 at 12:54 pm
whatever happened in abbottabad that night does not matter anymore. history will only remember this piece of popular art, and hence this will be the only truth. what if QT wrote and made this film? bin laden might have been the inglorious basterd who hijacks the aircraft and flies it straight to the white house!
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February 3, 2013 at 7:51 pm
Amen!
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January 27, 2013 at 6:31 am
Interesting perspective on the movie, especially your observation of the opening scene. I felt it was the exact opposite of your claim, wherein the observer is exposed to a barrage of voices “from the beyond”, reminding the observer that the dead still gave a damn.
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February 3, 2013 at 7:52 pm
Rocketman, you are not alone in your support of the opening scene. Lot of people love it, apparently.
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January 27, 2013 at 5:34 pm
“History as commodity” – you couldn’t get more spot-on.
Maya’s “portrait of wartime masculinity as performativity” struck me as no more than an equivalent of a henpecker in action. Maya crying at the end made ZDT a Bollywood equivalent for me – Vidya of Kahaani from recent memory. Maya’s character is based on a male. I wonder why the switch of gender and why make her a celibate, or impotent, other than to portray her like, in the eyes of a “Taliban” that is, a righteous woman. (I also wonder why all the characters in the movie have only one name – just the first name – and why Maya’s named Maya (Illusion).) The caged monkeys, amid the heavy-handed torture in the movie, gave me the impression they’re caged to be tortured as well and later when it’s mentioned they’ve been killed I didn’t know whether to laugh (at my prescience) or to be shocked. The sense of realism gets lost at the aestheticization of explosions and at other times it becomes a “parody of itself”.
This is a Hollywood movie, not Cinema.
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February 3, 2013 at 7:55 pm
Ahimaaz,
I found it flat even as a Hollywood movie (as opposed to something like ARGO).
Cheers!
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February 24, 2013 at 10:42 pm
True that. While in fact it’s just barely decent, Argo farces itself.
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January 28, 2013 at 12:24 am
Looking forward to Manhunt in May and seeing some more accurate details.
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February 3, 2013 at 7:58 pm
Hadn’t heard of MANHUNT, Chris. Thanks!
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February 18, 2013 at 4:04 am
I guess it turns out Zero Dark Thirty was pretty accurate after all.
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March 5, 2013 at 10:54 am
Have you written about Vishwaroopam SA? Would like to read your take, if so.Thanks!
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March 5, 2013 at 10:56 am
No, Arthi, I haven’t.
Cheers.
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