When Vengeance Rings Hollow

Since 2007 I have chosen on or around the anniversary of 9/11 to re-watch Paul Greengrass's “United 93”. Yet this week, for reasons I’m not sure I could have articulated in the moment I made the decision, I reached past the “United 93” DVD for Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” instead. In retrospect, this decision was a result of my bad mood. I think a lot of people are in bad moods these days. There is so much shit in so many corners of the world that is so profoundly fucked up that if I really stop to try and consider it I find that I can’t even fucking breathe –and no, I will not ask you to “pardon my French.” Because fuck that. The fucking world is on fucking fire. And I felt fucking pissed off. And so I guess that as an extension of this mood I didn't really desire the hope of “United 93” (and yes, in that indescribably intense concluding sequence when the passengers fight to take back the plane that’s specifically what I feel – hope). I desired……

Vengeance is the word I’m supposed to employ. I mean, isn’t that what “Zero Dark Thirty” is all about? Wasn’t that the purpose of our ten year odyssey to track down Osama bin Laden, pop a cap in his ass and hurl his remains into the sea? To have our vengeance for his masterminding of the most significant attack ever conducted on American soil? Isn’t that why the film opens with actual recordings taken from inside the Twin Towers before they fell? There are those who would argue the film does not suitably address the "why" nor suitably address America's overall involvement in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but such arguments fail to understand the film's contention that bin Laden was the predominant symbol of 9/11. His death would supply vengeance. Then we could all go back to watching Youtube in peace.

One of the significant knocks levied against Jessica Chastain’s protagonist, Maya, based on a real life CIA agent, was a lack of characterization. No home life, no loved one, no friends, no beers with the boys, no pillow fights, no diatribes about how underrated Juliana Hatfield is. It’s a knock I’ve addressed before as absurdly irrational. The point is her lack of characterization. Is there anything more profound than the utter un-profundity of this shot? 

That’s her. Nothing. No one. A tall boy and a glob of candy on a non-descript couch. Hollowed out to the point of her obsession with finding Osama and nothing else. And in that way, she also becomes emblematic of America’s obsession with vengeance, with finding and punishing bin Laden in the wake of 9/11. David Thomson, my favorite film critic, compared it, unfavorably, to something born of John Wayne jingoism. Now I am rather notoriously not a John Wayne fan. In fact, I was recently at a film exhibit and I quite purposely walked right past the John Wayne display. But I also don’t entirely disagree with Mr. Thomson.

In his movies, Wayne always possessed a “pathological absence of self-doubt mak(ing) everything all right in the end.” That’s a phrase the critic Daniel Pinto used to negatively describe the character of Maya in his own “ZDR” review. He’s right about the pathological absence of self-doubt, which is a trait that Maya the character (“I know how much certainty freaks you guys out”) and Chastain the actress play straight to.

This pathological absence of self-doubt also manifests itself in the torture sequences. It manifests in the movie, of course, in the way that Maya’s initial hesitancy toward it gives way to an almost disturbingly matter-of-fact ruthlessness. “You're not being fulsome in your replies!”

But it also manifested itself in the conversation had by so many around the movie. Was it pro-torture? Was it anti-torture? Were its depictions of torture accurate or imbalanced? EVERYONE had an opinion and EVERYONE’S opinion was RIGHT (i.e. pathological absence of self-doubt). And look, when it comes to the subject of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, I would contend it’s virtually impossible to know the whole truth. The government and its representatives can assert anything they damn well please, but then the government asserted they weren't spying on us until they admitted that, yeah, well, they were. Discerning the proclivity of torture in the pursuit and how much information that torture yielded until everyone involved truly comes clean (which they won't) is a fool’s errand. Perhaps the significance of torture as argued by “Zero Dark Thirty” is overstated compared to the truth stowed in a briefcase chained to some Langley operative’s wrist but torture was employed. That much we know. And the question Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal seem intent to to ask is whether or not it makes – to re-borrow Mr. Pinto’s phrase – “everything” (as in, torture) “all right in the end” simply because it aided in nabbing, “for God and country”, al-Qaeda’s #1 douchebag?

Thomson writes that Maya “is the moral authority at the end of the film, surveying the corpse and nodding, as if to imply, ‘Mission accomplished.’” I respect Mr. Thomson more than any critic alive but have no earthly idea what he was watching. She nods, yes, but how he extrapolated an implication of ‘Mission accomplished’ from the manner in which Chastain nods is utterly beyond me. That nod is partly disbelief for having finally seen the mission through, but it’s so much more – it’s doubt. It’s fear. It’s Bigelow and Boal consciously setting her up this way to take her to the end point of the journey, to the point where her logistical and moral certainty and her pathological absence of self doubt suddenly run up against pointlessness. She boards the military plane. The pilot asks “Where do you want to go?”

Her only answer is tears, and as empty as all the vengeance felt watching those tears in 2012, it felt, in the aftermath of the last few months, even more empty. Two years later and we still have no idea what it really meant or where we really want to go.

Countdown to the Oscars: Maya, My Favorite 2012 Movie Character

Since the proper release of "Zero Dark Thirty" it seems that the criticism has thankfully shifted from the political arena (torture) to the cinematic arena, even if I personally think both arguments ring hollow. The dissatisfaction I have encountered regarding Kathryn Bigelow's rightful Oscar nominee for Best Picture involves the characterization of the main character, Maya. The oft-asked question: why do we care about her and/or why are we rooting for her?

Writing about the film in The New Yorker, Richard Brody, in a typically spectacular article (whether you agree or not) chock-full of talking points, boils it down to "deceptive emptiness." I think he gets one of those two words right. "Emptiness." He writes: "(T)here’s also no...personal context for the protagonist. Did Maya not have sex for ten years? Did she have no family with whom she communicates, no friends with whom she discusses her work, her obsession with catching bin Laden, her ideas about life in general? What did she put on hold in her pursuit for bin Laden?"

In my review I noted that "Throughout the film we never see Maya off location. She is always at the job, tucked away at some computer with some stack of files, questioning some detainee. She counts off the days since the compound’s discovery with no action by scribbling the number with a magic marker on her boss’s office window. So often 'possessed' characters in movies are given requisite home front scenes in which they are glimpsed ignoring spouses and forgetting children’s birthdays. Maya does not even have THAT."

The esteemed Roger Ebert has often lamented characters saddled with needless "context", writing, for example, of The Sports Movie Spouse, "This role, complete with the obligatory shots of the wife appearing in his study door as the husband burns the midnight oil, is so standard, so ritualistic, so boring, that I propose all future movies about workaholics just make them bachelors, to spare us the dead air." "Zero Dark Thirty" spares us the dead air!!!

Then again, movies typically have their reasons, however poorly executed, for showing the dead air. Sports Movies, for example, are always on a crusade to remind us that "it's just a game" - hence, the Suffering Spouse. She/He works to remind us (hammer home) that "it's just a game", symbolizing what the protagonist stands to lose by investing him/herself too deeply in the game.

By deliberately refraining from showing us the dead air, Bigelow lets us see how Maya stands to lose nothing personal as a result of her jihad against bin Laden. A colleague (Jennifer Ehle) offers a couple questions about a love life and Maya sluffs them off. A colleague offers to buy her dinner and Maya turns it down. In one blink-and-you-might-miss-it moment she returns to her makeshift residence dressed in traditional Islamic garb, turns on the TV and pops open a tall boy. This, we assume, must be her typical night. Clearly, she has a void. We know this because we never see her engaging in anything personal. She fills the void with the mission. Which is why when her boss threatens to shut the mission down she would rather blackmail him than face life without it. Her emptiness is not deceptive, it is refreshingly candid.

The movie ends, crucially, not with the infamous invasion of bin Laden's compound and his killing, but with Maya, all alone, on a military plane bound for a destination specifically not specified. "Where are we going?" the pilot asks her, and these are the film's final words. She has no idea where she's going. The concluding image is a close-up of Maya, a tear rolling down one cheek, and then another tear rolling down the other. Some have debated the intent behind these tears. To me, it is clear.

It is not until she is alone and forced to consider life without the pursuit just ended that she cries. The void is no longer filled. She has no Suffering Spouse to return to, no semblance of a life away from an interrogation room and military base and we understand this because the movie has consciously refrained from filling in those blanks. She has nothing, not a goddamn thing. So, where to? What now? She has no earthly idea.

I have said before that I adore films bold enough to wait until the final shot to reveal themselves in full, and this is precisely "Zero Dark Thirty's" ultimate intent. Oh, it could be argued that the tears she sheds are our tears too, that the symbolic weight on her shoulders was weight we all carried and that her realization of the hollowness of the ten year ordeal made foolish this need for closure that will never be had in the war on terror. But a character, first and foremost and above all else, is just that - a character, a person, one person and only one. And Maya's final moments are hers alone. The last shot reveals the film to be neither a bin Laden nor a 9/11 film. Instead, it is a Jessica Chastain film - or, more to the point, a Maya film.

Emptiness has never looked more soulful.

Zero Dark Thirty

“What else have you worked on besides bin Laden?”

“Nothing. I’ve worked on nothing else.” 

The first time we truly get a good look at Maya (Jessica Chastain) is in an interrogation room where an al-Queda operative named Anmar (Reda Kateb) is strung up and sadistically water boarded by burly C.I.A. officer Dan (Jason Clarke). But many of these shots are struck in a wide frame so that we can see Maya to the left, standing on the sides of her feet, arms crossed in such a way to suggest she is trying to huddle with herself, generally evoking someone out of her element, fearful and leery of the tactics on display. When we return to the same room and same prisoner later there is a brief moment when Maya is left alone with the prisoner. He senses, as we sense, her wariness. He pleads for help. She replies: “You can help yourself by being truthful.” Woah. She is not quite who we thought she was.

"Zero Dark Thirty", a joint effort by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter (war corespondent) Mark Boal, is a re-telling of America’s attempt in the wake of September 11th to find and kill the man responsible, al-Queda king Osama bin Laden. It stretches across years, chock full of names and dates and places, stops, starts and dead ends. The real deed took, as acting director of the C.I.A. Michael Morell has noted, “the selfless commitment of hundreds of officers.” Bigelow and Boal, however, choose, correctly, to make Maya our one surrogate, our entry point, a character that does not necessarily come manufactured as imposingly heroic and slogan-barking but frightened, suspicious and, ultimately obsessive. 

The much-debated torture scenes in the film are explicit and treading murky, inflammatory ground. It is not outright propaganda but nor does it deny, and in one sequence we watch characters watching President Obama on "60 Minutes" claiming torture was not used in locating bin Laden. The most significant bit here is the characters’ reaction – that is, they have none, as if it is business as usual, as if the President is merely reciting the company line. That is a fairly strong statement. And if this is a political film, and that can certainly be argued, well, this is the film drawing a line in the sand and taking a side, and what are politics if they are not drawing lines in the sand and taking sides?

Does it argue that torture was instrumental in the capture and killing? It does, yes, in that the most crucial clue is revealed by Anmar. And though he reveals it in a moment of water boarding reprieve, of being afforded food and water, it is quite clear that torture laid the groundwork for this revelation. At the same time, the clue is specifically called “a needle in a haystack”, underscoring the notion that clues – strong or weak – were gathered from an assortment of places and that wherever they came from, however they were obtained, it was going to take a person or people to latch onto one and have the faith (compulsion) to see it through.

The clue is a name. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. A false name, as it turns out, but a false name that could lead to a real name. He becomes, in a sense, the Sean Regan of "Zero Dark Thirty", the (mostly) unseen focus of attention, the piece of intel to which Maya clings with fervor, the name she will track to the ends of the earth, convinced to her core that whoever he is will unlock the gate, figurative or otherwise, to bin Laden’s hiding place.

When a few of her colleagues are killed in the tragic attack at Camp Chapman in 2009 she tells another character: “I’ve lost a lot of my friends. I believe I was spared to finish the job.” We know bin Laden will be found and killed, of course, and he is in an elongated sequence that in spite of our awareness of its conclusion will still you breathless. Yet, in a strange way, if the film has a storytelling flaw it is that for this chunk of running time, Maya, to whom and to whose quest we have become so attached, is effectively sidelined. 

More telling is the build-up to the “jackpot”, the way in which the infamous walled-off compound at Abbottabad is discovered and how colleagues, be it C.I.A. or Presidential advisers, waffle in their desire to move on the location without definitive knowledge that the desired target is inside. Maya is definite. She knows. SHE.KNOWS. Everyone goes around an obligatory conference table reciting in percentages their confidence level. They are moderate to less than confident. Then Maya declares: ”One hundred percent.” She quickly amends it to “ninety-five percent. Because I know how people feel about certainty in here.”

Throughout the film we never see Maya off location. She is always at the job, tucked away at some computer with some stack of files, questioning some detainee. She counts off the days since the compound’s discovery with no action by scribbling the number with a magic marker on her boss’s office window. So often “possessed” characters in movies are given requisite home front scenes in which they are glimpsed ignoring spouses and forgetting children’s birthdays. Maya does not even have THAT. A female colleague wonders if she has at least hooked up with another guy on base. Ha! Maya taking time away from the job to hook up? Please! 

Bin Laden and his operatives, for all the atrocious harm they committed across the globe, had an unshakable, if misguided, belief in what they were doing. They were zealots. So is Maya. It takes one to catch one. And in the last stunning shot a single tear is shed. You could read this as relief. Re-consider it, and then consider what Maya is going to do whenever she gets where she is going. “Nothing. I’ve worked on nothing else.”

Often great movies do not reveal themselves in full until the final second and that is "Zero Dark Thirty’s" intention all along – it belongs to Jessica Chastain, and in that instant she cracks the entire movie wide open.