A First Draft for Our Newest National Myth
by Andrew Collins
It’s been said that journalists write the first draft of history. If that is the case, then cinema turns our drafts of history into cultural myths, endowing them with a fresh drama and significance for our generation (Spielberg’s Lincoln is a perfect example).
Zero Dark Thirty, the latest film from director Kathryn Bigelow (of Hurt Locker fame), stands somewhere in the gap between the traditional roles of journalist and filmmaker. It functions as both an early draft and mythic interpretation of the search for Osama Bin Laden. Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal pull directly from firsthand accounts and private interviews with CIA officials involved in the hunt, hitting the high points of a decade-long narrative. It starts with a panicky 911 call from one of the victims in the World Trade Center before the buildings collapsed — played audio-only from a black screen. It concludes with the legendary raid on Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.
The careful crafting and portrayal of events that led the CIA to Bin Laden result in a film that carries a unique emotional force very rarely achieved in film. It has an inescapable weightiness that comes from the story’s chronological proximity and high stakes. Just as the bomb-diffusing scenes from The Hurt Locker riveted audiences two years ago, the constant threat of suicide attacks and national failure to bring justice to our enemies captures us in Zero Dark Thirty. This is a new kind of war. Hundreds of potential adversaries surround U.S. units at all times. Intelligence leaders must deal in probabilities, make snap judgments, and function in a world where one wrong choice means national embarrassment at best, but more likely death, as we see several times in the film.
Zero Dark Thirty hammers us harder than other action movies because all of the attacks in this film actually happened, and we sense that the film’s portrayal of them is probably quite similar to the real events. Sure, most people realize that factors like artistic license, composite characters, and dramatization should keep us from understanding Zero Dark Thirty as truth. But none of those philosophical subtleties came to mind when I watched a bus explode in England or saw one of our top secret stealth helicopters crash over Bin Laden’s compound. The sense that, my goodness, these things actually happened, overrode everything else in the moment.
One other factor makes Zero Dark Thirty brilliantly effective. It keeps us caught up in the chase rather than making its own moral or political judgments. Aside from killing Bin Laden, it portrays events with an ambivalence that should be sufficient for all but the most dovish viewer. In particular, it avoids both heedless patriotism and anti-Americanism. The protagonist, CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain), struggles more with finding leads to accomplish the mission than with confronting moral questions. When faced with the prospect of pulling away from the Bin Laden trail in favor of hitting easier, more accessible targets, she stops her commanding officer in his tracks. You brought me on to do one thing, she says, and that’s get Bin Laden. Later in the film, as she offers her opinion to some of the top intelligence leaders about the Abbottabad compound, the CIA director asks her who she is. “I’m the mother****** who found this place,” she replies.
It will be interesting to see how history remembers the Bin Laden manhunt. Many now see Seal Team Six as poster boys for U.S. military might — our own real life GI Joes. On the other hand, the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” — prominently displayed in the film — represent to many America’s immoral and unwarranted overreach into international affairs, a picture of human rights abuses committed for nothing more than a national vendetta. The intense torture scene that opens the film stirred up plenty of controversy upon its limited release in December, prompting a letter of condemnation from a group of U.S. senators and an internal memo from acting CIA Director Michael Morell. (I wrote more about the torture scenes here.) While I can understand the concern for the film’s portrayal of torture as a tool to find Bin Laden, much of this controversy tries to project too much of an agenda on the film. Simply put, Zero Dark Thirty handles its morally disputable elements by painting a vivid, straightforward portrait that focuses on the human uncertainty, suffering, and resolve of the moment.
What will the Bin Laden manhunt come to symbolize? Whatever America ends up making of this story in the generations to come, it will surely hearken back to Zero Dark Thirty, the first draft of our newest national myth.
