Sunday afternoon January 20th I find myself
sitting, stunned in a dark movie theatre. The credits roll as the score plays
for one of the most powerful films I have seen in many years. There’s a lot to
digest here and I haven’t been this shaken and awed by a film since Francis
Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” I
remain motionless. “Directed by Kathryn Bigelow” flows from the darkness and
reveals itself onto the screen then fades away. After a time I have to leave
the theatre; this brilliant, unusual production piece, “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Bigelow has created nothing short of a masterpiece. It will
be viewed and studied for years to come. It is already being dissected and analyzed.
It is also already an intense controversy. This is the stuff that makes
legends; makes the world think. Torture is nothing short of the most vile, hideous
and least human of acts that human beings perform on each other. There is no
connection to the heroic in it’s execution and Americans need to see themselves
as heroes. The depiction of the torture of the detainees in a CIA Black Site is
so realistic and brutal that I almost left the theatre at one point, to watch
it is to somehow comply with it. I sat
through the scenes that went on for at least 20 minutes (an eternity in film
time) and it is to the great credit of the film maker that she was able to
bring me back into her vision. It was the scene with the monkeys that brought
me back.
“Zero Dark Thirty” is military slang for thirty minutes past
midnight (Oh Dark Thirty) or an arbitrary time between midnight and dawn. It is
very late night or very early morning depending on your point of view. The film
too is very much left to the viewer’s perspective. This is good for events that
are so critical to the national psyche and are actual events in the nation’s
history. The bringing to justice of Osama Bin Laden was important and it was
not pretty. There is no real glorification or “Hollywood” clichés involved. The
film opens to a total black screen with archive recordings of the attack of the
World Trade Center. Our imaginations and memories are already put to work. It
cuts directly to the torture of an “Enemy Combatant” who strangely comes to remind
me of Jesus. What follows is without a single moment of detachment for the
viewer.
