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Caden Mark Gardner Revisits Zero Dark Thirty

In spring and summer 2011, I was a Washington, D.C. college intern for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Mondays featured intensive lectures on government and policy from our instructor and various visiting D.C. institutions and think tanks, while the rest of the week was filled with unpaid intern duties. In my memory, that specific stretch of time can be divided into before and after the day it was announced that the U.S. Navy Seal Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The day before it was announced, Saturday, April 30, there was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, best remembered for President Obama taking shots at a man who was his most bombastic political opponent despite never serving a day in public office: Donald Trump. The consensus was that Obama, whose American citizenship and race were at the heart of Trump’s persistent attacks, destroyed Trump in his speech and sunk his presidential ambitions—at least for the 2012 election cycle.

The following day, May 1, 2011, was the typical warm spring Sunday in Washington, and I was eagerly awaiting the Mets-Phillies game that night. Suddenly my class’s group chat started firing off on my smartphone. I could immediately tell this was not regarding Monday’s lesson plan. Then I remember ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball telecast breaking the news, along with the Public Address announcer at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, of bin Laden’s death. The stadium erupted into applause and chants of ‘U-S-A!’ I was numb and stunned into silence. I switched from the ballgame to put on Al-Jazeera. It gets blurry for me at that point, mainly because it felt like I should have been in a great mood, but even in D.C. there was no celebratory collective moment. It was more of a disquieting surprise.

The day after, my classmates and I, who skewed liberal to far left, tried to make sense of what this moment meant. We certainly did not feel any sense of relief or victory, as those Phillies fans seemingly had on television. All of us at some point had sat through Senate and Congressional hearings during our internship and knew that American foreign policy was still operating as a neo-imperialist presence in the Middle East, with Libya being the latest, expensive adventure. American media wanted to portray bin Laden’s killing as an ending, a closed chapter of American history, and yet U.S. forces were still in Afghanistan. Guantanamo Bay was still open. Pandora’s box had been opened on 9/11, and there would be no return to “simpler times.”

At the beginning of my senior year, my thesis advisor and I had our first meeting over my intended senior project, which would be on Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). The film, about the Algerian revolution, had a strange afterlife as radical cinema, having been once used as an instructional tool for the Black Panthers and other left-wing radical organizations. In 2003, at the start of the so-called “war on terror,” the film was being screened at the Pentagon. Making this incident particularly complicated for the legacy of a film by a virulent anticolonial Italian communist (who cast non-actors who participated in the original revolution) is that the film did not shy away from showing torture committed against Algerians by the French forces. There is a moment in which an Algerian political prisoner gives up information to the French through torture. This raised alarms for antiwar leftist intellectuals who saw these Pentagon screenings as going beyond reconnaissance over the process of terrorist bombings; for them, the film was confirming the idea that torture was an effective tool. Of course, in the case of Algeria, the galvanized citizenry won and beat the global empire. So, in meetings with my advisor, I tried to figure out how to tell the story of the film’s complicated legacy and political readings. At one point, I mentioned to my advisor that Kathryn Bigelow was in the process of making a film about the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and I was curious how she would tell that story. He shrugged; although he was a cinephile, he ultimately thought that Bigelow’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker was more of a neo-Western on masculinity than a political film and believed that her upcoming project would similarly be devoid of any political tensions. He would be wrong.

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It was late 2012, and I became restless that the debate and discourse around Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty were primarily taking place in major outlets and cities long before I could see the film where I lived. The controversy centered on the implication that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal meant to show that the torture used to get intel helped in taking down UBL (as bin Laden is often referred to in the film), thereby justifying the agency’s torture of detainees as a means to an end. Then, Senators John Kerry, Diane Feinstein, and Carl Levin sent a letter to Sony Pictures calling it “grossly inaccurate” for even suggesting it happened. “Depiction is not endorsement” would be the common refrain for film critics and from Bigelow herself. The loudest critics were not necessarily in the film space, such as New Yorker journalist Jane Meyer, who reported on torture and its politicization during the Bush administration, and Glenn Greenwald, whose descent into being a pro-Trump anti-institutionalist damaged his reputation among anti-Bush leftists who were early supporters of his work. In contemporaneous film criticism, Richard Brody’s early dissent in The New Yorker is worth revisiting. Brody believed the film was infected by the “dogma of ambiguity” that befell so much art-house cinema of the day: “The movie’s pseudo-objectivity is a willful ambiguity of a very distinct sort; its willful rejection of the inner life is a posturing stance of cool, an attitude of no attitude.”

My own take on Zero Dark Thirty, originally published on Tumblr (to really date this), stands as an example of an aspiring, young critic getting stuck in the mud of the discourse. Part of that was comparing Zero Dark Thirty to another film involving the CIA: that year’s eventual Best Picture winner, Ben Affleck’s Argo, a film I unabashedly hated. I doubled down on that animosity when I noticed that people who were “uneasy” about Zero Dark Thirty were otherwise okay with a film that whitewashes the CIA’s culpability in destabilizing Iran in the lead-up to the revolution and that arrogantly lionized the agency’s role in the rescue of six American diplomats. The film is insidious and vexing, and few things better typify the Obama White House’s relationship to Hollywood than the First Lady announcing the “uplifting” Argo as Best Picture at the Oscars.

Looking back at my Zero Dark Thirty piece, I wish I had asserted more of my persistent belief that the CIA was a failed institution of the American empire that should have been abolished years ago. This is hardly a radical concept, even the moderate Pat Moynihan landed there in the 1990s. Instead, I was bound to the discourse and posited that the ambiguous murkiness of Bigelow’s CIA was still better than the heroic portrayal of Affleck’s CIA. But even upon revisiting Zero Dark Thirty, I didn’t see the film as an advertisement for the CIA, and I never saw the connection of torture to intel gathering. Overall, I found Bigelow’s dramatization of the CIA as intentionally vacant of competency or conscience and dripping with moral turpitude. However, I cannot deny the Brody claim that the film is murky, slippery, and ambiguous to a fault. Generally, good films about American bureaucracy, particularly on American intelligence, tend to focus on the banality of evil, and that is certainly the function of a film in which drone images of unknown targets being bombed play in the background in control rooms while CIA colleagues casually converse.

Yet in rewatching the film, I find that its self-imposed myopia—in framing the entire decade of pursuing UBL through the agency’s eyes—feels disconnected from a period of time marked by the scapegoating of Muslims into bogeymen. Jessica Chastain's Maya, the film’s embodiment of UBL's obsessive pursuit, offers diminishing returns; there is not enough depth to her nor to the other characters (all based on or composites of real people). Once you untether Maya from UBL, you feel like you know next to nothing about her.

I find myself now less drawn to Maya than the character Dan (Jason Clarke), who commits torture against a detainee. After what can only be described as burnout, he transforms into a CIA office suit in Quantico, clearly one with ambitions. He is probably the slickest character in the film, obviously complicit, and he washes his hands of it like a politician. I can imagine that character in the real world today: think of the recent news that presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis had to fend off rumors he was involved in direct torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay when he was in the U.S. Navy. Bush-era sins in foreign policy persist (see the disastrous end to occupying Afghanistan in 2021, with Afghanis risking their lives to flee from the Kabul airport) and still infest much of the American political landscape and across the world, even if Trumpism has shifted most of the conservative battles to the domestic agenda.

I sense my opinion about Zero Dark Thirty would have been cooler at the time had I been better versed in Bigelow’s oeuvre. But I also think my initial trepidation to express more of my political knowledge and belief systems was wrongheaded; it all could have been stronger and more persuasively argued. In subsequent years, after getting more familiar with Bigelow’s body of work, like Strange Days and Blue Steel, I began to see how much less effective Zero Dark Thirty is in depicting moral gray areas. Early-career Bigelow was making, to borrow terms from critic Manny Farber, “termite art” (eager works that eat through their own boundaries) rather than “white elephant art” (self-aggrandizing masterpiece art). However, in Bigelow’s collaborations with journalist Mark Boal, starting with The Hurt Locker, her films shifted into distillations of times and places of American history, with Zero Dark Thirty followed by the 1967 Detroit race riots of Detroit (2017). These films are formidable displays of their maker's craft, but they lack definitive commentary about state power, policing, and militarism. Unlike with those Zero Dark Thirty dismissals, I was more receptive to the criticisms from critics of color about the failures of Detroit. While Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit have all the hallmarks of Bigelow’s kinetic energy, they are closer to “white elephant art.” The murky politics of Zero Dark Thirty are an intended feature and not a system bug The film is a delivery system of “important history” with a very limited—and largely biased—perspective.

Postscript: Something positive did result from this for me, personally and professionally. The film’s critical dialogues introduced me to many other film voices that produced several online friendships I had on Twitter, including the late Jim Gabriel, who wrote one of the best essays on Zero Dark Thirty. The depiction of the nocturnal compound raid has been lauded as the film’s major set piece and a career highlight (Point Break remains Bigelow’s high point for me), but Jim cut to the core of the film’s effect: “Zero Dark Thirty has a few moments of banal heroics, but they are outweighed by scenes both pointed and disquieting: the loaded image of Dan sharing soft-serve with caged monkeys only a few steps away from penned-up prisoners; operatives plotting strategy while TV footage of Barack Obama’s declaration that ‘America doesn’t torture’ looms in the background; and finally the raid on bin Laden’s compound, shot by Bigelow with directness and severity—no martial stings, no heroic angles or worshipful framing—simply men flying through a mountain range where empires come a cropper to an appointment with cold murder to be carried out in pitch blackness.” Jim was an encouraging, passionate, no-bullshit cinephile presence who, in his way, made me a better writer. RIP, Jim.