INTRODUCTION: CONFRONTING THE ABU GHRAIB PHOTOGRAPHS
2. George Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 169.
3. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3.
4. Agamben argues that there is a connection between American actions in the war on terror and those of the Nazis during World War II. This connection is evident in both official declarations—such as the designation enemy combatant—and in unofficial activities like the torture at Abu Ghraib.
5. See Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, “U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations,” Washington Post, December 26, 2002, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/09/AR2006060901356.html (accessed February 11, 2014); and Eyal Press, “In Torture We Trust?” Nation, March 31, 2003, www.thenation.com/article/torture-we-trust (accessed February 11, 2014).
6. See Marc Lacey, “Iraqi Detainees Claim Abuse By British and U.S. Troops,” New York Times, May 17, 2003, A11; and David Lamb, “When MPs’ Push Becomes a Charge,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2003, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/18/nation/na-soldiers18 (accessed July 16, 2014).
8. Scholars such as Alessia Ricciardi have investigated the direct aesthetic connections between the Abu Ghraib images and past films. Ricciardi specifically looks at Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) to unpack the relationship between violence and sexuality. She argues, “Watching Salò thirty years later, one finds that the film’s provocative aesthetic appeal has not notably changed. However, with regard to its ideologically scandalous position, its use of sexuality as a metaphor for power, the story is different. Saló, it turns out, shares the most troubling elements of its iconography with the photographic record of torture at Abu Ghraib.” Alessia Ricciardi, “Rethinking Salò After Abu Ghraib,” Postmodern Culture 21, no. 3 (2011), http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed February 19, 2014).
9. President Obama signed an executive order in 2009 prohibiting any interrogation methods not authorized by and listed in the Army Field Manual. But human rights groups point out that this does little good when it is the Army Field Manual itself that needs to be rewritten. For example, it separates out “war on terror” prisoners as not subject to the same rights as prisoners of war. Additionally, this Appendix M, as it is labeled, allows for many enhanced interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and others. For further explanation see Jeffrey Kaye, “Contrary to Obama’s Promises, the US Military Still Permits Torture,” Guardian, January 25, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/25/obama-administration-military-torture-army-field-manual (accessed February 19, 2014); and Scott Horton, “Obama’s Black Sites,” Harper’s Magazine, May 12, 2010, http://harpers.org/blog/2010/05/obamas-black-sites/ (accessed February 19, 2014).
10. Wisnewski provides a comprehensive look at the many legal definitions of torture. J. Jeremy Wisnewski. Understanding Torture (Edinbugh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 5.
11. See Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2013), originally published in 1785; and The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Licentiousness (New York: Grove, 1994), originally published in 1787.
12. For other discussions of this history of torture, see Lisa Hajjar, Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2013).
13. For an excellent discussion of the implications of this juridical approach, see Justin Clemens, Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1978), 3.
15. The following is the exact wording of the Eight Amendment: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel or unusual punishment inflicted.” Many of the cases that have referred to the Eight Amendment have parsed 10. out whether a punishment was disproportionate to the offense in cases involving capital punishment or life imprisonment.
16. Generally evaluating what “cruel and unusual” means relies on what legal analysts often refer to as evolving standards of decency. Even as recently as 1972, the courts continued to work on defining these standards. In Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, Justice Brennan elaborated that there are four principles that determine whether a punishment is cruel and unusual. First in this list was that a punishment must not degrade human dignity, and it specifically refers to torture as a prime example of such an offense.
17. The U.S.’s history is rife with examples of corrupt legal systems in which no one was prosecuted for these acts. It also has, however, many cases in which people have been prosecuted and convicted for these infractions.
18. The language of the Geneva Conventions reads: “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” Part 3, section 1, article 17.
19. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1984, and ratified by twenty nations on June 26, 1987. The work on this convention started in 1975 when a declaration was made to protect people from torture and a Commission of Human Rights studying the questions of torture was formed. As of September 2013, the Convention Against Torture has 154 signatories.
20. George W. Bush, “Statement in Support of Victims of Torture,” White House Press Release (June 23, 2003).
21. Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president, Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation Under 18 U.S.C (2340–2340A), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, filed August 1, 2002.
22. This was reported in the news. See, for example, “U.N.: U.S. Tortures Guantanamo Detainees. U.S. Takes Issue with Preliminary Report,” NBC News, February 13, 2006, www.nbcnews.com/id/11333496/#.UvzatfYdR0g (accessed February 1, 2014).
23. It is, of course, Louis Althusser who contends that the primary function of ideology involves interpellating individuals as subjects. Althusser’s formulation seems especially out of date when we examine contemporary representations of torture. Even though this is an almost wholly ideological terrain, one finds bodies but not subjects.
24. This separation of mind and body forces Descartes and subsequent thinkers to try to resolve their interdependence. Descartes argues for their absolute distinction, but he nonetheless must accept that a reciprocal influence exists. This leads him to the most fantasmatic development within his thought—the pineal gland, a mysterious organ that functions as the site where mind and body interact.
25. Colette Soler, Lacan, l’inconscient réinventé (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 200.
26. Instead of theorizing mind and body as two possible sides of an opposition, psychoanalysis conceives of both sides as impossible to grasp. If we try to situate ourselves on the side of the mind, we don’t just lose the body, but the mind as well. This is what Jacques Lacan is getting at in his account of the subject’s fundamental division in Seminar XI. He states, “If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into non-meaning. If we choose meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of non-meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization of the subject, the unconscious. In other words, it is of the nature of this meaning, as it emerges in the field of the Other, to be in a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being, induced by the very function of the signifier.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 211.
27. A. Kiarina Kordela attempts to synthesize the project of biopolitics and that of psychoanalysis, and she does so by viewing the body itself as an interruption in discourse. She claims, “A psychoanalytic theory of biopolitics … requires that Foucault’s account of biopolitics be revised through a reconceptualization of the body and bios as the excess to, or lack in, discursive construction.” A. Kiarina Kordela, Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), xvi.
28. William Schultz, The Phenomenon of Torture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 261.
29. We should nonetheless commend Schulz for arguing that torture doesn’t work rather than just engaging in a moral diatribe against it. Calling into question the effectiveness of torture is one way of challenging the biopolitical ideology that grounds the practice of torture. But it fails in the end to undermine the torture fantasy because it doesn’t emphasize the role that enjoyment plays in torture. This critique recognizes that torture doesn’t produce truth, but it doesn’t recognize what torture does effectively produce—that is, enjoyment.
30. Julia Lesage, “Torture Documentaries,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (2009).
31. See Jean Lartéguy, Les Centurions (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1960).
32. In an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, Alan Dershowitz supported torture in the case of the ticking bomb scenario and said, “If anybody had the ability to prevent the events of Sept. 11 … they would have gone to whatever length.” The justification is always tied to a retroactive explanation. David Kohn, “Legal Torture?: Civil Libertarian Believes Torture Will Be Used in War on Terrorism,” 60 Minutes, January 17, 2002, www.cbsnews.com/news/legal-torture/ (accessed February 11, 2013).
33. Political scientist Darius Rejali notes, “But too often fantasy sells better than reality. Les Centurions won the Prix Eve Delocroix in 1960 and sold half a million copies, a privilege no book on the real Algerian war can claim. It won praise for its military realism, and French Paras embraced the novel.” Darius Regali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 547.
35. Rejali explains, “A survey of the famous cases suggests as well that interrogators who did not torture were more successful in harvesting accurate, timely information.… Contrast these cases with the four important prisoners who were tortured, Ben M’hidi (the head of the FLN in Algiers), George Hadhadj (editor of the underground newspaper), Ali Boumandjel (the FLN foreign minister), and Henri Alleg (editor of the Alger Républicain). These prisoners gave up nothing other than their identity as opposition members, and two were killed to avoid bad publicity.” Regali, Torture and Democracy, 490.
36. The effectiveness of the ticking bomb scenario also has its basis in fundamental anxieties that accompany modern democracy. Journalist Jane Mayer explains, “Lartéguy’s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies—that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.” Jane Mayer, “Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind 24,” New Yorker, February 19, 2007, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all (accessed Februrary 12, 2014).
38. Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 240.
39. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel claims, “truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made. Nor is there such a thing as the false, any more than there is something evil.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 22.
40. Alias provides an implicit critique of the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt, which views politics as dependent on the distinction between friend and enemy. During every season of the series, it becomes impossible to distinguish clearly between a friend and an enemy, and the two positions often switch multiples times.
1. TORTURE, BIOPOWER, AND THE DESIRING SUBJECT
1. For some of the main evolutionary thinkers today, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003); Edward O. Wilson, Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012); and Robert Wright, Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Vintage, 1995).
2. Many contemporary psychoanalytic cultural theorists write about this desiring subject as a subject at the heart of politics and philosophy, and in doing so they are interrogating how desire and politics work together. See Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 2001); Jennifer Friedlander, Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (New York, SUNY Press, 2009); Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan, Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2012); Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left (New York: SUNY Press, 2007); Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 2009); and Alenka Zupenčič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (New York: Verso, 2012).
3. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 59.
4. This is not an unchallenged view. There have been several attempts to marry biopolitics and psychoanalysis. See, for instance, A. Kiarina Kordela, Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013).
5. I often equate biopower and biopolitics because, as I argue in what follows, both operate according to the same fundamental assumption concerning the philosophical priority of the body and the absence of a subject complicating this body’s self-identity.
6. The term biopower first became popular as a result of Michel Foucault’s mention of it in the first volume of the History of Sexuality. Describing this new form of power, he writes, “there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of ‘biopower.’” Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 140.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90.
8. Though there are vast differences between the thought of Foucault and that of Deleuze, this is their fundamental point of intersection and what constitutes the basis for their philosophical comradeship. Both are champions of the body and critics of the signifier for the violence that it does to the body.
9. Michel Foucault, Security, Nation, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977—1978 (New York: Picador, 2009), 1.
10. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997), 247.
11. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:142–143.
12. See Foucault, Security, Nation, Population.
13. Foucault offers a famous celebration of the body at the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. He says, “It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibilities of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.” Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:157.
14. It should not be at all surprising that Foucault wrote a panegyric to Anti-Oedipus when prefacing that work. His position on the body as the site of resistance is exactly congruous with that of Deleuze and Guattari.
15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 158.
16. Roberto Esposito also calls for a positive biopolitics as a potential antidote. See Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
17. For Agamben, bare life appears exactly where political freedom should be. He says, “Modern democracy’s specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place—‘bare life’—that marked their subjection.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9–10.
19. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1989); Carl Schmidt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
20. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7.
23. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 171.
24. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 45.
25. W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 71.
26. Even though Freud never discusses the signifier in the way that Lacan does, he nonetheless chronicles how subjection to the signifier disturbs the individual and constitutes the subject. The attention that psychoanalysis pays to language as decisive is not a pure addition that Lacan makes but is present at least implicitly from the beginning.
27. No matter how diligently they work to engage psychoanalytic theory, constructivists will always run up against the role that the body plays in it and will view it as too naturalist. On the other side, naturalists will always dismiss psychoanalytic theory as too committed to constructivism. The point is not that psychoanalysis is a compromise position between the two but that it excludes completely the two alternatives.
28. Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier, 1963), 105.
29. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 39.
30. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 321. A few years later, he makes an even more direct statement about the relationship between enjoyment and the real. He claims, “enjoyment is from the real.” Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome, 1975–1976, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 78.
31. Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, trans. Alix Strachey and James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 10:166.
33. Torture is in no way residue from the past. J. Jeremy Wisnewski points out that we should not assume we are beyond torture, that this is partly what creates problems in thinking about it and making astute political and juridical prohibitions on torture. See J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Understanding Torture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
34. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 45.
2. THE NONSENSICAL SMILE OF THE TORTURER IN POST-9/11 DOCUMENTARY FILMS
1. Even though we tend to think of fantasy as illogical and unstructured, every fantasy obeys a precise logic, which is what enables it to be effective in obscuring the gaps in ideology. Jacques Lacan traces this logic in his “Seminar XIV,” entitled “The Logic of Fantasy.” See Jacques Lacan, “Séminaire XIV: La logique du fantasme,” unpublished manuscript.
2. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 104.
3. For more work on gaze as stain, see Joan Copjec, Read My Desire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Jennifer Friedlander, The Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); and Hilary Neroni, “Documenting the Gaze: Psychoanalysis and Judith Helfand’s Blue Vinyl and Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27, no. 2 (2010).
4. Mulvey’s conception of the gaze became so dominant in film studies that it completely obscured Lacan’s understanding of the gaze as the point that disrupts the image. Screen theory thus had the effect of eliminating disruption, which is the key to any psychoanalytic interpretation.
5. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 400.
6. Žižek is at once more pessimistic than Screen theory and more optimistic about ideology. He theorizes the subject’s investment in ideology as much more thorough than Screen theory, but at the same time, he sees the necessity of gaps within ideology from which one can mount a challenge to it.
7. Slavoj Žižek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; Or, The Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 90–128), 115.
9. Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 243.
12. Brian Whitaker says, “In contrast, opinions of Patai’s book among Middle East experts at US universities are almost universally scathing. ‘The best use for this volume, if any, is as a doorstop,’ one commented. ‘The book is old, and a thoroughly discredited form of scholarship,’ said another. None of the academics I contacted thought the book suitable for serious study, although Georgetown University once invited students to analyse it as ‘an example of bad, biased social science.’” Brian Whitaker, “‘Its Best Use Is as a Doorstop,’” Guardian, May 24, 2004, www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/24/worlddispatch.usa (accessed February 28, 2014).
14. Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind, rev. ed. (New York: Haterleigh, 2002), 130.
15. Whitaker, “‘Its Best Use Is as a Doorstop.’”
16. In discussing the historical situatedness of documentaries, Paula Rabinowitz says, “The cinematic choices these visionary directors made have an eerie parallel in the diminished political possibilities available in the Reagan era. As such the films serve as guides to the place of women in the nation, the place of language in identity, the place of documentary in politics.” Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (New York: Verso, 1994), 204. Though she is discussing a different group of films, her point still resonates for these current documentaries about Abu Ghraib. As they do battle with much of the American government and media about torture, they are also evidence of the narrowed symbolic discourse surrounding these important moments.
17. For lengthy investigations on this topic, see a Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004); Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Holt, 2006).
18. Linda Williams considers the role of the frame in the war photo. Through this line of investigation, she analyzes Standard Operating Procedures, about which she argues, “I hope to demonstrate that it can help show us the difference between a frame that ‘conducts dehumanizing norms’ and a frame that might be capable of questioning these very norms to open up our seeing and knowledge to elusive and contingent truths that lie beyond the frame’s limits.” Linda Williams, “Cluster Fuck: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure,” Camera Obscura 73, 25, no. 1 (2010): 31.
19. Jonathan Kahana argues that Standard Operating Procedure does not ask enough of the soldiers in the interview. Similarly, he sees the reenactments and the narrative structure of the film as too understated to arrive at any kind of truth. He says, “In this way, various forms of narration in the film create a self-enclosed economy of discourse about torture at Abu Ghraib, a system within which the statements of the accused have the effect not of confessions but of excuses.” Jonathan Kahana, “Speech Images: Standard Operating Procedure and the Staging of Interrogation,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 52 (2010), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/sopkKahana/index.html (accessed February 27, 2014).
21. Caetlin Benson-Allott proffers a different theory. She argues, “For if Morris is indeed suggesting that Harman possesses no better understanding of the woman in the photo than any other viewer, then he is also acknowledging the limits of his documentary.” Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Standard Operating Procedure: Mediating Torture,” Film Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2009): 41.
22. Kris Fallon documents Errol Morris’s persistent interest in photography and its implications. He claims he looks at photography, such as the Abu Ghraib photos, in several ways. He says, “One might even be tempted to go further and credit Morris’s twin alter egos, the philosopher and the detective, for each of the works, one doggedly tracking down the facts while the other tackles the more slippery issues of human consciousness.” Kris Fallon, “Several Sides of Errol Morris,” Film Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2012): 48–49.
23. Another potential interpretation of Standard Operating Procedure is as a reframing of those in the photographs. Just as inscrutable and ultimately mysterious, Morris’s new frame provides some interpretation but insists on the confines of the frame itself to hint at the impossibility of finding an explanation.
24. Arguing that Standard Operating Procedure does not engage the viewers in a way that truly exposes the heart of the issues, Thomas Austin says, “I suggest that in Standard Operating Procedure these conventional proposals of how the viewer should respond, ethically and politically, become ambiguous, uncertain or unconvincing. As a result, the film’s insertion of the events at Abu Ghraib into a discursive framework that might render them both legible and ‘useful’ (that is, of moral and political significance) is compromised.” Thomas Austin, “Standard Operating Procedure, ‘the Mystery of Photography’ and the Politics of Pity,” Screen 52, no. 3 (2011): 344.
25. Errol Morris was as concerned with what the photos concealed. For example, they concealed what happened in the interrogation rooms since they only depicted the interaction with the MPs. Morris explains, “One thing I’m very fond of pointing out is that photographs can both reveal and conceal. They can serve as an exposé just as well as a cover-up. And that’s exactly what happened with these photographs. They concealed almost everything about Abu Ghraib.” Quoted in Howard Feinstein, “Beyond the Frame,” Sight and Sound 18, no. 7 (2008): 34 (accessed February 19, 2014) It’s possible that Morris saw the smile at the heart of the photograph as concealing some sort of truth.
26. Julia Lesage makes the excellent point that Alex Gibney employs other dramatic photos to help make his point and bring in a different kind of emotional resonance. They are photos that photojournalists have taken that emphasize the power relations between the U.S. and the detainees or those being arrested. “By using the previously artfully-composed images of photojournalists, Gibney can make political points, borrow the images’ emotional impact, or set up his own ironic contrasts in an astute way.” Lesage, “Torture Documentaries.” Lesage here points to the way that Gibney recognizes the emotional and political tie in these photos and then puts them in play alongside the Abu Ghraib photos.
27. In discussing the form of Taxi to the Dark Side, Julia Lesage argues that there is more aesthetic development in the presentation of other visual material. The film, she suggests, contributes to the viewer’s emotional investment in the prisoners through these drawings and reenactments. She says, “The film is edited around the recurring image of a Bagram prison cell, showing shackles and chains dangling from the ceiling, from which prisoners were hung by raised hands. The recurrence of this image elicits ever-greater horror as the narrative circles back to it and as we know more of the background of torture, especially at Bagram.” Lesage, “Torture Documentaries.”
28. Kant’s great achievement in moral philosophy is to remove duty from the domain of sentiment where it had been mired and to show that our duty lifts us above the world of feelings.
29. Paula Rabinowitz argues, “Neither the eye nor the camera can take in wholeness; wholeness, like Georg Lukács’s totality, is a dream. Partiality is the province of the lens, whether in the eye or the camera.” Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented, 208–209. She goes on to suggest that it’s the documentary directors that really push this formal nature that allows the viewer to think through the implication of our perception of the body. Clearly the depiction of bodies in the Abu Ghraib photos is not one of whole bodies. They are bodies made into partial objects, objects in the contemporary torture fantasy. And while these documentaries work to destroy that fantasy, they at times miss this fantastical element in the service of providing a whole story.
30. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes kettle logic. He notes, “[a man] was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed the kettle from his neighbour at all. So much the better: if only a single one of these three lines of defence were to be accepted as valid, the man would have to be acquitted.” Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 4:120.
31. Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 167.
32. Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others.”
33. Dora Apel, “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib,” Art Journal, 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 89.
3. TORTURE PORN AND THE DESIRING SUBJECT IN HOSTEL AND SAW
1. Jerod Hollyfield feels that the torture porn label has obscured the more interesting aspects of the subgenre. He says, “For Roth, the torture of the film does not act as pornography, but a glimpse into the overlooked specters that manifest when post-Cold War nationalism and the forces of the globalized market collide with American cultural perspectives.” Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield, “Torture Porn and Bodies Politic: Post-Cold War American Perspectives in Eli Roth’s Hostel and Hostel: Part II,” Cineaction 78 (2009): 28. And while I agree that these films should not be dismissed out of hand for their more conservative aspects, I do feel that the porn in torture porn is apropos if only for the nod toward the sexual nature that these horror films reveal at the heart of torture itself, which contradicts the contemporary fantasy about a cleaner, more purposeful type of torture.
3. The imagery from media representations of torture can also be seen in other representational landscapes. As Andre Mayer observes, “Torture has even invaded our urban landscape. Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America reprimanded U.S. film company After Dark Films for a billboard promoting the upcoming thriller Captivity. In it, Canadian actress Elisha Cuthbert plays a supermodel who is kidnapped and tormented by a deranged fan. The offending ad, which appeared in New York and Los Angeles, featured Cuthbert in four panels, labeled ‘Abduction,’ ‘Confinement,’ ‘Torture’ and ‘Termination.’ In the final frame, she appears to be dead. While After Dark has yanked the ad, the film’s current poster—in which Cuthbert looks to be buried alive—is no less vexing.” Andre Mayer, “The Crying Game: Why Torture Scenes Have Gone Mainstream,” CBC Arts and Film, April 11, 2007, http://web.archive.org/web/20070703045949/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/torture.html (accessed February 11, 2014).
4. The Saw films include James Wan’s Saw (2004), Darren Lynn Bousman’s Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), David Hackl’s Saw V (2008), Kevin Greutert’s Saw VI (2009), and Kevin Greutert’s Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010).
5. Other examples of torture porn films include Captivity (Roland Joffe, 2007), Carver (Andrew van den Houten, 2008), The Collector (Arkin O’Brien, 2009), Offspring (Franklin Guerrero Jr., 2009), The Human Centipede: First Sequence (Tom Six, 2010), and The Woman (Lucky McKee, 2011).
6. While many have embraced the term torture porn, for some scholars this has been an unfortunate trend. Lowenstein argues, for example, that torture porn is not the best name for this group of films and instead argues for the term spectacle horror. “Spectacle horror’s ‘loudness’ as a mode of direct, visceral engagement with viewers distinguishes it from ‘quieter’ forms of what we might call ‘ambient horror,’ but this distinction should not mandate the negative value judgments that structure torture porn as a category.” Adam Lowenstein, “Spectacle Horror and Hostel: Why ‘Torture Porn’ Does Not Exist,” Critical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2011): 42.
7. Maisha Wester claims that it has to do with the types of villains and heroes. She says, “As post–War on Terror narratives, the Splat Packs’ films trouble the lines between torturer, victim, villain, and hero. In other words, at a time when the political moral efficacy of torture was centered in political debates, these directors and writers visualized the difficulty of reducing such acts to permissible or unpardonable. Notably, most of the films … feature average Americans both as tortured victim and torturing hero.” Maisha Wester, “Torture Porn and Uneasy Feminisms: Rethinking (Wo) men in Eli Roth’s Hostel Films,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29, no. 5 (2012): 389. I agree here with Wester and would emphasize that this allows the films to turn away from the demands of biopower.
8. The evanescence of the musical as a dominant genre in Hollywood is very misleading. Though Hollywood rarely makes musicals today, the concern of the musical—locating and exploring how the subject enjoys itself—continues in new generic manifestations like action films, pornography, and torture porn. The set pieces in these genres interrupt the narrative with an outburst of enjoyment.
10. Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 656.
11. This is the central point in Lacan’s analysis of sadism. See ibid., 645–668.
12. While complicated in its own right, the television show Homeland, though not in any way a part of the horror genre, has certain plot lines that also depict torture as damaging the victim’s psychic structure, as accessing and disturbing the victim’s unconscious.
13. Kevin Wetmore notes the Hostel films relation to American torture. He says, “The first film engages the fear of being tortured and the fear of torture in general. The second film engages the fear of becoming a torturer and the ambiguity of rendition, enhanced interrogation and the ‘ticking bomb’ justification for torture.” Kevin J. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2013), 105.
14. The simplistic depiction of Slovakia functions, for Jerod Hollyfield, as a critique of America. He explains, “As a result, while Roth may appear to eschew an accurate portrayal of present-day Slovakia, he presents a portrait of a nation whose history is in service to a globalized economy that absorbs national legacies into its own order.” Jerod Hollyfield, “Torture Porn and Bodies Politic,” 25.
15. Wetmore makes the observation that there might even be a regressive turn back in representation of women in horror films when he points out that the final girl, who was a marker of potential female power or triumph made famous by Carol Clover, has disappeared in contemporary horror. He says, “Clover’s famous ‘final girl’ becomes the ‘final couple’ in the remake of Friday the 13th or Hatchet. The ‘final girls’ of Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Rejects, and Martyrs all die horrible, painful deaths, despite their resourcefulness.” Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema, 15.
16. See Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
17. Jason Middleton, “The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 4 (Summer 2012): 9.
18. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 7:158.
19. During a scene in which the friends are out jogging, they link sexual experience with manhood when they discuss the first kid that had sex in class and how they knew it. In one scene, Todd says to Stuart, “Sometimes you meet a guy and there’s just something fucking scary about him. Something that makes you think: this guy has killed somebody. He doesn’t have to act tough. He never has to say it. But like an animal, you can sense it. You know that this guy’s got the balls to do what few others can. And that’s you after today my friend. People are going to fucking fear you. Linda is going to fucking fear you. What we do today is going to pay off everyday for the rest of our fucking lives.” For these characters, though not for all the torturers depicted in this film, torture can be seen as a potent signifier of masculinity.
20. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Keven Atell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
21. About this scene, Wester points out that it reveals not that Stuart is excluded from patriarchal power but that he pursues it in other forms, notably torture. She explains, “His violence expresses not only a latent brutal desire and attitude towards his wife but a socially suppressed privilege to which his position as patriarch traditionally allows him access. Social mandate requires him to suppress such violent impulses, yet success within the market allows him renewed access in extreme ways.” Wester, “Torture Porn and Uneasy Feminisms,” 392.
22. Unlike the Hostel films, the Saw films do not traverse national boundaries. As McCann argues, “The Saw films situate horror in the everyday world of contemporary America but do not project that horror onto a foreign invader.” Ben McCann, “Body Horror,” in See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, ed. James Aston and John Walliss (London: McFarland, 2013), 42.
23. Dean Lockwood says that Saw should also be read as an expression of contemporary capitalism. He says, “My argument situates Saw in the context of mutations of capital and ensuing transformations of labor, specifically, the affective dimension of labor.” Dean Lockwood, “Work Is Hell: Life in the Mannequin Factory,” in Aston and Walliss, See the Saw Movies, 141.
24. Sharrett points out that the killer is also a completely mundane figure. He argues, “Jigsaw, the disgruntled, middle-class white male professional, fits in a long tradition of male characters fed up with democratic institutions, determined to set their own rules.” Christopher Sharrett, “The Problem of Saw,” Cineast 35 (2009).
25. Steve Jones points out that the ticking clock is also an important part of the Saw films. About the torture traps in the films, he says, “All of these traps are restricted by time as well as space (countdown timers limit the victims’ options), making explicit the connection between spatial and temporal control.” Steve Jones, “‘Time Is Wasting’: Con/sequence and S/pace in the Saw Series,” Horror Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 226. This provides insight into another biopolitical link to the theme of the countdown clock in 24 as linked to the justification of torture. Of course, unlike 24, in which torture always succeeds, in the Saw films torture always fails to be productive.
26. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 256.
27. Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 137.
28. The fact of Kramer’s own imminent death indicates that the lesson he is trying to impart to others through torture is really a lesson for himself. Torture always reveals more about the torturer than it does the victim, despite the fact that the torture fantasy and Kramer privilege the knowledge that the victim has or will have.
29. Lockwood writes about attempts to censor torture porn, and he suggests that torture porn, in fact, could play a liberating role. But he argues that ultimately it falls short of anything radical because it is too mired in the horror genre itself. He says, “In terms of its affective strategies it is mired in the typical. The problem with torture porn cinema, as I see it, is that it fails to achieve sufficient escape velocity, so to speak, to disrupt the clichés of the aesthetic tropes to which it consistently refers.” Dean Lockwood, “All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of ‘Torture Porn,’” Popular Communications 7 (2009): 47.
30. Critics have tended to view torture porn as inherently conservative. For instance, Sharrett argues that torture porn marks a nadir in the horror genre. He argues, “It is important, I think, to place Saw and other such films in the context of genre history, recognizing that the issue at the center of any critique is not so much hoary arguments about the role of violence in cinema, but the regressive nature of popular cinema in the current moment, its sense of the worthlessness of human beings, and the horror film’s embrace of dominant ideas about power and repression.” Christopher Sharrett, “The Problem of Saw: ‘Torture Porn’ and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror Films,” Cineaste 35, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 37.
4. 24, JACK BAUER, AND THE TORTURE FANTASY
1. Howard Rosenberg, “Deft Timing Makes 24 Tick: Fox’s new drama covers an hour of its characters’ lives in each episode, building up suspense minute by minute,” Los Angeles Times (November 6 2001): F1.
2. The use of a real-time narrative has a few antecedents in film, and they almost always use real time to create a sense of urgency, just as 24 does. In the classic example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), the two murderers are on the verge of being caught for the crime during of the film’s real time narrative. Hitchcock furthers the sense of urgency by eliminating obvious cuts, which differs considerably from the multilayered 24.
3. Dana Calvo, “Intrigue at Its Own Pace: With each episode covering one hour of an anti-terror agent’s harrowing day, 24 bets viewers will be in the mood-for the plot device and the subject.” Los Angeles Times (October 28, 2001): F6.
4. Christian Smith, “FOX Premieres Innovative Concept Tonight on 24,” Michigan Daily (November 6, 2001), www.michigandaily.com.
5. The dense narrative complexity of Veronica Mars (2004–2007), for example, both intrigued and sometimes confused audiences but became a fundamental part of their identification with the series.
6. The powerful nature of this fantasy leads some opponents of torture to acknowledge that they would consent to torture in the ticking bomb scenario. But they insist on the exceptional status of the situation and refuse to use it as a basis for legitimizing or normalizing torture.
7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 479.
8. This was especially true in fundamentalist Christian circles, where author Hal Lindsey popularized the notion of a coming apocalypse with The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970) and The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (1980). But even respected atomic scientists formed the doomsday clock in 1947, with which they measured how close the planet was to nuclear destruction on the basis of current international relations. This symbolic clock calculates time on the basis of how many minutes before midnight—or total annihilation—we have. Currently, it is 11:55 on this countdown. Hal Lindsey’s Countdown, however, is now out of print.
9. The film 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009) represents the ultimate expression of the anxiety about the end of the world predicted by the Mayan calendar.
10. There are many films that struggle against the notion that we are just finite beings, often aiming directly at time itself. Here we might consider the way that recent films such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2012) or Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) use temporal disjuncture in the narrative in order to investigate the desiring subject.
11. Heidegger, Being and Time, 470.
12. There have been many books written on time and narrative, for example, Paul Riceour’s Time and Narrative, which details the way time is created through a narrative configuration. See Paul Riceour, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
13. In “The Art of Time, Theory to Practice,” Jesse Matz points out that most narratives are defined by their relation to time. He argues, “In theory, then, human time is a product of narratives temporal dynamics.” But he also argues that narrative has the potential to constitute an “art of time” and allow us to create more “temporal diversity.” Jesse Matz, “The Art of Time, Theory to Practice,” Narrative 19, no. 3 (2011): 275.
14. It does not require a great leap to see that the form also alludes to the news format. Television audiences are used to looking at several different frames on screen. Additionally, this coincides with our expectation that television, along with the Internet, is the medium that can give us life in real time.
15. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 20.
16. In her detailed investigation into the torture on 24, Isabel Penido links this emphasis to a cultural shift in the military. She says, “The program, which defines inflicting torture as patriotic, is extremely popular with cadets who will go on to hold command posts in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to [U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick] Finnegan’s observations, 24’s insistence that the law must be sacrificed to protect the security of the nation has fueled resistance to the idea that the United States military has to respect human rights, even when the terrorists do not.” Isabel Penido, “Tortured Logic: Entertainment and the Spectacle of Deliberately Inflicted Pain in 24 and Battlestar Galactica,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 52 (2010), http://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/pinedoTorture/index.html (accessed February 15, 2014).
17. Lisa Nakamura points out that the depiction of race, torture, and surveillance are intimately related in 24. She explains, “Both torture and information communication technologies (ICTs) are spectacular in the sense that they compel a fascinated gaze. 24’s technologiza-tion of torture and its narrative precursor—digital identification technologies—foreground the ways in which the terrorist body is informationalized as a digital signal, a graphic file that can be decoded and recoded using the right kind of software-based tools.” Lisa Nakamura, “Interfaces of Identity: Oriental Traitors and Telematic Profiling in 24,” Camera Obscura 70, 24, no. 1 (2009): 111.
18. Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 243.
19. This is the case in season 2 (in which we learn Jack has retired but gets pulled back in to help with an impending nuclear attack); season 4 (in which we find he was fired from CTU for his torturing methods and is now working for Secretary of Defense James Heller, but is called back in to help with a ticking bomb scenario); season 5 (eighteen months after he has faked his death he is living on the outskirts of town with a woman and her son, but he reemerges at CTU to help his colleagues who are under attack); season 6 (in which Jack is still working for CTU but has been in a Chinese prison for twenty months, and the president must make a deal to get him back to help with an emergency); season 7 (in which CTU has been closed down and Jack is on trial for torture, but is pulled out of the trial by the FBI for a ticking bomb emergency); season 8 (in which Jack is still working for CTU, but is about to retire to spend time with Kim and her family and is called back in one last time).
20. Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 74.
23. Quoted in Shampa Biswas and Zahi Zalloua, “Introduction: Torture Democacy, and the Human Body,” in Torture: Power, Democracy, and the Human Body, ed. Shampa Biswas and Zahi Zalloua (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 12.
24. 24 also came under attack for its depiction of torture, and it tried to respond to these attacks within the content of the show. At the beginning of the seventh season, the show’s creators literally put Jack on trial. The senators of the special committee investigating CTU accuse him of torture. He admits to torturing and says he knows that it is morally wrong, but that he saved American lives doing it and so would do it again. Ironically, the FBI, to help save the nation, pulls him out of this very trial. In this second-to-last season, by including the self-reflexive critique of torture, 24 is performing the same gesture that it performs in nearly every torture scene. A character demands that Jack (or the torturer) stop, but then the torturer procures the essential information and proves the protestations wrong. Putting Jack on trial for torture at the beginning of the seventh season allowed the series, on a larger scale, to suggest that the nation needed Jack and his torturing ways.
5. THE BIODETECTIVE VERSUS THE DETECTIVE OF THE REAL IN ZERO DARK THIRTY AND HOMELAND
1. This film is significant in that the entire running time is dedicated to the contemporary torture fantasy as it depicts the search for and killing of bin Laden, but there are many other films coming out every year that continue to depict torture as a regular plot device. It has become a staple of the action film. Joseph McGinty Nichol’s 3 Days to Kill (February 21, 2014) and Jaume Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop (February 28, 2014), for example, two ordinary action films, which came out in subsequent weeks, both had one or more scenes in which the hero quickly tortures his target in order to find out information in a quick and supposedly easy manner.
2. The Bourne films are Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002), Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Tony Gilroy’s The Bourne Legacy (2012).
3. Poe is the inventor of the classical detective, who first appears in Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The hard-boiled detective emerges in the work of a group of writers of detective fiction, including Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
4. About shows featuring detectives relying on forensics, Yvonne Tasker says, “Even the forensic shows which came to prominence in the 2000s still work to reveal motive; despite the mantra that physical evidence doesn’t lie, neither does it explain.” Yvonne Tasker, “Television Crime Drama and Homeland Security: From Law Order to ‘Terror TV,’” Cinema Journal 51, no. 4 (2012): 57. Tasker suggests, however, that this complexity disappears when the theme of national security enters the narrative, which she dubs Terror TV. Terror TV, for Tasker, erases the question of motive and replaces it with the urgency of the ticking bomb. Tasker distinguishes between federal agency shows such as 24, The Agency (2001–20013), Threat Matrix (2003–2004), Sleeper Cell (2005–2006), The Unit (2006–2009), and NCIS (2003–present) and crime shows such as Law & Order (1990–2010), NYPD Blue (1993–2005), Bones (2005–present), Without a Trace (2002–2009), and Lie to Me (2009–2011). But she points out that even the crime shows become less complex when they take on the themes of Terror TV.
5. About Bigelow characters, Leo Braudy says, “This friction between an extreme version of the conventional hero and the needs of a larger group seems to me to be a constant element in the plots that attract Bigelow.” Leo Braudy, “Near Dark: An Appreciation,” Film Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2010): 29. Clearly, Zero Dark Thirty continues this theme with Maya’s place in and struggles with the CIA itself.
6. Bigelow’s use of audio from the 9/11 attack differentiates her film from other 9/11 films such as United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006). Greengrass uses documentary footage—both image and sound—in order to establish authenticity in his film. By confining herself to audio, Bigelow heightens the sense of threat while lessening to some extent the sense of authenticity.
7. Many reporters remarked on the importance of the torture scene. For instance, John Anderson says, “Zero Dark Thirty reaches the indirect but unavoidable conclusion that torture worked, that the key piece of information that led to bin Laden was achieved through waterboarding and the variety of deprivations suffered by detainees.” John Anderson, “The Hunted and the Haunted: The disturbing brilliance of Zero Dark Thirty,” America February 11 (2013): 29.
10. Bigelow’s obsession with authenticity affected multiple levels of the film form. In discussing the sound, Bigelow says, “Paul actually hired a sound artist in Pakistan to record the noise of the marketplace in the actual town where the scene was meant to take place. I mean, who does that?” Quoted in Brooks Barnes, “As Enigmatic as Her Picture: Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty,” New York Times (December 30, 2012), MT2.
12. Reviewers came up with a similar interpretation at the time of the film’s release. For instance, David Denby says, “[The torture scenes] damage the movie as an alleged authentic account. Bigelow and Boal—the team behind The Hurt Locker—want to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time, and the contradiction mars an ambitious project.” David Denby, “The Current Cinema: Dead Reckoning, Zero Dark Thirty, and This Is Forty,” New Yorker (December 24, 2012), 25.
13. The desire of the other resides in the blank space in the field of knowledge. One cannot approach it through the apparatuses of knowledge, like biometric examination, but must have recourse to interpretation. Desire is never known, but only interpreted.
14. Slavoj Žižek contends, “The status of the drive itself is inherently ethical.” Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do (London: Verso, 1991), 272.
16. For instance, Peter Howell claims, “The red-haired fury has to push through obstacles posed by a dismissive U.S. Embassy station chief in Pakistan (Kyle Chandler), by a hard-to-convince boss at the CIA’s Virginia HQ (Mark Strong) and by the once-burned, twice-shy National Security Advisor (Stephen Dillane).” Peter Howell, “Zero Dark Thirty a Masterful Thriller: Review,” Toronto Star (January 11, 2013), www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2013/01/11/zero_dark_thirty_a_masterful_thriller_review.html (accessed March 12, 2014).
17. Laura Rascaroli, “Steel in the Gaze: On POV and the Discourse of Vision in Kathryn Bigelow’s Cinema,” Screen 38, no. 3 (1997): 237.
18. I am indebted to Ethan Wattley for this point.
19. Nonetheless, Cross is able to rebel, and he does so by employing the very biological technology that the national security forces use to control him. By depicting this rebellion, The Bourne Legacy reveals its own rebellion against the ideology of biopower. Only a subject that exceeds its body could revolt in this way.
20. Carrie’s insistence on the need to survey Brody in spite of laws protecting his privacy appears to establish her as a biodetective at the beginning of the series. But, as the series develops, it becomes apparent that surveillance works in service of the interpretation of desire for Carrie.
21. It is not clear, however, whether the e-mail address is ultimately helpful for the CIA or for the terrorists, which indicates that even this supposedly successful instance of torture on the show is ambiguous.
6. ALIAS AND THE FICTIONAL ALTERNATIVE TO TORTURE
1. Though Alias presents Sydney’s fictions as almost always successful, they always remain fictions for her. There is never a threat that she will fall completely into the role that she’s playing and lose herself in the fiction, as we often see in films or television series that depict agents working undercover. Because she is working as a double agent in the first season and a half of the series, sustaining the fiction often requires complex performances, but the series never shows the performance intruding on Sydney’s own subjectivity. It is as if her lack of psychic investment in the fictions contributes to their effectiveness.
2. One of the small hints that Sydney’s work, and especially her violence, bleeds into fantasy lies in her sexual preferences. Deborah Finding and Alice MacLachlon points out that Alias subtly links the heroine’s violent abilities with her enjoyment of rough sex. They say, “Nor is the image of the female action hero who secretly (or not so secretly) likes rough or unconventional sex uncommon.… The implication is either that violent work leads to a craving for release through equally violent sex or that the hero can only combat darkness because she possesses it, and that this darkness must manifest itself through ‘dark’ sexual play.” Deborah Finding and Alice MacLachlan, “Alias, Alienation, and Agency: The Physical Integrity of Sydney Bristow,” in Investigating Alias: Secrets and Spies, ed. Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 80.
3. Molly Brost argues that in the fictions of the aliases Sydney renegotiates the male gaze. She says, “As the hero of the story, she is placed in an atypical role for a female, at least as compared to the female described in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and though she is often sexualized, she is always shown as remaining in control of her sexuality, using it for the purpose of completing CIA missions and casting it off when necessary.” Molly Brost, “Spy Games: Alias, Sydney Bristow, and the Ever Complicated Gaze,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 6, no. 1 (2007), www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2007/brost.htm (accessed February 14, 2014).
4. See Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
5. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 12.
6. Manuel Garin notes that the aliases in Alias become part of the larger narrative in J. J. Abrams’s following project Fringe (2008–2013). That is, the narrative itself becomes bifurcated, not just the main character. Concerning Fringe, Garin says, “The series’ great finding is to transfer the doubling of the heroine to the narrative as a whole: it brings forward the fictional experiments that Abrams and his team had already conducted in Alias.” Manuel Garin, “Truth Takes Time: the Interplay Between Heroines, Genres and Narratives in three J. J. Abrams’ Television Series,” Communication and Society/Comunicación y Sociedad 26, no. 2 (2013): 52. While I think this argument is incredibly insightful, I would suggest that the reason Alias is more successful is that Sydney’s aliases remain truly fiction and thus create a stage for the truth to emerge. In Fringe, both universes have the status of a reality and thus neither can hold claim to truth.
7. Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 133. For more on fantasy as the setting for desire, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Fantasme originaire; Fantasme des origines; Origines du fantasme (Paris: Fayard, 2010).
8. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome, 1975–1976, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 78.
9. Though not addressing biopolitics specifically, Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown make the insightful point that even the biological family is in question at the heart of Alias. They say, “Alias is unique in that it seems to reinstate the biological family at the heart of the narrative and as a source of support for its main character Sydney Bristow by reconfiguring the separation between chosen family and biological family. At the same time it contests the biological family by offering a distorted representation of conventional family roles and gender dynamics.” Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown, “Can’t Live with ’Em, Can Shoot ’Em: Alias and the (Thermo) Nuclear Family,” in Investigating Alias, 89.
10. Those invested in biopower believe that its analysis penetrates directly to the truth. For instance, the detective who privileges DNA information postulates that this information is straightforward. But DNA is a symbolic map, and one must read it just like any other map.
11. In one sense, the torturer doesn’t ignore the imaginary because she or he relies on the imaginary identifications of the victim in order to procure information. But the torturer’s conception of truth dismisses the imaginary altogether. The imaginary is just a tool in the hands of the torturer, not a part of what she or he hopes to find.
12. Notably, another female-centered television show about a female detective comes to the same conclusion. In Veronica Mars, Veronica (Kristen Bell) also uses aliases rather than force when she needs information. Indeed, her ability to imitate people and convince anyone of her assumed identity is part of what makes her a good private detective. At one point, she even says, “Despite popular opinion, you really can’t beat the truth out of someone.” Veronica evinces awareness of the power of the fiction and because of this does not believe in torture.
13. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 95.
14. The relationship between Sydney and Dixon is essential to the form of Alias. This pairing of a black man and a white woman as the most important protection for American national security plays a structuring role throughout the series. While the series doesn’t go so far as to have them be romantically involved, their friendship and equality play a key role in the fictions that they create in their joint search for the truth. Unlike 24’s waning of interracial relationships and communities as the series goes on, Alias relies on these relationships throughout its duration.
15. Other characters in the series note Sydney’s seriousness. They tell her constantly that she should relax and enjoy herself. But almost every time she attempts to do so, some traumatic event befalls her. The depictions of Sydney enjoying herself are confined for the most part to her performances of the various aliases.
16. For the classic psychoanalytic account of femininity as a masquerade, see Joan Rivière, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303–313.
17. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 67.
18. Hilary Radner, Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011), 38.
19. The path to authenticity can also go in the other direction. That is, when a woman discovers her more feminist self—she enters the workforce, becomes more of a protector for her family, becomes aware of the way her current feminine identity is oppressing her, or becomes violent—she is often depicted shedding or deconstructing her feminine appearance. For example, in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), the two women, after their enlightenment, trade their lipstick and jewelry for cowboy hats and bandanas. At the same time, they stop worrying about their hair and change their attire from dresses to jeans. Though this film moves in the opposite direction than that of Pretty Woman, it remains within the same philosophical universe. It conceives of the woman as a purely symbolic construction rather than as a real subject.
20. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Laura Portwood-Stace argue that this is also the case in the cosmetic surgery reality television show. They say, “Reality makeover shows clearly and uncritically legitimate the increasing normalization of the cultural practice of cosmetic surgery in US culture, and transparently conflate personal fulfillment and individual achievement with the attainment of a physically ideal body.” Sarah Banet-Weiser and Laura Portwood-Stace, “‘I Just Want to Be Me Again!’: Beauty Pageants, Reality Television and Post-feminism,” Feminist Theory 7, no. 2 (2006): 255–272.
21. Elizabeth Barnes says that series like Alias and Buffy the Vampire Slayer show the contribution the women can have to the employment of violence itself. Barnes explains, “female action heroes dramatize in specific and somewhat counterintuitive ways both the potentially dehumanizing, because desensitizing, effects of violence and the redemptive potential of emotional vulnerability.” Elizabeth Barnes, “The New Hero: Women, Humanism, and Violence in Alias and Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” in Investigating Alias, 58.
22. Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 77.
23. David Coon argues that Alias walks the line of relying on sexist imagery and moving beyond this image in the depictions of Sydney. He analyzes a spate of advertisements for the series that used the tagline “Sometimes the truth hurts,” and he argues that the show’s position to truth positions Sydney outside the realm of objectification. According to Coon, “The image emphasizes her importance without isolating and emphasizing her sexuality or placing her in a position of objectification.” David Roger Coon, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Selling of Charlie’s Angels and Alias,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 33, no. 1 (2005): 8.
24. Manuel Garin also considers this episode and investigates the relationship between truth and time not only in Alias but using this theme from Alias, also looks at other J. J. Abrams’s series such as Felicity (1998–2002) and Fringe (2008–2013). He claims that through the seriality of television, Abrams—using strong female characters—slowly undermines the expected plot trajectory and with it contemporary American ideology. He argues, “Truth and lie integrate a territory in perpetual mutation, going from the romantic adventures of Felicity to the familiar ambiguity in Alias and the ontological duplication of the real in Fringe. Each model resonates in the precedent one and outlines a portrait of the heroine permanently split between the truths of her feminine condition (shattered and elliptical) and the lies of the universe she is doomed to save (legal, ethical).” Garin, “Truth Takes Time,” 49.
25. Jacques-Alain Miller, “On Semblances in the Relation Between the Sexes,” trans. Sina Najafi and Marina Harss, in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 19.