History

A central thread through this book is the question of the place of 9/11 in history. Jacques Derrida observed that the term ‘9/11’ quickly become a way of marking the attacks as a ‘singular’ and ‘unprecedented’ event, thereby signifying that the attacks somehow existed outside of, or beyond, history (see Habermas et al. 2003: 85–6). In the same vein, David Simpson argues that 9/11 was ‘widely presented as an interruption of the deep rhythms of cultural time, a cataclysm simply erasing what was there rather than evolving from anything already in place, and threatening a yet more monstrous future’ (2006: 4). The appropriation of the term ‘Ground Zero’ is indicative of this stripping away of history, leading John Dower to observe how its origins in World War II were replaced by connotations that placed

America as victim of evil forces – alien peoples and cultures who, ‘unlike ourselves,’ did not recognise the sanctity of human life and had no compunctions about killing innocent men, women and children. […] To an extent almost impossible to exaggerate, ‘Ground Zero 2001’ became a wall that simultaneously took its name from the past and blocked out all sightlines of from what and where that name came. (2010: 161)

The consequence of this turning away or repression of both history and historical complexity, especially of events in the recent past which might explain the attacks, marginalises the calling into play of historical explanations produced by historians and political scientists following 9/11, as well as evidencing a degradation of the ability of the wider culture to think historically, that is, to place contemporary events in relation to earlier events in a way that might help explain and contextualise.⁴⁹

And yet, this is not quite the full story: in a key speech, Bush stated that ‘history has called our nation into action’ (quoted in Croft 2006: 126), signalling the importance of a providential, nationalist sense of history to the initial response to 9/11. The introduction to this book described how the photograph Ground Zero Spirit called on a nostalgic and jingoistic sense of World War II and how this provided ballast for the call to arms in Afghanistan and Iraq; as Marianna Torgovnick notes, mythologised accounts of World War II ‘can make things happen’ (2005: x). The height of World Trade Center One, or the ‘Freedom Tower’, the central building in the complex built to replace the World Trade Center, is 1,776 feet (541 metres). This height was chosen to commemorate the year in which the US declared independence from Britain, thus beginning the War of Independence. Devin Zuber notes that the building’s ‘cornerstone ceremony was conveniently sped up to occur on the 4th of July preceding the 2004 Republican National Convention’ (2006: 291) and that the symbolic architectural gesture of the building’s height was a way of garnering credibility for the ongoing ‘war on terror’ through symbolic association with ‘the most patriotic war in American history’ (2006: 271). These examples show how the banal nationalism that shaped the cultural response to 9/11 relied on a simplified view of the past that legitimised war as moral, proportionate and with historical precedent. Previous chapters have shown how, in terms of cinema, this particular dilute relation to history underpins the jingoistic sentiments of the unity and revenge films, the apocalyptic sensibility of the end-of-the-world cycle and the individualised/medicalised narratives of the therapy film. In each case, history is at once effaced (9/11 comes out of the blue; historical explanation, from the scholarly to the conspiratorial, is deemed inappropriate) and activated (traditions are reaffirmed, a positivist and partial view of the nation’s history is brought to the fore, and personal and family histories are preferred over the political and geopolitical). The erasure of historical complexity and the deployment of what might be termed a historical nationalism is associated with a neoconservative response to 9/11. However, as the decade progressed, the discursive combination of dehistoricised present and mythic past became increasingly unsustainable and a more questioning and critical approach to 9/11 and its aftermath began to shape popular culture, something seen most clearly in the cycle of torture films described in chapter seven. A key element of this critical approach was a willingness to reach for a greater historicity: a view of the past that might frame 9/11 in a more complex way. This chapter argues that a cycle of history films displays this desire for a more serious engagement with past events, and focuses on the revisionist account of World War II found in The Good German (2006), which exemplifies the desire to seek out complex and critical counter-histories through which to reframe the experience of 9/11. This is followed by an analysis of Zero Dark Thirty, a film that at first glance appears to belong to this cycle of critical history films, but which activates history in a carefully calibrated way that serves to shore up the hegemonic response to 9/11.

The Good German depicts a world of political subterfuge, counter-espionage and black marketeering in occupied Berlin in the period immediately preceding the Potsdam conference of 1945. The city (and its subsequent partition) is symbolic of the complex forces at play during World War II, not least the quickly disintegrating alliance between the US and the USSR. Events in the hinterland of the narrative include the Holocaust and war crimes, the mass rape of Berlin women by Soviet soldiers and the emergence of what would become the Cold War arms race. Christine Sprengler argues that the film’s opening montage sequence, composed of footage of Berlin shot by Hollywood filmmakers William Wyler and Billy Wilder, who were seconded to the US military to make propaganda films, allows a comparison to be drawn between The Good German and films such as Rome Open City (1945) and Paisa (1946) (2009: 165). The use of newsreel in this way seeks a neorealist affinity with actual events that ‘testifies to very real destruction caused by conflict in an age where death and battles are sanitized and footage censored to accord with the Pentagon’s closely regulated image of war’ (2009: 167–8). Indeed, the film’s setting – with US president Harry Truman’s Potsdam speech talking of freedom, peace and prosperity, while the events of the narrative reveal clandestine power struggles and political assassinations – suggests that political rhetoric has long been used to surface over historical complexity. A mise-en-scène rich in historical detail, including, as Sprengler notes, ‘the 1937 Rolls Phantom 3 owned by Field Marshall Montgomery, a 1936 Chrysler Airflow limousine driven during the Potsdam conference and countless antique props flown in from Germany including telephones, light switches, toilets, stoves and street signs’, adds to the sense of authenticity (2009: 163). The depiction of Berlin in this way offers an alternative to the stock images of World War II that had given shape to post-9/11 popular culture, an alternative that points to aspects of World War II that are repressed in contemporary culture, including ‘internment camps for Japanese and Japanese-Americans; incendiary bombings of cities in Germany and Japan; the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and, operating in a different register, the vital Soviet role in defeating the Nazis’ (Torgovnick 2005: 4). As a counterpoint to the post-9/11 effacement of history and the activation of a mythologised version of World War II after 9/11, The Good German engages historical complexity, and acknowledges the deep roots of US involvement in clandestine activities during the Cold War.

In the scenes following the opening credits US serviceman ‘Tully’ (Tobey Maguire, playing against the grain of his star persona) is introduced as a seemingly amiable driver to US journalist Jake Geismer (George Clooney), who has been commissioned to write an article on chief production engineer of the V-2 rocket Franz Bettmann. The film quickly reveals Tully’s violent abusive relationship with German prostitute Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett) and his unprincipled black marketeering. Later scenes show him beating a cripple and using racist invective, showing him as a sociopath with little respect for human life. While Tully strikes a casual and naïve pose in public, in private he enthuses that the war has been the best thing that ever happened to him, leading Sprengler to argue that while

Tully’s innocent act is the United States personified and envisioned through its own political rhetoric (young, enthusiastic, well-intentioned, moral, and courageous), Tully’s true self is the United States as envisioned by its critics (opportunistic, corrupt, hypocritical, ignorant and ruthless). (2009: 216)

While the character of Tully lends itself to this unambiguous reading, the film as a whole reveals a greater complexity in order to show that history is not so one-dimensional.

The central thread of the narrative has Geismer searching for missing German scientist Emil Brandt (Christian Oliver). Brandt, a former SS officer, had been the secretary of Bettmann at a Nazi concentration camp. While stationed at the camp, Brant kept careful notes detailing the abuse and extermination of Jewish prisoners that implicate Bettmann in war crimes. Soviet, British and US intelligence agencies are also seeking Bettmann in order to solicit his expertise in the development of rocket technology and nuclear weapons. In return they are willing to overlook his culpability in war crimes. To protect Bettmann’s reputation, Brandt must be assassinated. During his investigation Geismer meets his ex-lover, Lena Brandt (Blanchett), who is Emil’s wife and a Jew. Lena gives Brandt’s notes to Geismer for use in his expose. After Brandt is assassinated Geismer gives his papers to the US authorities in exchange for an exit visa that will allow Lena to leave Berlin. The notes are then destroyed in order to ensure that Bettmann can travel to the US with impunity. Geismer later learns that Lena has survived the Holocaust by doing ‘what she had to’ – that is, betraying the whereabouts of Jewish Germans in hiding, who were then sent to concentration camps.

As this plot summary indicates, the authorities are shown to behave, without exception, in ways that are self-interested and without recourse to moral principle or law. The successful recruitment of Nazi scientists (and war criminals) does, with time, allow the US to prevail in the Cold War, thereby ensuring post-war prosperity. As Sprengler notes, the film ‘questions the extent to which domestic prosperity came to postwar America at the expense of justice’ (2009: 167). There are strong parallels here between the clandestine activities of the intelligence agencies at the tail end of World War II and the actions and terror campaigns perpetrated by US intelligence agencies and surrogates of US power in the Middle East and elsewhere during the Cold War. Situated thus, characters are faced with a bounded set of choices often offering no easy course of action: Lena must betray others in order to survive, Geismer must sacrifice the truth in order to save Lena, and so on. Brandt’s willingness to atone for his sins by testifying (even under threat of assassination) identifies him as the good German of the film’s title – though his principled stance results only in his own death.

As he investigates, Geismer is cheated by Tully, is beaten up three times without response and repeatedly fails to grasp the full significance of the story he is investigating. It is suggested that Geismer is Jewish (he declines the offer of a ham sandwich), yet he retreats from going public with his evidence of war crimes in favour of protecting Lena, ethically compromising himself. Indeed, for a central character in a Hollywood film Geismer’s almost complete lack of agency is a way of refusing an understanding of history as driven by the will/actions of determined individuals. Clooney plays a similar character in Syriana and Michael Clayton, both of which seek to reveal how structural forces will determine the actions of individuals trying to challenge the system. That Geismer is shown to be naïve and ineffectual and to lack agency stresses how historical forces are paramount and that any account of events that foregrounds the experience of the individual will inevitably be found lacking. In contrast to the famous final scene of Casablanca (1942), which the film recalls through strong intertextual referencing, the ending of The Good German has Geismer insisting that Lena leave alone (in the absence of a Victor Laszlo character, Geismer could accompany her), eschewing romance in favour of ethical judgement on what she has done. It is a bleak ending, with all characters seemingly helpless, unfulfilled and compromised in one way or another.

The Good German undertakes a wholesale revision of the dominant senses of World War II, doing so through its depiction of characters who even if seeking a moral course of action are unable to carry it through. Marianna Torgovnick argues that in the US context, any properly complex understanding of World War II has been replaced by a focus on a heroic narrative of D-Day and victory (2005: 6–8); alongside this, a simplified version of the Holocaust (constructed as a scenario of evil fascistic hatred overcome by freedom-loving liberal democracy) now forms ‘a kind of citizenship for everyone after 1945’ (2005: xii). For Torgovnick, as a result of this view of World War II, it has become likely and ‘even logical, that we have difficulty imagining – steadily and unblinkingly – our nation in oppressive or even murderous roles’ (2005: 9). It is this difficultly that The Good German seeks to address. It does this, first, by showing the US state undermining its own stated principles in a naked power struggle as former allies quickly become enemies, and, second, in the depiction of US characters who are shown to be evil and exploitative, and with no easy options available for those who wish to try to maintain some ethical stance in the face of this complex situation. The complex geopolitical allegiances and ethically fraught scenarios shown in The Good German serve to model the historical intricacies of self-interested US involvement in the Middle East (including financial and military support for a number of Middle Eastern states). Indeed, the film’s revisionist view of World War II offers a model of history that helps us to understand the ways in which clandestine intervention (often once removed) shapes present and future events in complex and unpredictable ways.

While the opening sequences, and the care with which the story is meshed with actual historical events, suggest a realist aesthetic in play, the film, in fact, adopts a complex formal aesthetic through which to explore this view of history. It is careful in its recreation of the black-and-white cinematography associated with films of the period in which it is set; indeed, the filmmakers used, where possible, ‘vintage’ equipment (uncoated 1940s lenses, boom microphones, and so on) and filmed everything in a stripped down 1940sstyle studio. Techniques such as wipe dissolves, back-projection and model work all actively recall the classical Hollywood film style, as does the acting technique and use of expository voice-over. Thomas Newman (son of famed Hollywood composer Alfred Newman) crafted a ‘score reminiscent of 1940s film noir that was used to punctuate dramatic moments and in a way that called attention to itself’ (Sprengler 2009: 166). Little attempt is made to smooth the segue from the black-and-white film footage (actually shot on colour film and stripped of colour in post-production) into the archival material, the ensuing disjunction serving to remind the viewer that the film is a constructed object.

Fig. 24: History and intertextuality: The Good German (2006)

There is also a strong intertextual dimension to the film. As already suggested, it self-consciously recalls but ultimately refuses the propagandist inclination of Casablanca, instead paying homage to the cynical and pessimistic tone of The Third Man (1949). In contrast to, say, United 93, which emulates news/vérité camera techniques to create a powerful reality effect, The Good German calls attention to the process of reproducing the style associated with an earlier period of filmmaking. The objective here appears to be to encourage the viewer to think about the relations between past and present, the world on screen and the world outside the cinema, in a dialectical way. The result is complex: the past is recalled as something real, imperative, dialectical, but there is also a careful commitment to reminding the viewer that they are watching a film as construct. Sprengler concludes that

these visually distinctive oppositions between fact and fiction, past and present serve to remind viewers of the contemporary political lens that The Good German offers, one adept at exposing parallels between American involvement in each of the two conflicts [World War II and Iraq]. (2009: 169)

Many reviewers found in the film’s style (and its failure to deliver an unqualified nostalgic experience) grounds for criticism. Sprengler, on the other hand, suggests that it is precisely the way in which the film’s visual style ‘puts the viewer at arm’s length’ and constitutes an ‘intricate play of fact and fiction and past and present’ that enables it to ‘facilitate political critique’ (2009: 212).

The Good German is indicative of how much of the initial clarity of purpose and strong public support that the ‘greatest generation’ interpretation of World War II had garnered in the immediate aftermath of 11 September had dissipated by 2005. For example, one appropriation of the Ground Zero Spirit photograph circulating on the web shows the flag-raisers working together to put in place a McDonald’s sign, complete with Arabic script. The image suggests that the military campaign in Iraq is one of economic and cultural imperialism, and one with strong historical precedent.⁵⁰ Another indication of this critical historical perspective is the centrality of the flagraising photograph to two films directed by Clint Eastwood, Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). Flags of Our Fathers is a conventional war film in which the ferocious fighting on Iwo Jima, the raising of the flag and the Seventh War Loan bond drive are described from a US perspective. The film establishes a critical perspective through a focus on the story of Ira Hayes, a Native American flag-raiser who we see become victim to institutional and petty racism on his return to the US. The film also shows those directing the war to be cynical, hard-nosed and unsentimental, offering some corrective to the hagiography of the ‘greatest generation’ view of World War II. Letters from Iwo Jima is based on a bestselling collection of letters written by Japanese soldiers during the fighting on Iwo Jima. The Japanese see the flag being raised in the far distance and from their perspective the event is full of portent (gesturing to a future of defeat and humiliation). Through this scene, and the resolute focus on their experience, the film points to a different cultural perspective and in doing so inevitably casts the dominant senses of the flag-raising photograph in a new light. The crucial aspect here is recognition of the other, and the attempt to figure history from an alternative point of view.

Many of the films examined in this book have brought a revisionist history to bear on 9/11. In 25th Hour, a personal history is unearthed and reckoned with in a way that requires dramatic change; in Parallel Lines a road trip is punctuated with stops at places with deep historical significance in relation to the US narrative of Manifest Destiny; in the conspiracy films a paranoid history comes to the fore, with the filmmakers seeking historical precedent in ‘false-flag’ operations such as the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and so on; Syriana searches for a suitably complex style to depict the interplay of corporate, colonial and political histories as they shape geopolitical realities and narrow future possibility. These films can be situated alongside a wider cycle of historical films that might be said to display an interest in a darker, contingent and less self-regarding version of US history, including The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Westerns such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), Appaloosa (2008) and Meek’s Cutoff (2010), as well as the western-influenced No Country for Old Men (2007), can also be read as revisiting the (mythic) past in order to critique the present. Douglas Kellner considers There Will Be Blood (2007) to be an important post-9/11 film, writing that the depiction of oil prospecting and evangelical Christianity in the early twentieth century ‘attempts to get at the roots of American’s malaise and madness and shows its problems rooted in its core institutions and values, ultimately providing a critical commentary on the contemporary moment’ (2010: 15–16). We might also add the counter-factual documentary Death of a President (2006), shown on television in 2008, which reconstructs – via talking heads, archive footage, and so on – the imagined assassination of George W. Bush in 2007. This wider cycle, to which The Good German belongs, is evidence of how a critical response to 9/11 sought to draw attention to the ways in which historical complexity had been sacrificed to a reductive nationalist history underpinning the ‘war on terror’.⁵¹

In the Bourne film series – The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) – CIA agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is an amnesiac spy who fights to break free from a corrupt CIA. The films initially suggest that his past is unsullied and that he is a principled person victim to government persecution. However, as the cycle plays out, Bourne’s memory returns in the form of PTSD-style flashbacks (akin to those suffered by many characters in post-9/11 cinema). These flashbacks show political assassinations undertaken by Bourne, including those of US citizens, thereby turning the trauma trope into something more difficult and complex. The final scenes of The Bourne Ultimatum show that he volunteered to join a programme devoted to this clandestine, illegal intelligence work, thereby pointing to culpability, the refusal of deniability and a lack of closure: historical processes, the film suggests, that still have some way to run. As Vincent M. Gaine writes, ‘the franchise does not present Bourne as a passive victim in his trauma but rather as at least partially responsible for what has happened to him’ (2011: 161). The trilogy’s narrative arc offers a corrective to the ideological direction of the therapy film (Bourne is not cured; instead he must learn to live with a murderous past that cannot be altered) and demands a return of history that will result in a reckoning with no easy answers. As Gaine notes,

At the end of Supremacy [Bourne] apologizes to Irena Neski (Oksana Akinshina) for killing her parents. His apology is futile and pathetic, and crucially so; he cannot be absolved for what he did, but he can accept shame…and he can live with that shameful knowledge. Similarly, we, the Western viewing and voting public, can regard 9/11 and the war on terror as something we have nothing to do with, or we can regard ourselves as bearing some responsibility for what our leaders do, and act against them through democratic processes. (2011: 163)

Although commercial demands require that Bourne escape rather than stand trial for his crimes, moral quandary remains: might the series have been called ‘The Good American’? It is significant, perhaps, that a further instalment, The Bourne Legacy (2012), steps back in time to replay the same scenario, this time experienced by other agents in the programme, suggesting a certain failure to find, but desire to have, closure.

In the introduction I described how in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, The Quiet American had its release date held back. The complex view of history offered in this film, with US-sanctioned terrorism shown as an integral part of an imperialist foreign policy, was deemed unsuited to the prevailing climate of jingoistic nationalism. Instead, dominant discourse ceded to the kind of mythologised view of World War II found in films like Pearl Harbor. Yet by mid-decade, following abortive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, memories of the experience of the failed Vietnam War returned to public prominence. Aligned with anti-war activism, a number of new films were released, and older films re-purposed, to foster a critical historical consciousness. This cycle includes The Fog of War (2003), Errol Morris’s searching interview with Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War), the re-release of the anti-Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds (1974; 2009) and David Zeiger’s Sir! No Sir! (2005), a history of anti-war mutinies within the military during the Vietnam era. Perhaps the most important re-release in 2005 was the documentary film Winter Soldier. Originally released in 1972, the film shows the ‘Winter Soldier Investigation’, an event staged by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in which soldiers were invited to Detroit over a three-day period and asked to describe (and have recorded) the atrocities they had witnessed while on tours of duty in Vietnam. The events described included the torture and murder of enemy prisoners and the torture, rape and murder of Vietnamese civilians. The name of the hearings and the film’s title refers to a soldier willing to patriotically defend their nation in the most dire and desperate of circumstances, and the phrase originates from a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine on 23 December 1776 that was designed to motivate the colonial militia in their fight against the British during the American Revolution. The soldiers who testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation and the VVAW organisers (including future presidential candidate John Kerry) believed themselves to be patriots, holding onto core principles of US national identity in the face of tyranny and corruption (with the US state now in the place of the British crown). The re-release of Winter Soldier, and the wider cycle of which it is part, sought to reveal how the ‘war on terror’ echoes and extends the experience of an earlier failed war, pointing to the way in which US foreign policy is driven by self-interest and runs counter to all stated moral principles and avowed reasons for intervention. The cycle also shows how resistance to the war requires acknowledgement of culpability in war crimes, structural critique of the state, a willingness to consider alternative viewpoints and a commitment to civil disobedience (burning of draft cards, mutinies within the military, testifying to atrocity, and so on).⁵²

Set against this complex view of history, The Path to 9/11, a $30 million five-hour ABC television mini-series which aired on 10 and 11 September 2006, sought to provide a singular and orderly account of the history leading to the 9/11 attacks. The series shows a series of missed opportunities to tackle the terrorist threat resulting from inter-agency rivalry and a lack of political will, which it associates with the Clinton administration. The film’s politics become clear in a scene where Condoleezza Rice (Penny Johnson), as a representative of the incoming Bush government, is briefed about the threat, and replies: ‘We’re on it.’ Kellner objects to the series’ clear separation of ‘an incompetent Clinton administration and a resolute Bush-Cheney administration committed to fighting terrorism’ (2010: 108). Indeed, the overly didactic and partisan tone of the series – set in stark relief against the more complex historical films described above – caused controversy, and as Thomas Riegler reports, ‘the program became so discredited in the process that no DVD edition has yet been released’ (2011: 160–1).

Against this backdrop of a cycle of films that seek historical complexity there was some cause to presume that Zero Dark Thirty, which recounts the hunt for, and killing of, Osama bin Laden, would retain a critical historical consciousness. Unlike United 93 and World Trade Center, which revisited the attacks with some historical distance but constructed 9/11 as a hemmed-in and ahistorical experience, Zero Dark Thirty’s account of the CIA’s decadelong hunt for Bin Laden does have significant historical scope. The film also brings together (in ways superficially comparable to Syriana and Rendition) a range of locations, including torture chambers at ‘black sites’ around the world, well-appointed CIA briefing rooms in Washington, DC, embattled US military bases in Afghanistan and bustling, dangerous Pakistani cities. In its ambitious timescale and global coverage the film appears to offer a definitive summation of a complex and contested history.

However, although the film is a detailed ‘procedural’ seemingly interested in the particularity of the CIA’s post-9/11 work, a complex account of history is not forthcoming. In the opening sequence we hear audio recordings made during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including radio chatter from first responders and a harrowing telephone call made by a woman trapped in the World Trade Center who states that she is being consumed by flames before the line goes dead. The next scene shows CIA investigators Dan (Jason Clarke) and Maya (Jessica Chastain) torturing a terrorist, seeking information about the Saudi Group and the whereabouts of Bin Laden. This transition (two years in real time; two seconds of screen time) establishes a direct connection between terrorist atrocity and an unbridled CIA response, leading Manohla Dargis to argue that the film here asserts ‘a cause and effect relationship between the void of September 11 voices and the lone man strung up in a cell’ (2012). In historical terms, the edit elides two years in which, as this book has clearly indicated, critique, contradiction and political struggle were predominant in the wider culture, especially with regard to the ‘war on terror’ and the legality of the use of torture.

In an extended analysis in the New York Review of Books, Steve Coll (2013) describes how the film’s wider narrative suggests that torture was imperative in securing the information that led to the tracking down of Bin Laden. Coll notes that the film shows how the most important leads come from al-Qaida prisoner Ammar (Reda Kateb), who is subjected to prolonged torture (as shown in the opening sequence). Although Ammar initially resists, while he is in a physically and psychologically traumatised state he is tricked into believing he has confessed, and thereby unwittingly confirms intelligence that leads to the identification of an al-Qaida courier, known by the alias Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Using this information the CIA trace al-Kuwaiti to Abbottabad and then to Bin Laden. Some critics point to the fact that Ammar ‘confesses’ only when the torture stops, but Coll argues that torture, trickery and reconciliation (the interrogators are kind to Ammar) are shown to be a ‘joined up’ strategy, with each part ineffective without the other. Later in the film Maya gleans further leads from videotaped interrogations of a number of prisoners who bear the marks of torture. This is followed by two interviews conducted by Maya: one in which a prisoner talks, claiming that he does not wish to be tortured again (the threat of torture proving enough to elicit his cooperation); the second with Abu Faraj al-Libi, an al-Qaida operations leader, which results in no information, even under torture (the only such case in the film). Coll concludes that ‘in virtually every instance in the film where Maya extracts important clues from prisoners…torture is a factor’ (2013). Hence, while beatings, waterboarding, sexual humiliation and the use of stress positions are shown in some detail, the work of torture is also shown to be conducted with professionalism and intellectual purpose by highly qualified CIA operatives (we even learn that Dan holds a PhD). Although torture is unpleasant, the film says, it is necessary, it is undertaken professionally and it pays dividends.

Like the causality and historical elision stressed in the opening sequence, the depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty differs from the sadistic and counter-productive actions described in Standard Operating Procedure, Taxi to the Dark Side and Rendition. The film runs counter to what, by middecade, had become a truism: torture does not work. As the films described in chapter seven indicate, torture is largely ineffective because, as Darius Rejali observes in an exhaustive study, its use inculcates ‘organizational decay [with] torturers tend[ing] to disobey orders and regulations’ and ‘induces false positives [while burying] interrogators in useless information’ (2007: 500). Indeed, the efficacy of torture has even been denied by (then) acting CIA director Michael Morell, who wrote to agency employees following the release of Zero Dark Thirty to state that such an ‘impression is false’.⁵³ Morell’s views were consonant with the wider political establishment, with the

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein and the two senior members of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John McCain, similarly co-author[ing] a letter stating that the film would ‘shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner’. (Coll 2013)

Against these (relatively conservative) markers of the received wisdom on the use of torture, Zero Dark Thirty arguably articulates an ideological position on torture that is consonant with that advocated by Bush and his policymakers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. As such, the film is engaged in historical revision, undoing a complex view and returning to a simplistic description of events.

Fig. 25: Embedded filmmaking: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

The clear causal logic shaping the film’s narrative structure reinforces this straightforward account of history. After 9/11, Maya is posted to the US embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, where she begins her investigation. While at work there she learns of a terrorist attack on the Khobar Towers residential complex in Saudi Arabia. In 2004, as the investigation shifts its focus to a terrorist named Abu Ahmed, Maya travels to a ‘black site’ in Gdansk, Poland, and to Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, where she oversees further interrogations. We see her watching the 2005 7/7 attacks in London being reported on the news. In 2008 back in Islamabad, Maya, and fellow CIA investigator Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), are caught up in a bomb attack at the Marriott hotel. In 2009, Jessica makes contact with a source that has infiltrated a terrorist cell in the tribal territories in Northern Pakistan. In a meeting at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan the source detonates a bomb, killing Jessica and six other CIA operatives. In response, Maya redoubles her efforts, and a covert surveillance operation in Rawalpindi and Peshawar leads her to Bin Laden’s suspected hiding place in Abbottabad. As this plot summary indicates, the film’s neat chapter-like structure intercuts terrorist attacks and the CIA’s response (one provoking the other), showing agents (and society) under constant threat and driven by the imperatives of professional obligation, self-defence and a desire for justice. Although Zero Dark Thirty is superficially similar in style to Syriana and Rendition in its mapping of an array of global locations, the historically clear relation between the work of the CIA and imminent and ongoing threats (between us and them) in the film is actually in marked distinction. Unlike these films, where relations are complex, Zero Dark Thirty maintains the clarity of the classical narrative structure, thereby bringing a purifying coherence to the chaos and contingency of past events.

Maya is central to this resetting and re-establishing of a more orderly account of the recent past. The film shows the work of tracing Bin Laden as an almost single-handed quest and hints at some kind of providence at work; after Jessica is killed by a suicide bomber, Maya states: ‘I believe I was spared so I could finish the job. I’m going to smoke everybody involved. And then I’m going to kill Bin Laden.’ In a key scene, the Navy SEAL team tasked with killing Bin Laden are at first cynical about their mission but Maya’s self-confidence provides a palliative for their experience of failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (which are otherwise completely elided). Frustrated by a risk-averse CIA and White House, Maya hectors her managers: when a CIA investigator states that he is only 60 per cent certain that the intelligence is accurate because it was obtained, in part, as a result of torture, Maya responds that she is 100 per cent certain (sardonically downgrading her estimate to 95 per cent to reassure those around her who can’t handle such certainty). Through sheer force of personality, then, Maya prevails. Here the film provides a stark contrast to the ineffectual central protagonists of Syriana or The Good German and the Iraqis living in poverty in Iraq in Fragments. Maya’s absolute focus also leaves no space to articulate the points of view of the terrorist prisoners or suspected terrorists. This reclamation of agency and extreme ‘sidedness’ – also in stark contrast to the ways in which a number of films in this book have sought to accommodate difference – leads Michael Atkinson to label Zero Dark Thirty ‘the definitive 21st-century Asymmetrical War Film’ (2013) and Peter Maas to suggest that it is an example of ‘embedded filmmaking’ (2012).

Realised by another actor (say, Tom Cruise), the kind of unwavering selfbelief displayed by Maya may not have convinced. However, the casting of Chastain (her Pre-Raphaelite looks, bone china complexion and watery gaze) and her understated performance (in which these physical attributes are shown to belie a ferocious sense of purpose) create a more complex image, which permits a convergence of seemingly incompatible points of view. In the film’s final scene Maya boards a cargo plane and is asked: ‘Where do you want to go?’ The question remains unanswered, and the final shot has her in tears. Dargis calls the ending ‘non-triumphant’, with the viewer left to ‘decide if the death of bin Laden was worth the price we paid’ (2012). Similarly, John Powers observes that the shot connotes ‘exhaustion, melancholy and uncertainty’ (2013). The purported uncertainty and ambiguity is taken here to be a marker of the film’s recognition that 9/11 has shaped a contingent, divisive and painful period of history. However, in keeping with many of the films described in this book, it would perhaps be more accurate to see Maya’s suffering (she has no friends and no relationships; her heart bleeds) as the way in which the description of the CIA as a capable and just institution is achieved. Through what Steven Shaviro calls ‘Maya’s passion’, sympathy is elicited for the traumatic experience suffered by those fighting the ‘war on terror’, thereby placing CIA agents in the role of victim (2013). As such, through the ambiguity of Maya’s character the film renews faith in an institution subject to considerable and legitimate criticism in the preceding decade. At the film’s close Bin Laden is killed in a shadowy room. This sequence eschews first-person-shooter suspense, gung-ho dialogue and action film heroics for a more prosaic account that is detailed and suspenseful, but even though it is presented in a non-glorified way, the fact remains that the mission has been successful: Bin Laden is dead. The point of view here remains with Maya, who oversees the raid, watching remotely. Here substituting for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton watching anxiously from the White House, Maya’s is a feminine, qualified viewpoint mediating a hard-nosed act of political assassination.

Described by the New York Times film reviewer Dargis as ‘the most important American fiction film about September 11’ (2012), Zero Dark Thirty’s reception was polarised. A number of commentators found merit in the film’s unflinching depiction of torture, the acknowledgement of the personal sacrifices made by CIA investigators and a recognition of the dislocation between the killing of Bin Laden and the continued terrorist threat (see Dargis 2012; Vishnevetsky 2012; James 2013; Powers 2013). Others, aligned with the analysis presented above, felt the film endorsed torture and functioned as an apologia for the war on terror (see Maas 2012; Atkinson 2013; Chen 2013; Coll 2013; Shaviro 2013; Zizek 2013). Here Zero Dark Thirty demonstrates the way in which post-9/11 cinema draws, sustains and seeks to reconcile markedly different political positions. The film is, on the one hand, readable as embodying a left-liberal sensibility: as Nick James argues, Zero Dark Thirty ‘portrays the pursuit of bin Laden as a pyrrhic victory, gained by immoral means, and…the weight of every violent action is felt to an unusual degree’ (2013: 9). On the other, these aspects of the film are overlaid with the redemptive mechanisms of a conventional structure, a curtailed version of history, a rigorously unilateral and sympathetic point of view and, ultimately, closure. Once again, an example of post-9/11 cinema indicates how seemingly irreconcilable views of 9/11 are drawn together in alignment with a hegemonic historical revision that, while acknowledging some ambiguity, restores credibility for US national identity as a whole. The image that illustrates the cover of this book actively seeks to distance Maya from the obvious connotations of the US flag; this is not a jingoistic image.

And yet her image also makes of the flag a palimpsest. As Maya retains audience sympathy so too does the flag and the myriad nationalist discourses it signifies. Following Abu Ghraib and all else, the meaning of the Stars and Stripes is here acknowledged as unstable and marked by contested and complex histories but, at the same time, is made subject (via the cinema) to a process of recuperation.

 

****

 

A number of scholars have looked at the same corpus of films and similar research questions to the ones addressed in this book, and drawn different conclusions. Douglas Kellner argues that post-9/11 cinema precipitated the shift from the neoconservatism of the Bush-Cheney administration to the social liberalism of Barack Obama, a redemptive narrative arc in which 9/11 (eventually, via processes of cultural struggle) results in progressive political change (2010: 3). Stephen Prince is more sceptical, arguing that ‘popular genres in film and television readily absorbed 9/11 context as background material inflecting a storyline’ without ever fully addressing the complexity of the event (2009: 304). Prince claims that only the documentary films have value for those seeking to properly understand 9/11 (2009: 306). David Holloway uses the term ‘allegory-lite’ to describe the way post-9/11 feature films graft on elements of the experience of the attacks to give otherwise unremarkable films emotional power (2008: 158). Yet these accounts feel reductive: Kellner’s bracketing of films into two distinct political groups is too simple. Neoconservative responses were actively resisted from 11 September 11 2001 onwards, while many of the seemingly left-liberal films celebrated by Kellner have been shown to err away from critique in search of consensus and hegemonic renewal. Prince’s simple feature-film-bad/documentary-film-good polarisation is unsustainable in the face of the range and variety of post-9/11 nonfiction filmmaking, with 9/11 and In Memoriam serving as examples of documentaries that describe 9/11 via dominant discourse. Films such as The Mist and The Good German which address 9/11 indirectly but do so in provocative ways and with lasting political consequences belie Holloway’s claim that the use of allegory in post-9/11 cinema is loose and opportunist.

Fig. 26: Convergence and hegemony: Parallel Lines (2004)

This picture is, inevitably, more complex. Post-9/11 cinema can be grouped according to distinct political positions, with some films echoing and amplifying the hegemonic view and others engaging in critique. Thus a number of parallel lines can be traced: a banal ‘Americans all’ patriotism (9/11, In Memoriam) running alongside an engagement with questions of social class and ethnic diversity (7 Days in September, Parallel Lines, 25th Hour); the use of revenge (and religious discourse) to justify a call to war (Man on Fire) but also the identification of revenge as necessitating ‘ethical exchange’ (Mystic River); the celebration of American exceptionalism (In Memoriam, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, World Trade Center) placed alongside an insistence that the US is already and irrecoverably entangled with other nations and peoples in often unexceptional ways (Rendition, Iraq in Fragments, The Good German); a year zero approach to history and politics (World Trade Center, United 93) alongside a sense of how the past informs the present in complex and contradictory ways (Parallel Lines, The Good German, Winter Soldier); a claim that torture is valid and necessary (Man on Fire, Zero Dark Thirty) alongside a critique of the ways in which illegal violence has been central to the ‘war on terror’ (Rendition, Standard Operating Procedure). Alongside this cinema of political struggle, this book has also traced a group of films that are marked by the convergence, or coming together, of these parallel lines. War of the Worlds, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, In the Valley of Elah and Zero Dark Thirty seek, if not exactly consensus, at the very least a way of living with contradiction. Arguably the most influential examples of post-9/11 cinema, these films reveal how dynamic, flexible and ultimately stable the system and its related systems of representation are – and how important the cinema remains as a mechanism of hegemonic renewal. The ‘parallel lines’ referred to in this book’s title signal both the cinema of opposing political viewpoints and the way in which certain films bring these viewpoints together, with the two versions of US national identity provoked by the crisis of 9/11 and its aftermath converging into one.