The mysteries of "Zero Dark Thirty"

[judy]

It is without any doubt a very well made film.
My take on it, when I saw it, is that the Jessica Chastain character is a desperate, depressed person with no life.

I do agree with Naomi Wolf's criticism that the movie seems to say that good information comes out of torture...maybe it happens every once in a while, while performing these horrible and illegal interrogations, but I completely agree that torture is applied mainly to provide the agents with whatever they want or were asked to hear...

The way I saw it, is that Maya is horrified by torture, yet she is driven by a false sense of self worth based on the hunt for Bin Laden. It is not a dream of glory, it is a hollow quest, conducted with criminal and cruel means, which leads to (in my mind) a mystery. We never see the body of Bin Laden, we don't even know if she is really convinced that it is really him, if it is really him, or for that matter if he really was the mastermind behind the attacks on the World Trade Center.
The raid scene is horrible, with the wives being shot and the terrified kids, and the whole thing leaves everyone in a state of nihilistic numbness.

I guess I saw it through my lens, which is that we don't have any idea what really happened in the killing of Bin Laden, and that this killing in itself represents a hollow victory over nothing (it didn't even stop the war), obtained by people who just do their jobs without thinking of the moral implications, and that there is no glamour in war, torture, killing, and that it leads to nothing but a general sense of despair.

I don't think Kathryn Bigelow meant to make a jingoistic movie glorifying torture and war as Leni Riefenstahl did for the Nazis, just like I don't think she made Hurt Locker to glorify the invasion of Iraq. But there are definitely different ways to understand the film. Maybe it is up to the viewer to decide...what do you all think???

[Honeycombe8]

1. I don't see Maya that way at all.

Seeing Maya as depressed and with no life is the way Hollywood typically portrays, and views, career women, unmarried women. The "Fatal Attraction" phenemenon (if Glen Close had only had a good man of her own, she wouldn't have been a crazed murderer....see what happens when women place career above family?). The "It's A Wonderful Life" phenomenon (if she didn't have ME to marry her, she would've ended up a lonely, old, unattractive librarian with no life at all...thank God for ME!)

And now we have the Zero Dark Thirty phenomena (if only Maya had had a better social life, she wouldn't have had to be on those God-awful places, focusing for years on finding this leader of an underground organization...if only she'd had a few girlfriends in Afghanistan to lighten the load by chatting about guys over a beer).

Interesting that you didn't say the same things about the men who participated in the hunt for years, even though the main man was also not married and not shown to have friends, except for some monkeys that were killed.

Having said that, though....it was just a matter of her having a high level job, and she did her job. It's that simple. It really has little to do with having friends or boyfriends, except the frequent traveling would interfere with that, as it does with anyone who travels a lot (most Hollywood actors, a lot of men whose marriages fall apart after frequent traveling).

Anyone can get married. Not just anyone can make a mark in history and find Osama bin Laden. Having done that by a fairly young age, I presume, she can now rise even higher in her organization, move stateside, and get married, if that's what she wants.

But frequently, men are hesitant to marry high level career women. I've read an article or two about this. It's hard for some men to deal with. Condi Rice is a prime example. Highly educated, high level in federal government, accomplished pianist, pretty, good figure....never been married, likely will never be married. Does that mean she shouldn't strive to be all she can be, because men would find that intimidating?

I didn't expect to like the movie, but I did. It was gripping from start to finish for me, but you have to like details to like the first half. It shows you in tedious detail what it took over a decade to find OBL. That requires making the viewer feel the frustration, the tedious work, the years ticking by, the discomfort of the locations.

I don't think Maya was horrified by the interrogation techniques. She had to get used to them, but she adjusted quickly. It wasn't THAT bad, considering what the person being interrogated had done, and the techniques used (not pulling out fingernails or anything....it was humiliation and discomfort and sleep deprivation mainly....with occasional waterboarding). Only the waterboarding is considered torture under the Geneva Convention, as I recall.

[judy]

2. Well, as I said,

I just described what I felt and what I saw...when I said she had no life, I meant she had no friends and no other interests. Not that she was not married...I definitely agree with you on that, and I also agree that the same can be said about the guy.
I really appreciate your analysis, I am genuinely interested in finding out what DU'ers think, and not trying to push my version.
I also liked the movie and found it realistic and gripping.

[Honeycombe8]

3. Oh, I see. I didn't see her as depressed, I guess.

The movie didn't really go into her personal life at all. Except to show that she is driven and all about business. A lot of successful people are like that. Driven, I mean.

When she sat down to eat with the other gal, the other gal basically tells her to put her phone away, that they are socializing now. I've had friends who do the same thing, and they are not depressed and have far from high level jobs. They're addicted to the damn things, wihch I can appreciate. I told a friend who answered a call while we were having lunch (for the umpteenth time)...I finally told him that that's so rude. You can chat over lunch with someone, or you can chat on your phone. But you can't do both at the same time. He doesn't do it anymore, so I guess he got the message.

I tend to think it's Hollywood that threw in that inference from the other gal that Maya didn't have friends. I think that, because it's so common for Hollywood to do that. I doubt it came from reality, altho I don't know for sure.

[judy]

4. Here's an article from Think Progress about ZDT...

It says more or less what I felt about it:
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/01/09/1419141/zero-dark-thirty-4/
Very interesting...

[Honeycombe8]

5. Yeah, I see that. But what the article did not state is that when she looks away...

it's only for a moment. As I recall, she looks away, at the abruptness and unnaturalness of the humiliation of the prisoner, but then quickly recovers & looks. Just as I'm sure any med student looks away at the first slice into a person's abdomen. It's not something you're used to seeing, and it's unpleasant. But as a professional, you must recover, deal with it, and move on. Which she did, very unemotionally and professionally, IMO.

In fact, it would have been very odd had she NOT looked away at something that was disturbing, something she didn't know was coming, and something she'd never seen before.