On Zero Dark Thirty

As many critics seem to agree, Zero Dark Thirty is a highly competent film, with a strong story line, tight dramatic execution, and conceivably enough factual accuracy to stand up to modest scrutiny. Most would agree, too, I think, that the most striking aspect of Kathryn Bigelow's depiction of the pursuit and demise of Osama bin Laden is its framing of a controversy that has raged since the early years of the Bush administration.

That torture is an effective and essential component of intelligence gathering, one that yields accurate, unambiguous, and actionable intel, isn't merely posited in the film—it's casually and nonchalantly asserted as fact, even common knowledge. With nary a question as to authenticity, nary a nod to the long-brewing controversy.

Some may quibble with the film's authenticity, and rightly so, but few seem to be suggesting that it falls significantly outside the Hollywood norm. Sure, some are suggesting that the characters are based on composites of multiple players (a common technique), that the script offered a simplistic and cartoonish portrayal of the mundane realities of intelligence gathering on a large scale, or that some of the mundane details (like what kind of bus was blown up in London) were clumsily fumbled.

But the most serious quibbles, of course, stem from the film's depiction of torture as a fundamental (and effective) interrogation technique. Inevitably, the CIA director has issued a statement disavowing the film. "The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding bin Laden,” he says. “That impression is false.”

It's possible that the film's torture scenes, comprising much of the first third of the film's 157 minutes, weren't originally intended to be so defining, to frame its whole narrative, to serve as the backstory foundation for all the action and story that later unfolded. It's nonetheless clear that, for most movie-goers, the torture question remained front and center long after these opening scenes played out.

So what to make of this ugly business of torture? And what is Zero Dark Thirty's contribution to a long-running national discussion?

The theme that stayed with me long after leaving the theater was that of the general perversion of public policy (and its implementation) by the very emotional investment that its participants are required to make in it. And without emotional investment, there is no torture discussion.

The story unfolds to depict Maya (played by Jessica Chastain, in an Oscar nominated performance), a plucky, dedicated CIA agent leading the charge on the hunt for bin Laden, piecing together enough intel to set her sights on a man named Abu Ahmed, whom she's convinced is a high-level Al Qaeda operative with direct ties to bin Laden. Maya's dogged pursuit, her persistence in the face of the skepticism she meets at every turn, and her emotional investment in connecting the dots and finding Abu Ahmed (and then bin Laden) form the narrative's dramatic backbone. Even the most unsympathetic viewer is left no choice but to root for the spunky young woman—of course because we're also rooting against the bastard behind the 9/11 attacks, but also because, well, she's cute and cuddly and has oh-so-much heart.

As she faces more and more criticism and skepticism from those around her, Maya digs in more deeply, learning to play the man's game, dropping F-bombs when she needs a credibility boost, pounding the table when she's not taken seriously. As the years go by, as the setbacks and dead ends accumulate, as more people die at the hands of the very terrorists she's pursuing, the stakes continue rising, and she repeatedly doubles down on the Abu Ahmed lead, following it to a high-security compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where she convinces herself from circumstantial evidence that bin Laden is hiding out.

By the time she's inevitably trotted out in front of the various White House bigwigs to sell her theory, she no longer simply believes that she's on the right track—she now really, really wants her lead to be legit and accurate. Not necessarily because she wants or needs to be right, to prove wrong all those doubting alpha white males jockeying and posturing around her. And not necessarily because her career is on the line (though it clearly is). Both the script and the actress are too powerful to give such simplistic motivations any currency—there's never any doubt that her fundamental desire is to rid the world of its most prolific terrorist.

It's Maya's emotional investment in the theory that she's pieced together over nearly a decade that compels her to pursue it at all costs, that convinces her of its (moral as well as factual) rightness. This deep emotional investment is never so clearly depicted as when she's asked to sell it to the CIA Director, National Security Advisor, and other high-level patriarchal devil's advocates. As the other experts in the room paint an uncertain picture, pegging the likelihood of bin Laden actually being at the compound in the neighborhood of 40% – 60%, Maya's audacious but unsolicited estimation is a solid, black-and-white, no-nonsense 100%. “OK, 95 because I know certainty freaks you guys out,” she back-pedals slightly, “but it's 100.”

Clearly, she wants the certainty to be 100% that bin Laden is in the house, she wants to put this exhausting chase to rest, she wants to ensure that the deaths of numerous colleagues were not in vain. Where the film loses its footing, however, is in the way that nobody around Maya calls her out on this emotional investment. As the CIA Director ironically points out, they're all smart people at these discussion tables. But although many of her colleagues express skepticism and doubt, none of them articulate what was painfully clear as day—that her emotional investment was clouding her professional judgment.

I can't help but wonder if the same sort of emotional investment convinced the architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion to overestimate their chances, or convinced Cold War intelligence analysts to badly overstate the general health of the Soviet Union in the late eighties, or convinced Bush's war cabinet that American forces would be greeted in Iraq as liberators. Groupthink, held together by the glue of emotional buy-in.

In the end, Maya turned out to be right. But being right does nothing to change the fact that, amidst all the complexity of reading the tea leaves, of connecting the dots, while under intense pressure to deliver results, people can get emotionally wrapped up in their conclusions. Emotional investment doesn't add credence to these conclusions, as Zero Dark Thirty implies—it compromises them.

It's this same kind of emotional investment that perverts the entire torture discussion.

The standard (and only) defense of “coercive interrogation” is an emotional appeal. If a terrorist were holding my family hostage, threatening to kill them, and if collecting intel from him or an associate were the only means of saving them, would I then be willing to assent to extraordinary rendition, torture, or any means possible? Of course—hand me a rifle, and I'll shoot the motherfucker's kneecaps off, myself.

But although it makes for great drama on screen, and forms the grist of many an anarchist vigilante's wet dream, an emotional, morally-compromised state isn't a foundation for sound public policy. Aside from the emotional context, there is no sound defense of torture as an interrogation technique.

Because this very emotional context gives the torture debate currency, though, it is in fact useful to examine the question of whether or not torture tactics are effective. Whether torture works. An extremely complicated, context-driven, nearly-unanswerable question.

Some (Leonard Pitts, for one) feel that the question itself shouldn't even be entertained. The general thinking here is that because we are a nation of morals, of human rights, of unassailable ethics—indeed, one that lectures much of the rest of the world on their own human rights records—we have no business engaging in torture of any kind. Period. It's barbaric, and beneath us.

I certainly don't disagree. But, to me, the question of torture's efficacy lies at the very heart of the discussion. The most common defense of torture centers around simplistic, highly theoretical constructs. Usually, something along the lines of a detainee knows everything about a bomb that's planted on a train in Paris, set to kill 100 people. Are you really willing to let 100 people die because you're more concerned about the detainee's human rights?

Although clearly an absurdly simplistic scenario, this type of contrived hypothetical has gained much traction among the chattering classes and the television talk shows.

But the moral underpinnings of “coercive interrogation” crumble when you insert them into the context of the real world. To follow this theoretical through to any useful conclusion, you have to be willing to accept so many assumptions as fact. That you have the right suspect. That the suspect knows the details of the bomb plot in question. That you'll be able to distinguish the right answer from all the deceptive ones that terrorists (and intelligence personnel) are trained to recite under pressure. And that you'll get the right answer at all.

There's very little moral ambiguity attached to this simplistic scenario because it's unencumbered by the uncertainty that taints everything we know about the real world. Intelligence is always murky, uncertain, ambiguous. Collecting it and acting on it requires field personnel to rely on gut and intuition. They never have all the information that they'd like to have—but we still expect and need them to act in our best interests. To sometimes make guesses, rely on intuition, and exercise their judgment.

The detainee in custody might be the person you think he is. Or he might be an unlucky innocent who happened to physically resemble a suspected terrorist who was vaguely described on some bureaucratic federal agency's terrorist watch list. He might be a high-level operative of an active terrorist cell, or he might be a low-level courier, or driver. He might have intimate knowledge of the next bomb plot, or he might know nothing about it. The intelligence is never clear and unanimous on questions like these—there is no such thing as a "slam dunk" in this game.  

And if it turns out, after coercive interrogation tactics have been exhausted, that the detainee doesn't have any useful intel? That we physically tortured a human being for nothing? Should we chalk that up to the cost of doing business, to the inevitable broken eggs in the pursuit of that omelet?

Because it's often implemented in the heat of the moment, public policy is best designed in cold blood, by those who have little invested in the intended outcomes, and with a bias toward civility and restraint.

Too bad that cold blood makes for boring cinema.