Today, the geopolitical imperatives of the American worldview operate through assumptions of omnipresence and transparency that attend the representations of interventions enacted in foreign lands. These assumptions support a worldview that rationalizes perceptions of liberal governance and democratization, frames the representations of violence at a distance, and supports an emergent schema of securitization that aligns the formation of the global war on terror with that of the homeland security state. This worldview reflects and refracts the conditions of the perpetual wars of terror and securitization that sustain it. These are wars without end; they are also wars without a principal enemy. The immanence of these wars dissolves cognitive borders between foreign and domestic affairs, unsettling assumptions about the relation between friend and enemy, and between war and murder. These perpetual wars have dislocated registers of temporal and spatial distance that structured and promulgated American perspectives on foreign affairs during much of the twentieth century. They have also dislocated ethical registers of violence and humanity that shape American understanding of who or what counts as human.
As a new paradigm and frame for US geopolitical imperatives, the war on terror poses particular challenges of representation. A subtext of this paper is the beguiling question that troubles representation (and perhaps especially documentary representation) of this war: how do you represent a war that is hidden in plain sight? To be sure, there are elements of this war that are deeply covert and concealed, posing particular challenges to those who wish to document the less visible institutions and infrastructures of power and governance that execute perpetual war.Footnote 1 However, the question posed here of representation is not so much about occlusion and silence as about transparency and disavowal, for diffused as this perpetual war is, it is not simply invisible; rather it is imbricated in multiple media spheres as both condition and object of representation. In other words, there is no lack of representation of the war on terror, but there is a lack (or limit) in representation – an aporia of representation – that needs to be considered in relation to the wider documentation of reality under conditions of perpetual war and within a public sphere in which the democratic polity is happily prepared not to believe what it sees. Like other visual media today, cinema screens the war on terror; that is to say, it functions both to show and to conceal the conditions and effects of perpetual war. It dramatizes the hauntology of this war, most obviously in representation of the figures of enemies that take the place of a principal enemy, and it also mystifies and demystifies its violence, most commonly registered either as the shock and awe of spectacular violent killing or as the collateral damage of the discounted dead. The optics that are critically commensurate with the logics of the war on terror are also going to be symptomatic of these logics; this includes the ethics and aesthetics of cinematic representation itself.
Commenting on American conspiracy films of the 1970s, Fredric Jameson famously critiqued the genre as “a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital,” arguing that the films’ formal conventions could not represent the functionings of the capitalist system as a totality.Footnote 2 Something similar may be said of cinematic treatments of the war on terror, which resists cognitive mapping as a coherent narrative of power, knowledge or ideology, and reflects the limits of documentary and democratic forms of representation and investigation.Footnote 3 The “absent cause” of this war functions as an aporia of representation that structures its production as a field of perceptible reality and reflects geopolitical priorities of an American worldview. Central to this aporia is the mystification of the “elusive enemy” and the naturalization of a “long war.”Footnote 4 The hunt for Osama bin Laden has been a symbolic narrativization of this aporia, limned in the barely legible “dark geography” that links militarism, imperialism and neoliberal capitalism across disparate global sites. In this essay, I will comment on how the film Zero Dark Thirty represents this aporia, refracting the political unconscious of the war on terror in the sublimity of neoliberal and technocratic governance of this war, yet disavowing the politics of its conduct and costs.
SHINING A LIGHT
Zero Dark Thirty functioned as a lightening rod for political commentary in the United States (and beyond) both before and after release. Indeed, the release of the film was delayed precisely because of the controversy that grew around it. Originally scheduled for release in October 2012 it was held back to December; that is, until after the US election in November of that year.Footnote 5 The killing of bin Laden became a deeply politicized issue throughout 2012 as commentators argued about what it meant for the Obama administration, especially in an election year. The making of Zero Dark Thirty, already in production before the killing of bin Laden, became caught up in this political fray as commentators claimed that the Obama administration released classified information to the filmmakers and gave other forms of unprecedented support to the making of this particular film.Footnote 6 At this time, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were at pains to stress the apolitical nature of the enterprise: “This was an American triumph, both heroic and nonpartisan, and there is no basis to suggest that our film will represent this enormous victory otherwise.”Footnote 7 This glossing of American exceptionalism as an objective, apolitical perspective is a common response of American filmmakers who have sought to represent some aspect of the war on terror, reflecting the political moment in the US where patriotism and partisanship are constantly parsed.
Following its release the film became the focus of an even more public and fractious commentary, most particularly on the question whether or not it promoted the use of torture by depicting a scene in which torture appears to produce actionable intelligence in the hunt for bin Laden. As the debates grew and diffused, the issue of torture held central attention yet was also part of a broader public discourse in which the film activated discussions about topics that have had limited exposure in the public sphere. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, along with two senior members of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John McCain, authored a letter calling the film “grossly inaccurate” and claimed that its flaws have “the potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner.”Footnote 8 This claim that the film has an extraordinary capacity “to shape American public opinion” was picked up by several critics. In the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday wrote,
As “Zero Dark Thirty” has begun to be screened in previews, it's become something of a policy proxy, a vehicle for debate about Bush-era detainee programs, “enhanced interrogation” techniques and black sites … that were ignored or never fully entertained by many Americans at the time. As Boal and Bigelow gather critics' plaudits and awards … the movie itself has entered a fascinating parallel conversation – part food fight for cable-news channels desperate for post-election fodder, part valuable (if belated) civic debate.Footnote 9
One of the key arguments among those who value the film is that it created the opportunity for what Hornaday terms a “(… belated) civic debate.” While many voices fulminated about the question of torture, a number declared that Bigelow had done a public service by opening up a space for rational discussion about the dark side of US intelligence work. In the New York Times, Roger Cohen argued that “Bigelow and Boal have done an important service in setting before a wide US and global audience images of a traumatized America's dark side.”Footnote 10 Bigelow has used similar language in describing her aims: “this was the story of a lifetime and I felt humbled to be able to tell it: to capture the essence of a very long, dark decade and shine a bit of a light on it.”Footnote 11
As we shall see, issues of visuality and transparency are crucial to the making and viewing of this film, and Bigelow's claim to “capture the essence of a very long, dark decade and shine a bit of a light on it” goes to the heart of the film's troubled representation of the “dark side” of America's war on terror. I want to question these metaphorical allusions to truth-seeking and transparency as virtues and values of a democratic public sphere that this film is said to be addressing.
One way to begin this questioning is to ask: what genre is this? The simple answer is: a melding of genres, including conventions from procedurals, war films, conspiracy thrillers and several others. In interviews, though, it is a question that receives some confused and confusing responses from Bigelow and Boal as they attempt to explain the melding of fact and fiction in their work. Bigelow told the New York Times, “What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film.”Footnote 12 Boal told the LA Times, “I wanted to approach the story as a screenwriter but to do the homework as a reporter.”Footnote 13 This seems clear enough, but when pressed on matters of fact and veracity they are readily defensive: “It's a movie, not a documentary”, says Boal.Footnote 14 In one interview Bigelow and Boal banter about different terms to describe their film. Bigelow finally settles on the term “reported film” and adds, “The event happens, then it's reported on, and then there's an imagistic version of that reportage.”Footnote 15
On the one hand, this sounds like a conventional description of docudrama or related forms of feature-film representation of actual events – positing both a temporal chain and a spatial palimpsest of representations, yet always signifying the authoritative role of the filmmaker as artist. On the other hand, it glosses what happened in the making of Zero Dark Thirty, not least because Boal undertook the primary reporting for much of what is cinematically re-presented. This somewhat confused provenance of the film, along with its timely timeline (the film was able to incorporate the killing of bin Laden into its narrative and was released while the event was still alive in public discourses) is relevant to the ways it engaged and was taken up by current events and debates. In part due to this indeterminate provenance, viewers of the film were tasked with contemplating and processing events that had few consensual reference points in the public sphere, such has been the delimited debate on the war on terror in the United States. Boal reflects this indeterminacy when he asks in interview, “What are the cultural criteria that get applied to this?”Footnote 16 This is a good question and goes beyond the somewhat formalist way in which he couches it, as a question about the lines between journalism and fiction, to implicate other criteria, ethical and political, that normally get applied (in response to representations of war and state violence) but seem now to be in abeyance. The suspension of such criteria is a crucial, defining feature of the American worldview in the age of perpetual war and I will return to this.
Faced in interview with questions about the depiction and function of torture in the film, Bigelow traffics between moral outrage and patriotic sentiment, finding a middle ground in artistic licence: “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.”Footnote 17 This is true as far as it goes but is also disingenuous and deflects questions about the ethics or politics of the hunt for bin Laden. Asked in an interview, “Does the film suggest that ‘the end justifies the means’?”, Bigelow replies,
I really don't know. We'll never know if you could have found that compound [where bin Laden had been living] without employing harsh tactics. It's definitely been confirmed that the name of the courier came out of the detainee programme. The way I see it as a film-maker is as a portrait of dedication and determination.Footnote 18
This is a common statement by Bigelow in interviews. Satisfied that she has not celebrated violence or rendered heroic her protagonists, she champions the dogged professionalism of intelligence grunts:
I see it [Zero Dark Thirty] as a portrait of dedication … I think it can be inspiring to everybody. The dedication of these professionals, people who have devoted their entire life, they have no public presence … and therefore no public acknowledgment or gratitude is given to them … you are made aware of the tremendous amount of dedication and service these people are giving every day.Footnote 19
Bigelow states, “the film doesn't have an agenda, and it doesn't judge. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience.”Footnote 20 Her reiterations of this suggest that key features of the film's style, genre and narrative are determined by her aim to produce an apolitical representation of the hunt for bin Laden.
In line with this, many commentators have noted how flat or neutral the film appears in emotional effect and in particular the seeming “lack” of emotion in the character of Maya.Footnote 21 This flatness is evident not only in the characters but also in the environments, the bleak mise en scène of CIA black-ops sites and bare, dull conference rooms. We are immersed in the overwhelming environment of the film, which is one of anonymous sites of interrogation, investigation and analysis; an entropic environment that is an eternal present – duration and distance are annihilated by the ubiquitous video screens and telecommunications technologies. These sterile settings are “non-places” that lack registers of affect or community yet suggest the banality of new forms of warfare, simulacra of an “international military sublime.”Footnote 22 For the viewer, the effect is disorienting, as we do not find any clear points of narrative purchase or character detail. The result is an intensity of representation that drains depicted events of drama and meaning while drawing us into the world of the hunt. This is not a world of political or moral choices or judgements; it is a world of procedure, which is precisely why proceduralism is the key element of the film's generic toolkit. There is an intense focus on proceduralism throughout the film; from the opening scenes of torture, through Maya's investigations, to the raid on bin Laden's compound, procedure is all. Maya's obsession is not dictated by personal feelings or ethical or political motives but is contained within and articulated by the proceduralism of her job.Footnote 23 This reliance on proceduralism is key to the narrative power and intensity of Zero Dark Thirty but also to its enthralment to the aporia of representation that derails epistemological inquiry into the workings of the war on terror.
“THERE'S NO SHAME”
The idea that Zero Dark Thirty shines a critical light on the dark side of American foreign policy is symbolically represented in several elements of the film, including in the opening scene. Throughout the scene there are constant references to issues of visibility and visuality and to questions of sight and insight. It begins with a dark screen and the actual, recorded voices of people who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11; the last voices appear to be those of a woman inside the WTC saying “I'm going to die…” and the voice of an operator saying “…going to come and get you…” The voices fade and the next shot is of a bright shaft of light shining through a hole in the roof of a room. As the camera moves down following the light we are shown a shady room in which a man is tied and surrounded by individuals wearing balaclavas. The camera moves quickly across their faces as the door to the room opens and then settles on the figure of Dan walking towards the chained man. Beside Dan is Maya, who is wearing a balaclava, staring intently as the interrogation proceeds. After the first bout of interrogation the words “BLACK SITE Undisclosed Location” appear on the screen. With this single cut, the film consequentially links the moment of 9/11 as a horrifying national trauma to a deterritorialized scene of torture. This opening scene stages the primal scene of the war on terror as a black site that exists in an exceptional time and space and in which ethical values of humanity are suspended. This is the time and space of “zero dark thirty.”
Throughout the scene there are references to visibility and visuality, both in terms of the torture scene being observed and in terms of broader scopic dimensions of what is being visualized and how. The scene is constructed to lend the viewer a sense of seeing what is not commonly seen, having a light shone on a dark space. The shaft of light is a symbolic figuration of this but the viewer's point of view and sense of insight depend on Maya as the camera lingers on her gaze and facial responses to the scene. We are pointedly asked to identify with Maya's gaze by the camera; she is our surrogate, our guide into this dark world, learning what is going on and quickly adapting to it. Bigelow hastens her apprenticeship and replaces character backstory and motivation with a focus on Maya's response to the scene of torture. This is establishing the core identification for viewers, as Bigelow says of Maya, “you're on her ride, her journey, her obsession, her determination.”Footnote 24
Following this first interrogation, Dan and Maya discourse outside the room and Dan says to Maya, “You know, there's no shame if you want to watch from the monitor,” which shows what is happening inside the room. Maya and Dan then gaze at each other for a long moment during which Maya slightly shakes her head. This statement has several significant connotations, all of which hinge on issues of representation. Within the action of the filmed moment, it poses a challenge to Maya and to our perception of her character in relation to the event of torture: the choice to look at first hand or at second hand, to be active and immediately complicit or passive and secondarily complicit. But it can also be interpreted as a challenge to the viewer and a reminder that the war on terror is a screened reality on the monitors that surround us all. At the same time it is an overt invitation, to move to the other side of the monitor and witness the reality that is being screened. This, of course, is the implicit promise of the film.
Notably, in foregrounding this issue in the opening of the film, it is explicitly presented as an ethical issue. There is “no shame,” Dan says, yet shame is one of the most relevant and contested structures of feeling in the visualization of political violence and is a key term in human rights and international relations discourses surrounding the war on terror. As Thomas Keenan notes, it is a
pervasive axiom of the human rights movement that those agents whose behavior it wishes to affect – governments, armies, businesses, and militias – are exposed in some significant way to the force of public opinion, and that they are (psychically and emotionally) structured like individuals in a strong social or cultural context that renders them vulnerable to feelings of dishonor, embarrassment, disgrace, or ignominy. Shame is thought of as a primordial force that articulates or links knowledge with action, a feeling or a sensation brought on not by physical contact but by knowledge or consciousness alone. And it signifies involvement in a social network, exposure to others and susceptibility to their gaze.Footnote 25
Moreover, within human rights discourse, “the power of shame lies at the heart of investigatory and reporting mechanisms.”Footnote 26 This power is based on the assumed effect of revelation and assumed relationship between knowledge and action. Under conditions of the war on terror, however, these assumptions have been challenged or eroded to the point where they have almost been emptied of effect. The statement “there is no shame if you want to watch from the monitor” can be read as an apologia of the war on terror, a war without shame. As such, the statement not only is a challenge to Maya; it also states the disturbing reality of the American public sphere, where the war on terror is observed daily without shame. The statement also alerts us at an early point to the absence of ethical questions and judgements in this film. In place of judgement, we have complicity. Maya not only watches; she begins to participate and we realize that she will not be our moral compass in this world, that she occupies a space of disturbing ambiguity.Footnote 27
“WE DEAL IN PROBABILITY”
This lengthy opening sequence functions both to represent the “dark side” of US intelligence gathering and to put it beyond conventional forms of ethical or political critique. The viewer, like Maya, enters at midpoint, in media res, accepting simply that we are where we are due to 9/11 and that the hunt for bin Laden is the only narrative direction available to make any sense of this confusing, shadowy world we now inhabit. It also establishes that the war on terror is a new type of conflict – it is the new normal – as Maya and her colleagues operate in a framework of permanent warfare. In Zero Dark Thirty the new normal is an elaborate technocracy of data-mining and procedural analysis; it is a universe of proceduralism in which protagonists debate theory.Footnote 28
As our guide to this world Maya teaches us how to understand the nature of the hunt for bin Laden as a procedural narrative. Near the end of the film, addressing the soldiers prior to their raid on bin Laden's compound, Maya states,
There are two narratives about the location of Osama bin Laden. The one that you are most familiar with is that UBL is hiding in a cave in a tribal area, that he is surrounded by a large contingent of loyal fighters. But that narrative is pre-9/11 understanding of UBL. The second narrative is that he is living in a city with multiple points of egress and entry, access to communications so that he can keep in touch with the organization. You can't run a global network of interconnected cells from a cave.
It is this post-9/11 narrative, in which war is waged through high-tech networks, that Zero Dark Thirty promotes and naturalizes, showing us how subjects are represented and surveyed through data, and actions are based on assessments of risk. In the words of one CIA operative, “We don't deal in certainty, we deal in probability.” It is deduction, not dedication, that wins out, reflecting a form of neoliberal governmentality which to paraphrase Michel Foucault brings “life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations.”Footnote 29 It is also a world of ruthless biopolitical power as befits the conduct of war as a technocratic management of human life. The opening scene of torture underlines the extreme activity of war as conducted by neoliberal technocracy, wherein knowledge extracted from the body through torture is just one more byte of information.
Zero Dark Thirty reflects the turn to risk management and measurement as practices of governing in the war on terror. A key aim in using risk technologies is, in the words of former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, to “thwart a terrorist who has not yet been identified.”Footnote 30 As such, it represents a desire for preemptive identification that is not answerable to discourses of rights or liberties. The proliferation of risk techniques is about a particular mode of governing, making an uncertain and unknowable future amenable to intervention and management.Footnote 31 They represent new economies of power and knowledge in which discipline gives way to risk, sovereignty gives way to governmentality, and geopolitics gives way to biopolitics.
In Zero Dark Thirty, every activity in the world of the film is treated as a source of data gathering, from the torture in the opening scene to the raid on bin Laden's compound. As Ignatiy Vishnevetsky notes,
Torture, surveillance, and enemy action are all treated as data, which is then used to calculate probabilities. These probabilities form the bases for future actions, which yield more data. The cycle goes on and on and on … Warfare becomes data, and then data becomes the object of warfare, supplanting its original goals.Footnote 32
It would seem that procedure takes over ideology, as characters discuss their work in terms of probability and degrees of certainty about what is known and not known. At one point the CIA station chief lists many things they do not know about bin Laden's whereabouts and is interrupted by another agent who says, “We don't know what we don't know.” The chief responds, “What the fuck does that mean?” The agent: “It's a tautology.” But this is less a tautology than an enunciation of the perverse logics of knowledge acquisition in the procedural war against terror. For those conducting this war, knowledge is based on a simple, if seemingly absurd, calculus, well described by the CIA inspector general in 2004:
field interrogators … judge that [Headquarters’] … assessments to the effect that detainees are withholding information are not always supported by an objective evaluation of available information and the evaluation of the interrogators but are too heavily based, instead, on presumptions of what the individual might or should know … Lack of knowledge led analysts to speculate about what a detainee “should know,” [versus] information the analyst could objectively demonstrate the detainee did know … When a detainee did not respond to a question posed to him, the assumption at Headquarters was that the detainee was holding back and knew more; consequently, Headquarters recommended resumption of [enhanced interrogation techniques].Footnote 33
This “catch-22” of interrogation illustrates the perverse logics of procedural warfare. It might also put us in mind of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's infamous statement when, following the revelations of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, he observed, “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.”Footnote 34 Rumsfeld's casuistry is implicitly mocked by the film, yet Zero Dark Thirty engages in a similar parsing of knowledge. The hunt for bin Laden is rendered an exercise in probability and risk, and the viewer is challenged with lending it an ideological cast.
The ending of the film dramatizes this in several ways. Maya sits on a troop transport plane staring into the middle distance. A pilot asks, “You have the plane to yourself. Where do you want to go?” A tear rolls down her cheek but she is otherwise expressionless. The effect is one of emptiness or purposelessness; there is no sense of catharsis or redemption. The scene quite clearly asks the audience to consider what has been the point or value of the hunt for and killing of bin Laden. Some commentators have read it to say, Maya/America has lost her/its own values in the process of the hunt: “we've warped our own souls in pursuit of a goal, the killing of bin Laden, that has left us fundamentally empty and dislocated.”Footnote 35 As with so much of the film, there is a stark sense of ambiguity, of not knowing what Maya is thinking or feeling and being unsure of what we are supposed to be thinking or feeling.
UNKNOWN KNOWNS
I have no doubt that Bigelow intends Zero Dark Thirty as a kind of Rorschach test for its audience, inviting them to read into the relatively blank representations of the action and characterization. As such, I think she has produced a difficult and demanding film, one that is unusual and challenging (though far from unique) in withholding certain conventional pleasures and expectations from the audience.
On this reading the absence of critique in Zero Dark Thirty is its strength, it is a knowing abnegation of ethical or political judgement and so it acts as a mirror of the web of liberal proceduralism that it assumes its viewers are also trapped within. But I think this is too generous a reading, one that allows Bigelow to play all sides of the art/journalism and fact/fiction borders and transcend the ideological compulsions of her film's narrative. Her stance “beyond ideology” is a precocious disavowal of the American exceptionalism inscribed in the narrative drive to find bin Laden. In interview Bigelow articulates her own ideological perspective in just such terms. Speaking of the ending of the film she says, “you know you're kind of caught between two worlds … as a member of this country I feel proud … but also grasping the scope and scale of what is before all of us.”Footnote 36 Ultimately, for Bigelow, as for so many American commentators, bin Laden has functioned as a vanishing mediator of American foreign policy (and American values) in pursuit of the war on terror.
The killing of bin Laden provides no clear sense of resolution or closure in the film and only serves to dramatize the aporia of representation that mystifies this “elusive enemy” and hides the war on terror in plain sight. President Obama's speech announcing completion of the mission to kill bin Laden obliquely enunciates the disjuncture between seeing and believing in the American worldview:
The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens. After nearly 10 years of service, struggle, and sacrifice, we know well the costs of war … tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11. I know that it has, at times, frayed. Yet today's achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.Footnote 37
With the reminder that Americans “did not choose this fight,” the assertion that “[j]ustice has been done,” and references to a renewed national unity, Obama conjures up the potent mythology of redemption through violence, and promotes a new American exceptionalism that will once again suture values and security in the American worldview. The inference is that the killing of bin Laden promises to close the circuits of violence and trauma that emanated from the event of 9/11. But this ideological suture is a confidence trick (and an old one), an avowal of belief in the American mission that disavows the obscene practices that make that mission possible, what Obama glosses here as “the costs of war.” This is a disavowal of the violence that has caused civilians to be brutalized or killed across the world as a result of the war on terror.
To the degree we accept the worldview of Zero Dark Thirty we are complicit in the normalization of torture, drone strikes and other dark arts. To give Maya a pass on this parallels the ways in which Americans have generally given their technocratic President a pass in continuing many of the same policies as his predecessor. Obama, we recall, found no accountability in prosecuting members of the Bush administration. Nonaccountability is key to this film's missing politics and this is something more than Bigelow's professed ideological agnosticism, a stance against interpretation; rather it connotes the political unconscious of a perpetual war in which the government does not so much withhold knowledge from the public (though this certainly occurs) as it redacts responsibility and liability for actions that knowledge pertains to. There is a “refusal to know,” a disavowal of knowledge that is a significant component of perpetual war. This has broad ramifications in contemporary American culture, inculcating certain patterns of perception and response to new forms of state violence. The collapse of distinctions between war and peace, and between war and murder, have entailed a diminishment of ideological and affective registers of empathy, compassion and shame in comprehending suffering others. We hear many glib references to the “costs of war” but these are part of a defunct ethical vocabulary about state violence and national service; more insidiously, they signify the abstracted calculations of a self-fulfilling technocracy.
An important question raised by Zero Dark Thirty’s missing politics is whether neoliberal governance of war is answerable to a democratic vocabulary. As noted above, many reviewers remarked on the film's “potential to shape American public opinion” and afford an opportunity for a “(belated) civic debate.” In part, this reflects a common assumption that American cinema is a technology of liberal democratic citizenship and has the potential to contribute to civic communications in the public sphere. More particularly, it reflects both the “newsworthy” elements of the film and its associations with investigative journalism. In the remarks, however, there is a notable ambivalence about the capacity of the film to function in this way. In The Atlantic, Peter Maass observed that “Zero Dark Thirty represents a new genre of embedded filmmaking that is the problematic offspring of the worrisome endeavour known as embedded journalism.”Footnote 38 This is an astute observation, recognizing both the complicated provenance of the film and its inevitable complicities with a state-sanctioned worldview. As with embedded journalism, the framing of events is always already charged with interpretation; it “takes part in the interpretation of the war compelled by the state.”Footnote 39 In the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday asked,
Are we willing – at the box office and through repeated viewing – to endorse “Zero Dark Thirty” as a metonym for the war on terror, the same way we've accepted “All the President's Men” as a symbolic catch-all for Watergate, which was a much larger and complex episode than two dogged reporters bringing down a president? We'd better be. In an era when legacy media are on the ropes and genuine investigative reporting is becoming increasingly rare, journalism will surely keep migrating into other popular forms, creating a new audience of citizen–spectators.Footnote 40
Hornaday's halfhearted endorsement of the film as a latter-day All the President's Men only serves to underline the diminishment of a political imagination in American cinema. In the earlier film, reflecting the paranoid liberal imagination of the early 1970s, narrative critique and pleasure focussed on conspiracy and exposure and on hidden machinations of power.Footnote 41 In Zero Dark Thirty, there is no deep truth to be uncovered. It reflects a neoliberal America in which the machinations of the powerful are barely concealed and where the corruption of ideals of democratic transparency do not trouble the “citizen–spectators.”
For all its smarts in representing war as an elaborate technocracy, Zero Dark Thirty misreads the dialectics of knowledge and belief in the American worldview. We should recall Donald Rumsfeld's statement on “known unknowns” that the film knowingly references. In his sly critique of Rumsfeld's statement the philosopher Slavoj Žižek adds a fourth term: “the ‘unknown knowns’, things that we don't know that we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which doesn't know itself.’”Footnote 42 Against Rumsfeld's list of dangers, Žižek argues that the “main danger lies in the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.”Footnote 43 This disavowal is necessary, whatever the revelations, for it maintains the identification of values and security that is so important to the promotion of the American worldview. The war on terror can be accepted as the new normal precisely due to such disavowals. An ongoing screening of collective deceptions, denials and complicities, and a mass suspension of belief in documentary evidence of the dark side of US foreign policy, confirm the political paralysis of homeland spectators, a public both blinded by and complicit with the spectacle of war – a war that was and is hidden in plain sight.
Perpetual war erases boundaries between soldier and civilian, between actor and observer, between home front and war front. Today, we live in the perpetual present of a war that exists in “real time” and for which we have as yet no adequate ethical gauge of our human affiliations. Cinematic and other media representations of the war on terror mimic this lack, reminding us of the limits of our knowledge formations and ethical imaginations. Zero Dark Thirty takes us some way towards the dark heart of this dilemma but leaves us stranded in its apolitical miasma, refusing to take responsibility for what it shows us, representing but not questioning the naturalization of preemptive violence as the right and might of the state and the role of the public as citizen–spectators. If we accept this role, then indeed there is no shame in watching from the monitor.
