Oscar Dark Thirty

“Zero Dark Thirty” is a great movie. It’s a subjective claim and a personal judgment as is this: It’s an important movie, a movie about the soul of America, who we think we are and who we really are.

The movie begins on September 11, 2001 and captures the essence of the decade-long manhunt that follows, ending with the killing of Osama bin Laden. Our guide is Maya, a CIA operative whose life’s work—almost literally—is to bring bin Laden to justice. Her first experience in the field is as a witness to torture. Initially, she is repulsed; she struggles to hide her disgust (because when you’re torturing someone it ruins the effect when you fail to act cool like that) but it’s clear that she is troubled by the reality of “enhanced interrogation.” Over time, she reconciles herself to it, uses it in her own interrogations and ultimately finds herself warned by her mentor not to be “the last one holding a dog collar.”

Through Maya, we experience the urgency to bring the man responsible for the murder of 3,000 innocent people to justice, a righteous determination that justifies any means necessary in the years immediately following 9/11. We see this urgent pursuit of bin Laden transition to the more corporate War on Terror as the US pivots off the Abu Ghraib scandal. There is a moment in the movie when Maya’s boss tells her to forget about bin Laden, that all he cares about is stopping the next terrorist attack. (Remember when George W. Bush told us it wasn’t that important that we get bin Laden?) Maya will not be deterred. The investigation turns from renditions and torture – enhanced interrogation – to police procedural. Evidence is gathered and analyzed, phones are tapped, suspects are tailed and bin Laden is found. Well, we in the audience know that bin Laden has been found but in the movie Maya must still convince the political leaders of the CIA as there are no pictures verifying bin Laden’s identity or anything other than circumstantial evidence that he is living in that compound in Abbottabad.

Every waking moment of Maya’s adult life has been spent hunting bin Laden. She has been shot at, blown up and lost her best friend—perhaps better described as her closest co-worker as Maya acknowledges that she has no friends—to a terrorist car bomb. She has seen hundreds die in terrorist attacks around the world that she believes may not have happened had she brought bin Laden to justice already. She has blood literally and figuratively on her hands and there is nothing she will not do to wash them clean. Justice for Maya means one thing and one thing only. When she meets Seal Team 6 for the first time she articulates it in no uncertain terms.

“…bin Laden is there. And you're going to kill him for me.”

Director Kathryn Bigelow deftly compresses a decade into a little more than two and a half hours. That’s remarkable enough but she also asks us to think about some hard things along the way. She does not celebrate or glorify torture but she acknowledges the facts. The movie does not argue that torture led to the capture of bin Laden; data analytics and police work gets that done. But renditions did happen. Waterboarding happened. Abu Ghraib happened. We did those things. Those things belong in this movie. We put our fellow Americans at risk, not only soldiers in the military but operatives in the Foreign Service. We ask them even now to do things that we don’t really want to know about. We ask them to do things they will struggle to reconcile with what they learned it was to be an American in their 7^th grade Civics class. We ask them to do things they’ll deal with for the rest of their lives. That they are willing, dedicated, obsessed even enthusiastic participants doesn’t diminish what they experience. “Zero Dark Thirty” shows us what Maya does; what the members of Seal Team 6 do and we cannot look away.

At the end of the movie Maya is alone, crying, the only passenger on a transport plane. It may seem an odd analogy but I was reminded of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards at the end of “The Searchers.” He has returned his teenaged niece Debbie, who was kidnapped as a small child by Indians, back to the safety of civilized society. Debbie is welcomed back into the home and hearth but Ethan remains outside. He is not a farmer or a merchant; he’s the man farmers and merchants ask to do the hard things that will keep them safe and their families whole. Maya and a thousand nameless others are our real life Ethans.

“Zero Dark Thirty” will not win the Academy Award for Best Picture but so what? I’m indifferent to any list of best pictures from 2012 that does not include “Moonrise Kingdom” but even if that wonderful Wes Anderson movie had rounded out a Top 10 of Oscar noms, how in the world would I compare those two movies? Or judge them against “Argo” or “Silver Linings Playbook” or “Lincoln?” Greatness is rarely judged objectively.

There is a visual in the movie that captured its essence for me. We see the American flag and then a black scrim of camouflage netting is blown by the breeze and obscures the flag. Then it is revealed again; and again hidden. Who are we as Americans, then? The uncomfortable answer is, of course, that we’re both. Sometimes we are that shining city on the hill. Sometimes we do things better done in the dark.