We offer several takes on a film with some of the most thought-provoking premise in a long time. By touching upon the taboo issue of class, director Blomkamp parts ways with the vacuity and silliness of most action flicks, or Hollywood fare in general, but there’s still too much frantic movement devoid of substance in this blockbuster to make Elysium a truly great film. See what four perceptive critics, Dave Walsh, Rob Kall, Chris Mandel, and Jonathan Kim, have to say.—PG

¶

(1) By David Walsh, wsws.org
Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium: To have or have not

The principal challenge in writing about a film like Elysium is to make neither too much nor too little of it.

Neill Blomkamp, the South African-born director (District 9, 2009), sets out certain provocative premises for his new film. By 2154, according to a title, the earth’s “wealthiest inhabitants” have “fled” to an orbiting space station, Elysium, some twenty minutes away by space shuttle. There, under sunny skies, gleaming mansions with luxuriant lawns and swimming pools prevail. Everything is light and elegant and clean. Medical science has developed equipment (Medi-Pods) that repair broken bones and cure even the most lethal diseases instantly.

The earth (whose scenes were shot in Mexico City), on the other hand, resembles a giant polluted, overcrowded slum. Its inhabitants are prevented, as undocumented “non-citizens,” from entering the paradise in the sky. They have little or no access to elementary social services such as health care. Police-state methods prevail, with armed robots controlling and brutalizing the seething, poverty-stricken population.

Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) works in a factory owned by Armadyne, the conglomerate that has built Elysium. An industrial accident, due to the company’s ruthless speed-up and drive for profits, results in his being contaminated by radiation and given five days to live. Much of the film is taken up by Max’s attempts to reach Elysium and provide himself with a cure for his condition.

Max’s predicament and his struggle to stay alive intersect with a crisis on Elysium, where Delacourt (Jodie Foster), a fascist-minded government official in charge of “Homeland Security,” who uses a vicious mercenary (Sharlto Copley) to liquidate “illegal immigrants” arriving from earth, is planning a coup that will place her in power. She justifies her plan on the grounds of the need to “protect our liberty.” At a certain point, Delacourt has a powerful motive for getting hold of Max and the information he (literally) carries in his head.

Max also encounters a childhood friend and former sweetheart, Frey (Alicia Braga), with whom he shares important memories. She too has compelling reasons for reaching Elysium: to obtain medical care for her daughter, suffering from an advanced stage of leukemia.

The events unfold in a violent, dense fashion.

There are numerous interesting things here: in particular, the focus on social inequality and its connection to political reaction and repression. In Elysium, as in life, the defense of the elite and its immense wealth requires intense violence against the disenfranchised, impoverished mass of the people. The references to Homeland Security, “Big Brother”-type surveillance, mercenary-like contractors, the plight of the undocumented, industrial murder, corporate corruption and malfeasance and anti-democratic conspiracies have an obvious significance. The events of the past two decades did not pass unnoticed, even in artistic circles.

Blomkamp grew up in South Africa during the latter stages of the struggle against the apartheid regime and attended film school in Vancouver, his current home. He seems a bit distant from the contemporary American film industry and its stifling, stagnant atmosphere, and thus capable of allowing realistic elements to enter into his work. A colleague explained, “He [Blomkamp] grew up in a racist, fascistic empire, watched it be overthrown, collapse into chaos, all while walking to school every day. Imagine the impression that leaves on you.”

Elysium has elicited a well-deserved venomous response from ultra-right commentators, who have referred to it as “Matt Damon’s Sci-Fi Socialism” and “socialist trash,” along with other insulting phrases. A spokesman for the right-wing Media Research Center told Fox News, “This is just the latest of several Hollywood movies this year to try and co-opt Occupy Wall Street plotlines into their films.”

Other media outlets have somewhat more objectively registered the film’s concerns. The Associated Press headlined a piece, “In Elysium, a cosmic divide for rich and poor.” The Los Angeles Times wrote of “Inequality at the movies.” In its review, Variety asserted that Elysium advances “one of the more openly socialist political agendas of any Hollywood movie in memory, beating the drum loudly not just for universal healthcare, but for open borders, unconditional amnesty and the abolition of class distinctions as well.” When was the last time Variety used the word “socialist” in reference to a major studio film?

Blomkamp told the LA Times that sections of contemporary Johannesburg, along with Bel-Air and Beverly Hills in the Los Angeles area, inspired his vision of Elysium. He commented to ScreenCrave, “I don’t think the film is speculative science-fiction. It’s so much more a metaphor for today in my mind.”

In an interview with Reuters, Matt Damon noted that the film’s premise was not far-fetched: “If you look at the difference between the bottom billion people on planet Earth and the top 10 million, the contrast is as stark as living on a space station and living in a third world urban centre.”

It is to the filmmaker’s credit that he has his eyes open and thinks about the way the world is. (An ominous score, by Ryan Amon, and some impressive special effects make their contribution as well.)

Elysium, as a result, has some genuinely moving moments. The factory sequence in which Max receives his fatal dose of radiation is effective and convincing. The unfairness of Frey’s situation, her child dying while the affluent receive the most advanced medical treatment without having to think about it, is compelling.

However, such moments are the exception. Much of Elysium takes the form of a relatively tedious action film, dominated by a great deal of noise and mayhem, to no great effect. There is hardly a single figure who deviates from his or her predictable course. The dialogue is largely uninspired, and uninspiring. The exposition of the complicated plot, given at top speed by the characters, often seems awkward and unconvincing.

Spider (Wagner Moura), a Che-like figure, and his entourage seem almost entirely extraneous, except as a device to move the unlikely story forward. Foster’s Delacourt and Armadyne chief John Carlyle (William Fichtner) are so icy, villainous and without nuance that they might well have stepped out of a comic book. The scenes of the Los Angeles slums have, at times, that almost hysterical, inauthentic look one associates with a dark and skeptical view of humanity. Generally speaking, cartoonishness never helped anyone.

Perhaps most damagingly, Max is transformed from an individual whose situation shows dramatic promise into, alas, a conventional, unreal “superhero,” possibly the most boring of all fictional creations. As a consequence, one loses a good deal of interest in his particular fate, and even his final act of self-sacrifice is largely unmoving.

One of the difficulties is that Blomkamp has chosen to reproduce identifiable social and political elements of contemporary life without seriously turning his attention to the content of everyday life, to the drama of it, to its relationships and emotions. Elysium presents a peculiar combination of accurate physical and institutional facts, on the one hand, and contrived, overblown, schematic relations between its human figures, on the other.

Both Blomkamp and Damon have gone out of their way to deny any particular social message in the film. “The first order of business for a big summer popcorn movie is to make a kick-ass movie with great action,” says the actor. Blomkamp told the LA Times, “To be pigeonholed into political films, I would put a gun in my mouth if that’s how my career ended up.” No artist wants to be pigeon-holed, but the director’s over-reaction reflects an accommodation to a retrograde industry climate.

It is not astonishing, one supposes, given the pressures that a $100 million budget inevitably generates, that the filmmakers seek to “reassure” potential audience members that nothing much will be asked of them. Not astonishing, but not terribly worthy either. Elysium’s marketing is some reflection of its production: there is a pandering here to preconceptions about what an audience will or will not accept. In my own view, Blomkamp has weakened his film and made it less appealing to audiences through his insistence on dull, pumped-up action sequences. Hollywood at one point made enormously popular and insightful films that were something other than “big summer popcorn movies.”

Without offering excuses for the filmmakers’ failings, who, after all, do present some intensely intriguing material, one has to take into account as well the general political situation. Although many are only waiting for the other shoe to drop, there has not yet been a major social explosion in response to the catastrophic social inequality and attacks on the lives and livelihoods of millions. That remains the decisive issue, both for social development as a whole and art in particular.

______________________________________________

(2) By Christopher Mandel

The Future According to Elysium

Neill Blomkamp’s blockbuster, Elysium creates a disturbingly realistic vision of the future.

The citizens of Elysium are a ruling class.  They enjoy monopolistic control the political bodies, military, and police.  They are also the primary movers and shakers in the market place.  Nevertheless, their primary relationship to the non-citizens stuck on Earth is not based on exploitation, but avoidance.  Blomkamp’s world is not based on a Marxist critique of capitalism where the owners exploit the workers. 2154 is even worse.  The majority of Earth dwellers simply aren’t needed in the marketplace at all, and most Elysium citizens would prefer to be shielded from the sad ugliness far below them.

One of Elysium’s many robots. by PatLoika

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author’s Website: http://www.cloudlessrain.net/

Christopher Mandel is a writer, activist, musician, and Sunday school teacher in Denver, CO. He was a dedicated organizer in the Occupy movement and published his memoirs of that experience as MY OCCUPY: AN ACCOUNT OF ONE PERSON’S ADVENTURES IN THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT.

_________

(3) Rob Kall, OpEdnews

By Rob KallI watched Elysium last night. It was successful. It made my blood boil and my teeth clench.  The movie delivers a powerful message. We are already living in a hellish world where the elite and powerful are living lives of luxury off the backs, off the deaths of the 99.9 percent. It’s no wonder that this movie has been panned by so many mainstream critics. To be honest, this is not a perfect movie. It is made to pander to the tastes of today’s movie-goers, with far more violence than necessary to support the story. But this is a movie worth seeing. Without spoiling the plot, I can tell you that this movie shows the banal evil of the ruling, moneyed class, the brutal treatment of workers, the dehumanization and, beyond militarization, robotization of the police– police programmed to be cruel and inhuman. The defense secretary, played by Jodie Foster, is a brilliant but lethal psychopath. The head of a military manufacturer is a despicable sociopath who sees worker fatalities as annoying production line slow downs. But they hire an earthbound psychopath to do their dirty work. In the movie Elysium, the people on earth are a down-trodden, hopeless lot. The people of Elysium live on an orbiting habitat that supports 250,000 people, with houses selling for $250 million and up. As you’ve probably concluded , the movie Elysium throws some futuristic trappings on the actual situation that exists in the world right now. Watching the contrast between the lives of the elite and the rest of the people on earth is what made my blood boil and my teeth gnash. Spoiler alert. Reading beyond this point will give away some of the plot developments. Matt Damon plays the hero of this story– a reluctant hero who accepts “the call” because he has no other choice. He has been exposed to radiation that will kill him in five days. Because of his dire situation, he seeks a very high risk solution with very low odds for success. That solution involves violating all kinds of laws of Elysium. As he embarks on this journey we learn that the elites who live on  Elysium, a massive space station  with green verdant lawns, waterways and clean air, control the laws and life on the surface of the planet. I’ve long believed that it will take heroes and heroines who are literally dying, people who know they have a short time to live, to engage in revolutionary acts of courage, standing up to the machine, fighting for justice and humanity. That’s what Matt Damon’s character does in this movie. There are many wisdom sources that say that it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. That’s true for this movie. The end is not really realistic or satisfying. It does show that the people take the tools for healing the sick back from the billionaires on Elysium. It does show that the people of earth are all made whole, treated equally. But as most Hollywood stories go, this one also portrays the solution as one resolved by a lone hero. Showing a courageous soul who is willing to sacrifice his life is a good example. But Howard Zinn and Woodie Guthrie have both said that it will take millions of small acts to save the world. Here’s what Zinn said in an interview I did with him: “How could you predict that four students,in 1960, would do is sit in Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and this would spark dozens and dozens of sit-ins and this would lead to freedom rides? In other words, there’s no way of predicting how a movement develops. All you can do really – you do your part, you do whatever you can, you organize with other people, you try to get some kind of change, and if enough people do enough things, even if they’re little things, they will add up. Because that’s what happens in movements: just millions of people doing small things which they cannot predict in it’s results. And Woodiy Guthrie said, “A lot of little things, millions of little things is what will save this world.” Last year, I interviewed, for my Bottom Up Radio Show, Chris Vogler, a movie consultant who wrote THE book, The Writer’s Journey,  on incorporating Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey into movies. I invited him on my radio show to discuss whether it was  possible to make a movie in which there is an Occupy Wall Street, horizontal version of the hero’s journey, in which there are many people who come together, from the bottom up, to save the day. He jumped at the idea and opportunity to discuss it and came up with the term  “collective hero.” Here’s an excerpt from the interview: Chris: This reorientation you’re talking about of getting it off of this hierarchical, leave everything to the secret elite team at the top, which is the idea of “The Avengers” and rewriting this or redefining this is. No, this has to be from the people. The people in “The Avengers” movie are like sheep.  There’s one woman who’s given a couple of lines and she’s supposed to represent all the people but she’s just like a big sheep looking up at, “Oh, the heroes they’re saving us. Oh, that Iron Man. He’s so cool,” or whatever it is.  It’s a very weak attempt to acknowledge the power of the people. So, that’s something that I think we could grow more of this kind of consciousness in our story. Rob: Of course the Marvel Comics brand is built upon this kind of superhero and I know Disney spent billions to buy the brand, right?  Chris: That’s certainly true yeah. Rob: They’re investing in maintaining that kind of hero archetype, but I wonder, this is a question I’ve been meaning to discuss with you and we haven’t hit all the archetypes but I think we hit enough of them.  Chris: Yeah. Rob: What’s the chance of a major movie company doing something like this? Chris: Well, I think that the very fact that you have so many of the certain kind of the elite team of the G.I. Joe’s or whatever it is or exceptional heroes like Indiana Jones, the very fact that those have such dominance creates a hunger for the other thing, so then you can get back to more grounded collective things. And to be fair with Marvel Comics, the original idea of many of these things was more like the Spiderman model, where it’s just a kid and he’s put together a costume out of stuff from the junk store and old athletic equipment. Rob: It’s true and actually some of the commenters from my article observed that many superheroes start out as average people who are victims of chemical spills or radiation or things like that. Chris: Yeah, that’s a very interesting thing. Yes, there is some working out of maybe collective guilt about that or trying to show that there’s an interaction between these environmental choices and what happens.  They’re very positive that way that usually the environmental change is positive. Not always, because some of the Batman villains, for example, are horribly deformed by it, like Two Face. It poisons their nature, but sometimes it brings out something good.  Spiderman has these powers, but the whole point of Spiderman is the powers have to be used responsibly. So, if you’ve got this wonderful new tool of tablet computers and e-mail and so forth that has to be used responsibly as part of this hero contract. Rob: When it comes down to making a blockbuster movie, underneath it there has to be a great story that people are going to care about and be able to relate to. Chris: Um-hum. Rob: Where the story will be able to lure them into the story trance. Chris: Yes, that’s true and a couple of things may happen along these collective lines we’ve been discussing.  One is that you present the collective hero like a village or a tribe or a street or a family or something like that and then the audience picks one or two that they like the best or that they relate to the most and so they kind of turn those into the heroes of the peace.  The other thing you can do, and I like this idea, is to really spend some time creating a character that is that village or that street or that family so that the filmmakers use their tricks and techniques to create the sense of the community as a real entity that has its own consciousness and its own goals and settings, and that those need to be adjusted a little bit and that can be a great movie of material; a great piece of material. Something that shows us, here’s a microcosm of your society in one family or one street. Rob: Has that been done? Chris: Well, I think that this is what Spike Lee was after in “Do the Right Thing.”  He was giving you of a sort of Charles Dickens view of this is a whole array of different types of people in this one location.  I thought that was a successful effort there and you could pick out certain people and say, “Okay, it was really this guy’s story or that’s guy’s story.”  But I think he did the right job there of creating the sense of the collective and that that itself can be a character. So I like things like that.  Or another example from far a field from that, there was a movie about U-boats, “Das Boots,” and very clearly the intention there was the boat itself. The crew of the boat is a collective and this is the main character; not the captain, not anybody on the crew. It’s that boat.  So, I think there are plenty of examples that show how you can do that very effectively.  John Ford did it during the war a number of times.  He took movies like “They Were Expendable,” where he was studying a certain unit and giving you the story that collective military unit. So, there’s lots of precedent for this.   It takes courage to make movies like this– for the studio, the actors, the director, the distributors. This is one movie I encourage you to watch. You’ll enjoy it, and you’ll show, financially, that movies with this kind of message can be economic successes too.  By the way, the Elysium official movie website has a number of interactive features, like an application to become a part of Elysium– that no matter what you answer, you fail. Of course, anyone seriously interested in such an elite program would not get in through an on-line application– they’d be invited, or would communicate with a real person. The application would just be for show. Think of the millions who applied for foreclosure relief.  ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and website architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), and publisher of Storycon.org, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and an inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com

(4)  

Bigelow: The devil often wears seductive masks.

Editor’s Note: This post offers our readers two additional views on the growing debate about Zero Dark Thirty, a film liable to win some Oscars this year. The first is by David Walsh, house critic at wsws.org, a socialist organization, and, for my money,  perhaps one of the most perceptive movie evaluators in the anglophone world. As a socialist, David brings to his readers the advantage of a sophisticated class analysis, a feature that, all by itself, makes his commentary that much more insightful than the rest. The second is by Jonathan Kim, critic for ReThink Reviews and the HuffPo. Here we deal with a liberal, with all the incomprehensible and exasperating myopias of that tribe, a social tier which, while blabbing criticism always strives to keep one foot firmly planted in the system. This posture inevitably leads to confusing statements like this (pay special attention to the bolded part):

Zero Dark Thirty ignores the fact that America’s torture program inspired anti-U.S. sentiment around the world, causing many to vow revenge on the U.S. and its allies. It ignores the fact that torture scandals like Abu Ghraib caused support for the U.S. occupation in Iraq to plummet, inflaming the insurgency, prolonging the fighting, and putting U.S. troops at increased risk. It ignores the possibly irreparable damage to America’s reputation as a country that respects the rule of law. It ignores the damage torture did to America’s relationships with its allies, who became reluctant to hand over possibly valuable detainees to the U.S. for fear of being accomplices to war crimes and were furious when the U.S. detained and tortured their citizens without charge. It ignores the fact that if CIA agents such as Maya and Dan — two of Zero Dark Thirty’s “heroes” — were actual people, they deserve to be tried and convicted as war criminals under international law for their unrepentant participation in the torture of detainees.

You may wonder what I can possibly object to in the above para, which looks and smells like an impeccable call to support the nation’s highest moral standards.  At the risk of sounding picayune, that’s precisely what sticks in my craw, and it happens often when dealing with the liberals’ version of America’s history. Kim does not seem to realise that it’s been a very very long time (if ever) that America truly respected the rule of law, especially in foreign affairs, as opposed to the simulacrum thereof.  While the brainwashed —among which I naturally include liberals, not to mention the countless fucktards that America incubates by the millions— may think that Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Mr Bushoma’s sneaky wars and invasions have done “irreparable damage to the (supposedly) sterling reputation of the United States,” we must offer the following correction: You can’t damage what doesn’t exist. On that basis I must conclude that what Kim is actually deploring is the fact the shocking revelations about torture and other inconvenient subjects have damaged the propaganda image the US ruling circles have carefully cultivated for more than a century. Their dismantlement should be cause for celebration, not concern.

Second, while the debate rages, most critics like Kim continue to take at face value the notion that Pres. Obama ended all torture. This is entirely false. Torture in one form or another continues, and will go on till the rotten but extremely hypocritical imperial system is defeated globally. That will only happen when America finally becomes a real democracy instead of a plutocracy pretending to be one. Third, if the ruling cliques based in Washington are a criminal enterprise, and in my view they are, why should we lament that other countries will now fail to collaborate with it?—P. Greanville

••••••
Director Kathryn Bigelow defends her indefensible Zero Dark Thirty
wsws.org

Director Kathryn Bigelow took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times Tuesday to defend her pro-CIA film Zero Dark Thirty which has provoked opposition inside and outside the film industry. Bigelow’s column, which reveals her as a slavish admirer of the US intelligence and military apparatus, only sinks her—deservedly—deeper in the mire.

The filmmaker and her screenwriter Mark Boal, in their political blindness and misreading of the current state of American public opinion, thought they could get away with murder, as it were. They assumed that wide layers of the population would be as excited as they were by contact with torturers and assassins and would be enthused about a version of events essentially told by the latter. They were mistaken in this.

Bigelow now finds herself in the unenviable position of claiming that her film, which clearly offers a justification for torture and other war crimes, does not advocate torture. One can only conclude from her ludicrous and incoherent LA Times piece that Bigelow was unprepared for criticism and protest.

The filmmaker begins by noting that her goal had been “to make a modern, rigorous film about counter-terrorism, centered on one of the most important and classified missions in American history.” She acknowledges that she started, in other words, by accepting everything that any serious artist would have subjected to criticism and questioning.

Bigelow betrays no interest (in the LA Times or in her movie) in the history of US intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia over the course of decades, of the CIA’s relations with Osama bin Laden and other Islamist elements in Afghanistan and elsewhere from the late 1970s onward, of the first war on Iraq in 1990-91, of Washington’s support for the oppression of the Palestinians, or, for that matter, of the murky events leading up to and surrounding the 9/11 attacks. In general, Bigelow indicates a lack of concern with anything that might disrupt her tale of “counterterrorism” and its courageous warriors.

The award-winning director presents herself in the following manner: “As a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.” As a devotee of counterterrorism and classified military-intelligence missions, Bigelow has already indicated that she is a unique sort of “pacifist,” but there is more to come.

She then notes disingenuously, “But I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately [?] expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen.” As it turns out, although Bigelow apparently hasn’t noticed it, such sentiments have been directed at those who instituted and ordered these criminal US policies for more than a decade.

Bigelow eventually gets to the heart of her argument, which has been echoed by such apologists as filmmaker Michael Moore: “Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”

Driving home the point, she asserts that “confusing depiction with endorsement is the first step toward chilling any American artist’s ability and right to shine a light on dark deeds, especially when those deeds are cloaked in layers of secrecy and government obfuscation.”

Something important is revealed here about a generation or generations of artists and semi-intellectuals nourished on post-structuralism and postmodernism, cold, empty “conceptual art” and social indifference, and made affluent as a by-product of the stock and art market booms and related economic trends of the past several decades.
No, depiction is not endorsement, as though anyone with a brain would ever suggest that it was. However, whether the representation of torture and other inhumane acts amounts to endorsement, on the one hand, or criticism and outrage, on the other, depends on the artistic treatment (context, juxtaposition of images, the artist’s attitude) in the given instance.

In the case of Zero Dark Thirty, the evidence is clear. The film begins, as the WSWS review noted, with “a dark screen and a sound track of fire fighters’ radio calls and frantic cries for help from the upper floors of the Twin Towers on 9/11 … The juxtaposition of the 9/11 soundtrack and the harrowing scenes of torture are presented as cause and effect, with one justifying the other.”

Zero Dark Thirty was created with the intimate collaboration of the CIA, the Defense Department and the Obama White House (including the personal intervention of John Brennan, formerly the chief of the drones assassination program and current nominee for the post of CIA director). It tells its tale from the point of view of a female CIA operative.

As was the case with The Hurt Locker (2008), where the central figures were US soldiers in Iraq, Bigelow concentrates in her latest work on how exhausting and difficult it is to be a victimizer. There is no indication that Jessica Chastain’s Maya seriously questions her work or that she would not preside over the same horrific acts in the future.

The suggestion that critics of her film are not “adult” enough to deal with the world’s unpleasantness or, as Bigelow puts it in her LA Times piece, are “ignoring or denying the role it [torture] played in US counter-terrorism policy and practices,” is another cynical effort to divert attention.

Films dealt with the most nightmarish events in history, including Nazism and the Holocaust, long before Bigelow picked up a film camera.

For instance, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) includes scenes of Gestapo torture of Italian resistance fighters and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) depicts the torture of Algerians at the hands of the French colonialist military. A more recent work, Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) vividly shows the British military torturing Irish republican detainees.

The important difference, of course, is that Rossellini, Pontecorvo and Loach, through their dramas, offered an indictment of the torturers and the forces that stood behind them, whereas Bigelow’s film takes the side, with whatever qualms, of the oppressors.

Other, better films on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have dealt with the brutalities of those conflicts. Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007), commented the WSWS, “depicts unflinchingly the simulated drowning technique now known to the entire world as ‘waterboarding,’ as well as the beating and electrocution of the torture victim.” However, Hood’s film, a protest against US policy, met with a generally hostile reception from the media, which criticized the movie for its “slanted” and “one-sided” and “deck-stacking” arguments.

Philip Haas’ The Situation (2006), Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (2007) and Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah (2007) were serious efforts that did not shy away from the realities of the US invasions, nor did the documentaries Gunner Palace (2004), The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (2006), How to Fold a Flag (2009), all co-directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), directed by Alex Gibney, and Standard Operating Procedure (2008), directed by Errol Morris. For the most part, the US media saw to it that these films, critical of American policy, were buried.

Bigelow concludes her piece in Tuesday’s LA Times by paying sycophantic tribute (a cruder expression comes to mind) to the American military and CIA. “We should never forget,” she writes, “the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation’s safety and security.” Bin Laden, we are told, “was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.”

The “brave professionals” in the CIA and military, the “defense of the nation”! Who writes and speaks in this manner? This is the language of the extreme right. Bigelow is appealing to and aligning herself with quasi-fascistic elements.

But this is the trajectory of the social element she speaks for and to. Perhaps not entirely happy about torture and assassination, which may even disturb its sleep for an hour or two, this upper middle class layer instinctively identifies the defense of its wealth and privilege with US military operations around the globe. There is no other way to explain a work as repugnant as Zero Dark Thirty or a “defense of the indefensible” as crude and transparent as Bigelow’s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
wsws.org site is an information arm of the Socialist Equality Party.

••••

Take Two

Jonathan Kim, Film Critic for ReThink Reviews and the Uprising Show
A Response to Kathryn Bigelow’s Latest Statement on Zero Dark Thirty and Torture

Dear Kathryn Bigelow,

I read your January 15 response in the Los Angeles Times to people like myself who have said that Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture. I would like to address it.

1. Do you believe that torture is an effective way to obtain accurate information?
2.    Do you believe torture was used to gain accurate information that led to finding Osama bin Laden? If so, who told you that? Did they provide any evidence?

5.    Do you feel that if characters such as Maya and Dan were real people that they should be charged as war criminals for torturing detainees?

7.    How do you define torture?

9.    What is your response to pro-torture pundits like Sean Hannity who cite Zero Dark Thirty as evidence that information obtained through torture helped find bin Laden, and that the U.S. should be free to torture in the future for reasons of national security?

Follow ReThink Reviews on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Follow Jonathan Kim on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ReThinkReviews

FILM/ SOURCE FOR THIS ITEM: PBS NEWSHOUR
Thursday on the NewsHour: Examining Torture in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
With appendix by Jonathan Kim’s ReThink Review: Zero Dark Thirty – Yes, It Endorses Torture

Posted by Anne Davenport , January 10, 2013

Academy Award nominations came out Thursday, and “Zero Dark Thirty” claimed five of them, including for best picture, adding to a number of other recent accolades. The movie hasn’t opened around the country yet, but chances are you’ve heard a lot about it.

Jessica Chastain, nominated for best actress, plays the role of a young, tireless CIA analyst named Maya, who is obsessed with finding Osama bin Laden. The film sweeps from the haunting days of 9/11 straight through to the successful raid on his compound in Pakistan in May 2011.

Behind the film is the team of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal. Their 2009 film “The Hurt Locker” won six Oscars, including for best picture, best director for Bigelow — the first woman to win that award — and best original screenplay for Boal.

“Zero Dark Thirty” is also a very difficult film to watch, and that’s where the controversy begins.

Critics argue that the film’s graphic and gritty depictions of torture — and the role it played in America’s anti-terror policy — distort the truth and imply that the CIA’s use of aggressive, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including water boarding, produced information that lead directly to the discovery of bin Laden’s whereabouts — and his death.

There’s been considerable controversy — from both sides of the political aisle — in Congress.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Senate Armed Service Committee ranking member John McCain, R-Ariz., and others sent two letters recently to the acting CIA director seeking information provided to the filmmakers and have subsequently begun a review of their own.

At a screening in Washington, D.C., Tuesday night, protesters, including some aligned with Amnesty International, showed their objections, while inside the filmmakers told the PBS NewsHour they stood by their work of the last five years:

Watch Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow on Torture in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

On Thursday’s NewsHour, we get two views from a pair of journalists who have written extensively about the 10-year-hunt for bin Laden:

Jane Mayer is with the New Yorker and is the author of “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.”

Mark Bowden wrote the book “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden.” He is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and teaches journalism at the University of Delaware.

Watch their discussion with Jeffrey Brown here or below:

Watch ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Catches Criticism Over Torture Depictions on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

APPENDIX

Jonathan KimFilm Critic for ReThink Reviews and the Uprising Show
ReThink Review: Zero Dark Thirty – Yes, It Endorses Torture
Posted: 01/11/2013 9:31 am
I was dreading the announcement of the 2013 Oscars nominees, in large part because it felt like Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the manhunt to find Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, was peaking at the right time and had emerged as the frontrunner in a fairly unsettled Oscar race. The source of my dread was what ZD30 says about torture (more on that below), and it both saddened and infuriated me that a film that attempts to rewrite history and validate one of the darkest sins of America’s recent history might be given the world’s highest storytelling honors.

ZD30 ended up nabbing five Oscar nominations, including one for best picture — a major achievement by any measure. However, I was delighted to learn that Bigelow had not been nominated for best director. Normally, I wouldn’t take pleasure in something like that, especially since I greatly admired Bigelow’s Oscar-winning bomb-defuser film The Hurt Locker, but I was very glad that the Academy members who voted for Best Director were informed enough to realize that Bigelow was ultimately responsible for the three enormous, destructive lies ZD30 asserts: that torture is an effective way to gather information, that it was instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden, and that America should have never stopped doing it. Watch my ReThink Review of Zero Dark Thirty below (transcript following).

Transcript:

The makers of Zero Dark Thirty clearly want it to be the definitive film about the ten-year manhunt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, claiming the film is “faithful to the facts,” “truthful,” “journalistic,” and “living history.” But if that’s their claim, how come the first 30 to 40 minutes of Zero Dark Thirty are about how torture was instrumental in locating the courier who eventually led the CIA to bin Laden, despite the fact that the acting director of the CIA and the chairmen of both the Senate Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committees have publicly stated the opposite? And should the film’s seeming endorsement of torture disqualify it from awards consideration?

The film stars Jessica Chastain as Maya, a hard-charging young CIA agent who has devoted her professional life to finding bin Laden. It’s Maya who believes that the path to finding bin Laden is through the courier who helps deliver his messages to Al Qaeda leaders and the media, since bin Laden would be too wary of surveillance to use phones or the internet. Maya and her colleagues attempt to locate this courier, an eight-year odyssey that involves surveillance, battles for resources, frustrating delays, life-threatening risks, and old-fashioned detective work. When the courier is finally located and leads to a suspicious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Maya is convinced that this must be bin Laden’s hideout.

Based on a real person, Maya is a fascinating character that Chastain handles wonderfully, both because of and in spite of the fact that we know so little about her, she isn’t the most likable person, and her single-minded dedication to her mission increasingly borders on obsession. The supporting cast — including Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, James Gandolfini, Chris Pratt, and Harold Perrineau — are all good and reflect the hundreds of people and the multiple organizations involved in finding and killing bin Laden. The film’s natural lighting, verité shooting style, and attention to detail successfully builds tension while also showing the often unglamorous nature of intelligence work. And when the Navy SEAL raid to get bin Laden finally occurs, it happens in almost real-time over 40 gripping minutes in a carefully reconstructed replica of the actual Abbottabad compound.

But it’s this attention to detail that makes the torture aspect of Zero Dark Thirty so baffling, infuriating, and unforgivable. It’s been accepted for decades within the intelligence and interrogation communities that torture simply doesn’t work and mostly leads to false confessions; strained relations with allies; prisoners made belligerent, insane, or useless; and victims’ families, friends, and sympathizers turned into sworn enemies. At one point, Maya says that getting bin Laden would protect the homeland. But after Guantanamo Bay, the invasion of Iraq, and the photos from Abu Ghraib, no one needed an order from bin Laden to justify attacking Americans or our allies.

Some critics have claimed that the torture scenes in the film reflect the “moral ambiguity” of the torture debate. But since the torture in Zero Dark Thirty is shown to be so effective, with one prisoner actually saying “I have no wish to be tortured again. Ask me a question and I will answer it,” and we’re shown none of the many downsides to torture, the “moral ambiguity” amounts to “torture is ugly… but it works.” For way too many people, that’s not morally ambiguous at all, and is instead seen as the dirty but necessary work of war.

But it’s a claim as factually wrong and repulsive as saying, “Rape is horrible…but some girls are asking for it.” In reality, there is no debate and no “moral ambiguity” about torture. Not only is it illegal, immoral, and counterproductive, IT DOES NOT WORK. But Zero Dark Thirty, like the TV series 24, claims that torture does work, or at the very least, revives the myth that the jury is still out on torture, just as oil companies and republicans want you to think the science of global warming is inconclusive. Zero Dark Thirty works as a crime procedural, but its irresponsible, destructive, dishonest stance on torture absolutely ruined it for me, and I feel Zero Dark Thirty should not be on any best-of-the-year lists, nor is it deserving of Oscar consideration.