Read This: Director Kathryn Bigelow defends Zero Dark Thirty in op-ed, thus ending all further discussion
As Zero Dark Thirty has rolled out to theaters over the past month, the controversy over the film’s torture scenes has played out not only in editorial and television roundtables, but also in Congress, where it’s been condemned and subject to an official investigation on how the filmmakers got their information from the CIA. For her part, director Kathryn Bigelow has twice drawn comparison to the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl by Guardian columnists Glenn Greenwald (who opined about the film before seeing it) and Naomi Wolf, the latter of whom referred to Bigelow as “torture’s handmaiden.” Of course, that’s not to say that all the criticism directed at Zero Dark Thirty is hyperbolic or unfair: There are legitimate questions about the use of torture in the film that are worth asking, particularly on the grounds of efficacy. If Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, are saying that torture was crucial in the decade-long hunt to find Osama bin Laden—specifically in yielding the name of the courier that eventually led to bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan—then critics have cause for concern. A mass-market entertainment like Zero Dark Thirty, even if it’s more “journalistic” than journalism and grounded in movie fiction, has the power to set the historical narrative. And those who abhor torture are naturally inclined to reject a movie they feel favors it.
