“We’re all smart, Jeremy”—or, I Am Not Immune To Propaganda: Thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants” (2001)

You know I call them our superheroes.

Woman on the radio a few years back, paraphrased (except for “our superheroes”)

 

A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. . . . Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons, to be pondered, solved, ignored. . . . The men at his level were spawning secrets that quivered like reptile eggs. They were planning to poison Castro’s cigars. They were designing cigars equipped with micro-explosives. They had a poison pen in the works. They were conspiring with organized-crime figures to send assassins to Havana. . . . They were testing a botulin toxin on monkeys.

Don DeLillo, Libra (1988)

 

But I love this country

To me she has no sins

If you don’t buy my record

Then Al-Qaeda wins

“America (I Love This Country)” from The Simpsons (season 15, episode 19, 2004)

 

This essay contains full spoilers for the film and South Park episode in the title, partial spoilers for the South Park episode “Cripple Fight,” and some discussion of real-world events/morbidity.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012) has been something of a pop culture ghost for me over the years—a movie I’ve found myself “haunted by” in a sense, that I’ve been thinking about probably a lot more than someone who knew me, my taste, and my politics might suspect, and for a couple of reasons.

One of those reasons is that I half-watched it years ago. Zero Dark Thirty was a film I bought for my father on one occasion or another. That’s significant because even though I love my father and have watched plenty of movies with him over the years, a movie bought specifically for him is typically not a movie For Me. So it was that when we watched Zero Dark Thirty, I was not paying full attention—was playing a video game or something—and so registered very little of it. Little enough that whether I “watched” it or not is arguable. What I mostly had were some impressions and two more concrete memories: Navy SEALs softly calling men’s names to lure them out for shootin’ during the climactic raid, and Jessica Chastain’s Maya sitting alone on a plane at the end and looking maybe conflicted. I arguably had not actually watched Zero Dark Thirty back then, but I saw enough that it sort of lingered, as a partially unchecked box or as an ellipsis in my mind, half-remembered or forgotten from the start and kind of a curiosity for that fact. Yet my memory is that it was a movie that had radio ads back in the day, it was such a thing. I can remember those disembodied voices (more ghosts of another sort) speaking their trailer-worthy lines—“You will never find him. He is one of the disappeared ones.”—over and over again when I was commuting to or from my college campus. These were serious, ultimately award-winning, words in their original context, but they were robbed of power by the quality of the radio signal and by the absence of the visuals meant to go with them and were then further reduced to white noise or nonsense by the repetition.

Another reason the film stuck in my head was because of its title, which tugged at my brain with its, to a civilian, poetical nonsense phrasing that was and is, still, so evocative-feeling: Zero, nothing, no one left or willing to tell the tale, cold and empty; Dark, inscrutable, shrouded, evil or just morally ambiguous, or maybe “misunderstood” given the over-association of “dark” with negativity; Thirty, a weirdly specific number out of context and pretty compelling for it. All of it perfectly fit to be whispered in a clandestine way thanks to the natural breathy sound of “e,” “ar, “thir.”

My ongoing interest in the movie has been somewhat abstracted or elevated in that way, what with not caring about the particulars so much as the vibes, and in trying to intellectualize/formalize it and produce something like coherent “thoughts,” I’ve found myself thinking somewhat of Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) and how it treats the words of Hagakure, the supposed guide to the way of the samurai that the titular character follows, like poetry rather than as an actual guide necessarily. It’s a problematic fascination that the film may actively engage with as part of its plot and themes even as it simultaneously valorizes people and ideas that were and are deeply problematic because it is such an undeniably charismatic movie. I recently saw a clip from a scene where Forest Whitaker’s Ghost Dog trains on his rooftop while the score by RZA plays experience a bit of a tiny renaissance on my Twitter timeline, and it’s just such a cool combo—Whitaker’s modern-day Black samurai hitman meditatively practicing with blades and bare hands against an urban backdrop and accompanied by music with style to spare. If there’s a critique in the mix, it’s fighting against the engaging, appealing artistry of the presentation. Similarly, Zero Dark Thirty concerns itself with the all-caps “greatest manhunt in history”—the CIA’s efforts to find and kill Osama bin Laden—which is full of problematic stuff: torture, jingoism both tacit and explicit, extrajudicially killing someone on foreign soil… Referring to the country of Pakistan collectively as “the Paks” sounds like some sort of racist to me! Like Ghost Dog, Zero Dark Thirty kind of grapples with some of this stuff (see, for example, the pointed, obvious irony and understatement of the SEALs telling these children they’ve brutally orphaned “It’s okay”), but whether grappling with something says anything of substance is worth thinking about. What lies beneath the slick presentation? And what salient meaning is there behind my Ghost-Dog-ian obsession with its abstracted, context-less form?

Of course, that thinking about Zero Dark Thirty has probably all been done by this point, by people who are probably better equipped to engage with the most unsavory and fraught elements, like how we go straight from a black screen where we listen to actual recordings from the 9/11 attacks to Jason Clarke’s affable, well-spoken Dan Fuller torturing a man for information—You play to the intended audience’s sense of pathos by letting them hear these (real) people in the direst of situations, facing imminent death, and then immediately introduce this likeable American man who’s willing to do Whatever It Takes to stop future attacks, basically priming the viewer to be receptive to the idea, to see the “necessity” the same way that the CIA does. Their inability to obtain fresh intel from “detainees” becomes an important conflict as the movie goes on and as they eventually start trying to justify raiding the compound where they think Osama bin Laden might be holed up.

It’s not like it’s hard to find issues to criticize here. Even in terms of artistic Reads, I’m willing to bet the film has been tapped out. Like, is Maya’s (nearly) lone confident, capable woman some sort of stand-in for Bigelow? Working in a field where she’s surrounded most of the time by men, ultimately alone in her victory and shedding a tear rather than celebrating with The Boys, her one woman friend having been lost some time back. Is there some sort of Commentary being made here?

Maybe the thing that surprised me most while actually watching the movie was that the “Middle East” wasn’t covered with a visual filter the color of urine to denote foreignness and unease. The only sequence kind of devoid of color is the appropriately… dark compound raid, though even the ashy blackness of the night feels more expressive and tactile and emotionally alive than not, and the nigh-upon-volcanic look of the wider world seen from an objective third-person point of view alternates with the green, artifact-y, first-person viewpoints of the armed men with their night vision.

I don’t think Zero Dark Thirty is without things to say, but there was a sort of “ambivalence,” or maybe “ambiguity,” that I felt at times, tonally. The final shot of Chastain stoically, briefly crying and then composing herself is probably the most loaded for me, partly because it’s the last thing we see, but also because it’s a spot where we’re clearly invited to speculate or to inject our interpretation: Is this a woman who’s held herself together for so many years and has basically willed an end to her quest for “Abu Ahmed” and then Bin Laden himself into being against all odds finally breaking under the strain? Now that the pressure which was holding her together has been removed, is she finally falling apart? Springing, to be a little silly, a literal leak? Or is she finally allowing herself that release, relaxing her own hold? Before the plane, after identifying Bin Laden’s body, she steps out of the tent where the previously mentioned boys are gleefully sorting the hard drives and other things taken from the compound and sort of tilts her head and closes her eyes as we hear a cleansing breeze wash over her. Or is the tear for her lost office buddy, Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), the death that really seemed to calcify her personal hatred of Al-Qaeda and her Ahab-esque fixation on finding the link to Bin Laden? Is it a tear for the many years she’s spent doing nothing but hunt for these men? She’s cultivated no social life, seems to have no one outside of work… So is this moment a relief or is it painful for her? A man tellingly (perhaps near-goofily when you think about it) informs her she’s the only one aboard and asks her where she wants to go—like, on a plane but also in general, right? Because she’s not just alone on the plane but in life as well. Obvious stuff!

Surely, we know, the tear isn’t for Bin Laden—a major player in this drama more notable for his absence than his presence—or for the woman “smoked” and left to bleed out in the process of reaching him, the orphaned children, the innocent bystanders who might have died if they’d insisted on investigating what heavily armed men were doing in their neighborhood crashing helicopters and blowing things up late at night, or the prisoners tortured for information that eventually led to that final confrontation. Does Maya care about the “human cost” she and her countrymen have exacted? She starts as this kind of hesitant, sickly, and reticent presence in the torture chamber but morphs into a competent girlboss interrogator in her own right, seemingly inured to the violence since the greater good (or at least revenge) is at stake. I felt a chill of recognition at her ascendancy when she was interrogating a captured financier and mirrors some of Dan’s speech: “I want you to understand that I know you. I’ve been following you and studying you for a long time.” Later, in another conversation with a different man in a similar room, she says, “You determine how you’re treated.” This may all be written in a book somewhere, but hearing the echo was still meaningful. It’s just after this second scene where Dan leaves for America, after turning down Maya’s suggestion that he “take a run” at the interrogation himself, further cementing her place as the one in charge now. She finds her nerve, but in service to what?

What I’m zig-zagging my way toward here is that I think Zero Dark Thirty’s ambiguously morose rather than strictly celebratory ending, along with Maya’s development as a character, is what marks it as distinctly Liberal rather than Conservative (in the American political sense of those words). It’s an ambivalence that I recognize in the nominally progressive arm of our political apparatus—a willingness to let the blood flow with abandon and then shed a stately tear in silence, or offer meaningless platitudes, in its wake. Isn’t all this military and spy stuff just really, really fun? The movie is slickly produced and certainly strikes me as intentionally cool, but we’re invited to feel bad (if we want) in the end since that’s the mainstream progressive position: It’s ok to feel good about torture and murder as long as you can justify it and can then put on a somber face for your public.

Ultimately, I’d go so far as to say the question of whether Zero Dark Thirty “endorses” torture or not is completely pointless since, whether it does or not, these are things the US has done, would do again, and has never actually stopped doing in one way or another. Sometimes it’s a man with a foreign-sounding name in a cell somewhere that you don’t know about, and sometimes it’s willfully sacrificing the long- and short-term health of your entire population by downplaying an ongoing pandemic in the name of keeping the wheels of capitalism and, by extension, of the social and political and cultural status quo turning rather than risking some sort of upheaval by treating a problem as a problem, which might require unpalatable solutions like… some sort of consistent federally-enforced safety net. While some of the people making these decisions might be “stupid,” there are certainly Dan Fullers involved—people who would self-identify as “smart” and who would gut you without thinking about it if it meant the world they were in service to kept turning for another 24 hours.

The shift from the Bush to Obama administration is pretty obliquely touched upon in the movie without really naming it outright by way of a change in how the CIA is supposed to operate with regard to torture, but (and I know I risk making a fool of myself in saying this) I don’t think Obama was actually anti-torture in any meaningful way. Here’s another quote from earlier on the same page of Don DeLillo’s Libra—a fictionalized account of the Kennedy assassination—that I quoted from a bit at the start of this piece and that I think captures what is probably the real-world social contract of the American government and its various servant agencies very well:

“Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing in Leader 4, or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horrors were not for their ears. Details were a form of contamination.”

And it continues like that for a few more lines, naming various officials and insisting that they are not meant to know certain things, culminating in the statement that “[i]t was the President, of course, who was the final object of their protective instincts. They all knew that JFK wanted Castro cooling on a slab but they weren’t allowed to let on to him that his guilty yearning was the business they’d charged themselves to carry out. The White House was to be the summit of unknowing.” Perhaps the most telling statement in all of the above to me is impair his ability to tell the truth—or, put another way in service to the point I’m making about Zero Dark Thirty, to say with a straight face that the US does not torture and be able to, by virtue of not knowing otherwise, fully mean it as a truth. This is certainly how the proverbial sausage (of liberty, say) is made. As a critic, I can appreciate the value and simple raw appeal of trying to suss out exactly what Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were saying about torture with their film, but I also think it is ultimately pointless since, regardless of what operational or historical inaccuracies it might technically depict, Zero Dark Thirty feels true to the spirit of the thing in a way that seems right to me. But maybe that’s just how every conspiracist thinks?

 

I like to think of myself as someone that has a pretty low opinion of The Military as an institution but who has a ready sympathy for those who serve in it, particularly when they come from disadvantaged or marginalized backgrounds and especially if they feel remorse on leaving. There’s a reason why the “Recrooter” “Wojak” looks like a sly pervert. Personally, when I see military stuff, my impression has always been of something like Steven Seagal on the cover of the “movie” Sniper: Special Ops (2016): He’s got all the signifiers of armed forces lone wolf badassery you’d expect, but the seeming cheapness of the tableau and the natural ungainliness of Seagal emphasize the lie—that this is a fundamentally uncool costume to wear and that the massive PR campaigns designed to make it look like a desirable way to be are always just as silly but are typically better at hiding it. Seagal’s community theater production goofin’ around in the prop room-looking self is basically an anti­-recruitment ad.

If there’s a certain gleeful derision in my tone here, that is also something worth thinking about. I never, to the best of my recollection, felt any real compulsion to join up. I would—and still do, if we’re being honest—think of myself as not a joiner: someone who Doesn’t Play Well With Others, who would be unwilling to demean himself by letting some old dude make him do push-ups or run laps as part of some kind of “team.” I didn’t and don’t take criticism well and naturally gravitate toward academia because of the concept of “academic freedom,” that you serve the institution and might need to hold yourself to some standards but that you are also afforded a certain amount of leeway with what you do and how you do it. I’ve heard “academic freedom” invoked in a department meeting as a reason why some potential changes or standards were untenable. Professors are, it is assumed, exactly the types of people collectively to have the sort of attitude I described.

At one point in time, I would tell people my favorite book was Pat Conroy’s 1980 novel, The Lords of Discipline, an intimate look at the homosocial environment of a fictional military institute, with a focus on brotherly bonds forged through adversity (read: brutal hazing). I really did enjoy the relationship between the young men at the center of the story when I read it years ago, but it was also just fun, as someone so obviously intellectual, to claim as a favorite a book so hyper-focused on a culture and on experiences that I clearly, classic geek-type that I was, knew nothing about and wouldn’t be expected to have any interest in.

And that is how Zero Dark Thirty won me over—by flattering the nasty little imp in me that disdains things like teamwork and the Lowly in-the-dust-and-blood of it all of being in the armed forces but that was intellectually “Interested” in it in a superior, removed sort of way.

I already knew what the plot of Zero Dark Thirty was, but since my most concrete/vivid memories of it came from the end, I think I overestimated just how much of it was Sniper: Special Ops stuff with the rowdy, beardy, beefy Chris Pratts of the story rather than focused on spyly espionage. The parts that, at the risk of giving myself way too much credit, focus on people with appearances and attitudes a lot more like my own. I went into the movie expecting to find it boring and jingoistic and full of boots-on-the-ground Dudes, but instead it properly begins with Jason Clarke, who’s kind of always a little mussed looking no matter how he’s dressed and who alternates between congenially addressing his torture victim as “bro” and speaking to him in ways that sound taken right from a serial killers’ guide to stripping someone’s mind before you strip away their flesh: “When you lie to me, I hurt you,” Clarke’s character says as a sort of refrain. You can see him be the good and the bad cop, from one moment to the other, in ways that feel scary and kind of exhilarating for how the concept of one person trying to be both is something I’ve mostly seen played as a joke before (see 2006’s Pink Panther reboot). Clarke’s Dan uses the word “tautology” in a later scene, and he lets a captive monkey have a small handful of his ice cream at one point, before shortly losing the entire cone in a funny, easily anticipated, and charming way. He’s saddened when the monkeys are later killed. He’s a character, with charisma, and he’s also the face of the movie’s torture plot. “[Y]ou don’t wanna be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes,” he warns Maya as he prepares to depart for America and a different job venue. He represents a power fantasy for a specific kind of guy who maybe thinks of himself as above the rank and file of the armed forces. “You agency guys are twisted,” says a smiling nearby guard upon witnessing the aforementioned monkey feeding. There’s room to be an eccentric here and still be smart and powerful, the movie says. It’s still selling that same old lone wolf power fantasy, but just without the fatigues.

And then there’s Maya—She is almost comically beautiful compared to just about everyone else in the movie, to the point that I had the impression, in one scene where she’s seated at a table among so many pretty unremarkable-looking men, that it was like that meme about how a player-created character in a video game looks in a cutscene, sticking out as so noticeably different from everyone else that it shatters the sense of immersion. The meme is focused on goofiness, I think, but beauty works just as well. I don’t want to push this particular aspect of the discussion too far, lest I sound like a creep and/or pathetic, but… let me just quickly borrow a particular phrase taken from writer and artist Molly Crabapple’s foreword to Katherine Dunn’s posthumously released novel Toad, in reference to the deceased author in her youth: “lank-haired hottie.”

That’s certainly an evocative phrase, with a poeticism of sorts, but also a sense of being a wildly inappropriate way to describe someone (especially a dead woman), but that’s kind of Maya here! She has an almost unearthly beauty in contrast to her peers, a small frame, and a surprisingly soft voice for someone in her line of work. The contrast with her developing grit is noticeable—and certainly intentional—and while it might feel like an oversight that basically zero misogyny or sexism seems to come her way at any point in this film, it's a fairly straightforward empowerment fantasy because of it. She’s the liberal feminist 101 ideal of a woman “empowered” by embracing masculine qualities and thriving in a patriarchal system. Given her gender, her seeming frailty, and her obvious unease in Dan’s torture chamber early on, I kept expecting his victim, Ammar (Reda Kateb), to look to her for help, and when he eventually does, she steps toward him from her position near the exit to the room and repeats Dan’s sentiment with all the force she can muster: Ammar can help himself by just giving them what they want. Well before the end of the story, she’s stomping around confidently with the boys. It’s not that this type of fictional character can’t be fun or that there aren’t real women who find some level of success living this way, but an unironic implementation of the “Hire more women torturers!” mentality is no way to solve real world systemic inequality, by just throwing women (or other vulnerable populations) into a system predisposed to work against them because just by virtue of their being in there—being ground up, probably—the discrimination/exclusion problem is being solved…

As a fantasy of a Strong Woman, Maya is beautiful, driven, and very smart. In the historical fiction of the film, she’s nearly single-handedly responsible for pursuing a lead others are repeatedly dismissive of, and, like I said before, she kind of wills the outcome she wants into being. “We’re all smart,” says the director of the CIA (played by James Gandolfini) wryly at one point, when another man assesses Maya as smart like that’s a distinctive positive quality of hers. But that’s what we’re told—that Maya is just one among many. What we see is just Maya, singularly effective at her job in a classically heroic sort of way. An icon of competence and forward momentum galvanizing a system that had kind of stalled before her arrival. It’s maybe a shock to the (viewer’s) system for her to be out of the way for such a large chunk of the film when focus decidedly shifts to the SEALs as the active players because she feels like the one capable person on earth so much of the time. Critically, Maya is pretty openly dismissive of them when they’re first brought into the fold (regarding the location of Osama bin Laden) during preparations to take some sort of action. Without any sense that she’s joking, she says, “Quite frankly, I didn’t even want to use you guys, with your dip and your Velcro and all your gear bullshit. I wanted to drop a bomb, but people didn’t believe in this lead enough to drop a bomb, so they’re using you guys as canaries. . . .” And isn’t that just my own superior, dismissive attitude reflected back at me?

It’s flattering to have that sense of intellectual superiority embodied by an attractive and larger-than-life personality, and while it feels gross, as previously mentioned, to focus repeatedly on Chastain’s looks, it’s undeniably one part of movies’ general appeal: to see people we want to be or be with who do and say things we wish we could say or do. That’s not always the case, obviously, but, still, presentationally, this is the total opposite of Sniper: Special Ops in that it preserves and strengthens the fantasy of what this kind of work looks like on you: You could be cool and hot and a lone wolf smarty and serve your country, and I wasn’t as prepared to resist being beguiled by that fantasy as I thought I was.

The way Zero Dark Thirty is written, especially early on, was also appealing to me, as someone who likes the work of Thomas Pynchon and has a fondness for calculated information overload and a sense of conspiracy. This movie casually, quickly throws out names and places and terms and is written in a somewhat “heightened” or “literary” sort of way. At one point Maya says to Jessica that she (Maya) is “not that girl that fucks. It’s unbecoming.” It’s the kind of thing that no actual person would say to describe themselves unless they were completely insufferable, antisocial, and had a willfully Artistic view of themselves and their life, but it’s such a great line to someone who reads and likes the way books are written. The exchange between Maya and Dan by the monkey cages as he reveals that he’s leaving and that he’s sad about the monkeys being put down also has this charmingly terse and awkward quality to it. I don’t know that I felt as much of that “literary” quality in the movie as it went on, but I was surprised to feel as seemingly catered to as I was by even the writing, at least up to a point.

I had expected to blast through Zero Dark Thirty—probably bored with the military stuff—and come out the other side confident in my sort-of dismissal of it along various political, cultural, or artistic lines I already had more or less settled on in my mind beforehand, but instead I found myself drawn in by both the quality of the execution and by the elements that felt appealing in ways targeted at me (and my Type) personally. Even the ambivalence or ambiguity that I criticized before kind of fits into that latter category, as while I wouldn’t describe my politics using either of those terms, there’s no denying the appeal of that attitude of regarding evil and terrible things and human tragedy from a position of intellectual and emotional remove, of being able to view them as either necessary for some greater good or abstractly as just art in their represented form—where the act of simply posing the question or leaving room for interpretation is itself valuable, where there’s a thrill to just knowing that something is being said, regardless of whether it’s coherent or if it’s retrograde or not. A stance where there is no meaning worth getting upset over—just vibes, raw poeticism, data and poll numbers and the like, outcomes anticipated and not. I’m aware enough of my own hubris to resist the urge to view things that way (above it all), especially where the real world is concerned, but clearly there’s a market for this sort of cynical, enlightened attitude.

I wouldn’t even say that the main characters of Zero Dark Thirty come across to me as all that patriotic. Clearly they’re willing to go to these excessive lengths to prevent further terrorist attacks, but you don’t see or hear them do or say much that I’d associate with nationalist pride, of the sort that produces a response to 9/11 along the lines of country musician Toby Keith’s incredibly-titled, pandering “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).” After a point in Zero Dark Thirty, in fact, Maya’s most readily accessible motivation, which we have the most concrete proof of, is simply revenge—not for 9/11 but for Jessica, whose death might, in casual parlance, be Maya’s own, personal “9/11.” She makes this just shy of explicit when she says, “A lot of my friends have died trying to do this. I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.”

There’s actually a sort of political agnosticism here, where the characters might be weirdly disconnected from what would be their presumptive motivation. There’s this one scene where several of them, including Maya, are having a conversation while an interview with Barack Obama regarding his opposition to torture plays on a TV in the background, and while they do momentarily attend to it, they don’t express an opinion about him or his words. Not that they look pleased by what they’re hearing either, but their facial expressions are, at most, ambiguous. Less ambiguous is the later scene where the CIA is being pressured to find adequate proof of Bin Laden’s presence in the compound before further action can be taken and the gutting of the “detainee program” is offered up as the source of the roadblock. In this context, we, the engaged audience of this story, are meant to root for swift and decisive action, so this puts us (theoretically) on the pro-torture side of the matter. Still, it strikes me as weird how the president is this distant, scarcely acknowledged presence that the agents seem to hold no strong feelings about. There’s this sort of sense, maybe, of a more… universal morality, separate from their allegiance to their country of origin or any sort of identifiable political (party) affiliation, which is maybe their sense of themselves as superior and better than worshipping Old Glory like the average servant of liberty. Or maybe it’s just the writing’s bias showing in assuming that an intensely American perspective is a neutral one, and so the nationalism is meant to be implied: Of course these people love their country! Can’t you see how hard they’re fighting to defend it?

In the continuing spirit of a piece that’s come to be about facing some uncomfortable personal truths, I need to acknowledge here that I underestimated Bigelow as a filmmaker. I had some vague sense of her as “The Hurt Locker lady,” knew that was a movie that superficially didn’t interest me (see, again, my disdain for the armed forces), and reached a conclusion years ago without really putting in any effort that was then subconsciously reinforced when her next movie was Zero Dark Thirty—another silly war movie, in my head. I half-saw Point Break (1991) at some point on television, but I didn’t know about her vampire movie, Near Dark (1987), or her science fiction film, Strange Days (1995). I only consciously changed my estimation of her a couple years ago when I watched a video essay about Point Break, on YouTube, on the Broey Deschanel channel: “Point Break and the Soft Masculinity of Action Movies.” It’s a great video on that specific film but that also touches on Bigelow’s approach to filmmaking in general, which includes some other evaluations of her work and some quotes from her that point strongly at an artistic intentionality I had (shamefully) assumed couldn’t exist because Military Stupid. To quote briefly from the conclusion of the video, “In rejection of the limiting and patronizing label of ‘woman filmmaker,’ we should understand Bigelow instead as an artist. Her films may present as ‘intellectually shallow,’ but her subtle and rebellious command over visual language, and her appreciation for the soft interior of masculinity, separate her from her peers.”

That’s specifically an assessment of her work on Point Break, of course, but Zero Dark Thirty might have its own subversive elements in its construction. While Bigelow didn’t write this movie—or any of her films since the 80s and 90s, going off Wikipedia—its focus on “smart” people feels kind of appropriate after what I learned about her background, since Bigelow herself seems pretty smart, which should not have been a surprise to me but was. It was this changed perspective and a desire to watch some movies I wouldn’t normally seek out that made me interested in finally paying attention to Zero Dark Thirty. It just took me a while to get around to it. In the end, I liked it, but I don’t think I should have. That might have been easier if it had been called something more on-the-nose, like “For God and Country,” or if it had used the pee filter—if it had been more obviously abrasive and patriotic and if it had offended my sensibilities rather than flattering them.

 

The adult animated sitcom South Park is a show that’s been accused of flattering a particularly toxic mindset, arguably encouraging an attitude of ambivalent superiority (leaning, perhaps, a bit conservative), where anyone who has a strong stance on an issue is a hypocrite, a fool, or some kind of pervert. I see that criticism and think it’s a valid reading of the show’s average political stance, but South Park is also one of my favorite series to casually rewatch. I may have lucked out by not encountering the show when I was quite so young and smug, as by the time I was watching episodes regularly, I had already hit an age where I valued honesty and having beliefs one is willing to defend over “winning” at life by trying to be the person who cares the least. Seeing most of it as an adult, I can balance what I like and dislike about South Park. In brief, I have a particular fondness for the musical Bigger, Longer, & Uncut movie from 1999, for example, and I own about a dozen seasons on DVD. During the couple of years where I had access to Comedy Central, the occasional days’ long South Park marathons were some of my favorite periods of television-watching. I’ve also played both the 2014 Stick of Truth and 2017 Fractured But Whole video games, and I have an RC Cartman sitting quite near me as I type this. Suffice it to say, I’ve had a lot of exposure to South Park and also like it a lot, so when I talk about the season five episode “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants” and criticize it, know that I’m not just parroting other people’s opinions about it or the series. It’s not one of my favorite episodes in terms of humor (that might be season 15, episode 11 “Broadway Bro Down” or season 16, episode 11 “Going Native”), but it has more relevance to this discussion than just being about killing the same guy as Zero Dark Thirty.

Although I haven’t done exhaustive research on the subject myself, “Farty Pants” has the distinction of being a very early piece of pop culture explicitly reacting to the September 11^th attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and American attitudes at the time, seeing as it debuted in early November of 2001. The rapid turn-around on episodes is both one of South Park’s strengths and its weaknesses. The show has been capable of responding to trends or events faster than similar series, like Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy, but whether that results in quality work is debatable. Still, the speedy “Farty Pants” captures a moment in time, and, critically, is surprisingly cutting in its stance on its subjects, up to a point. In typical South Park fashion, it is a lot more explicit (in more than one sense!) regarding the feelings of its creators about these things and has none of the ambiguity of Zero Dark Thirty, while still possibly saying similar stuff in aggregate.

The episode begins with the town of South Park in a state of heightened post-9/11 paranoia, where the kids are wearing gas masks while they wait for the school bus and where they (children and known quantities in the town) have to be searched by the police before they can board. Meanwhile, the one boy’s mother is completely obsessed with following the news and lies on the couch muttering incoherently in squalor. This is a pretty straightforwardly over-the-top depiction of our American obsession with terror after 9/11. On at least one or two occasions over the years, I saw someone express the opinion that Osama bin Laden “won” in the sense that he pushed the US into a state of fear and aggression and hyper-vigilance that it has never recovered from, maybe making us even more of an embarrassment. We might not “never forget” as much as we once did, but we still live in that world. The way people talk about the TSA, for example, makes it sound like just a (groping, privacy-violating) fact of life, which it essentially is by this point, but that doesn’t change the fact that this thing came to exist in my lifetime. That It (broadly speaking, not just the TSA) feels normal to us doesn’t alter the fact that the damage seems to be permanent and that we were changed forever back in 2001. You can twist that in either a deeply patriotic or critical direction if you like, depending on how you process the connotation; however, gas masks on children in a small mountain town far from any potential targets of value strikes me as pretty supportive of the Bin-Laden-won argument, even as a bit of absurd humor.

The actual inciting incident of the episode occurs when the boys get to school and are instructed to each send a dollar to the children of Afghanistan. Those children send a live goat as a reciprocal gift, and when the South Park boys try to get the goat back to Afghanistan, they ultimately end up captured by Osama bin Laden’s men, which leads to a final confrontation with the US forces, ending in Bin Laden’s death. That’s the short of it—I don’t want to summarize the entire plot in detail and want to focus instead on the particular ways in which the show critiques the American invasion of Afghanistan and possibly our Bin Laden obsession.

             The four Afghan children who receive the dollars and send the goat are a major source of this critique. Visually, they closely resemble the four central South Park child characters—Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny—and while them being doppelgangers is probably just intended as a fun visual goof, the resemblance ultimately suggests further similarity: These are just kids, like “our” kids, and our efforts to root out our enemies in their country aren’t doing anything but ruining their (the kids’) lives. There’s a short sequence, when these other boys are first introduced, where every normal kid activity they attempt to do is ruined by the US bombing them. They don’t even have a standing house anymore when it’s over, and when they open the first envelop from America and the single dollar bill flutters pitifully to the ground (and is contrasted against the nearby carnage with a couple of quick cuts away to wide shots of burning ruins and dead bodies), it makes a pretty powerful statement with no words. It’s a surprisingly sympathetic moment, in that it is comedic but that the target of the critique, the butt of the joke, is the assumption on the part of us Americans that a tiny piece of our currency could do anything for the children in this situation. It’s one of those moments where the show’s typical focus on rooting out and mocking hypocrisy actually kind of works.

The pathetically insufficient, maybe even insulting act of supposed mercy that the dollar represents speaks to a truth: the reality behind whatever gestures toward “bringing democracy” or somehow acting for the good of the people of Afghanistan that we deigned to offer. Once the two groups of boys come into contact, the show further allows the Afghan children to speak quite frankly and critically of America and its actions abroad. That the show this close to 9/11 allows them to do that and treats their words with gravity is… something. Noteworthy, maybe. It also just never actually refutes those accusations, despite having the boys argue back and forth, and instead ends up waving away the condemnation in favor of deliberately uncritical patriotism, which is also emblematic of a larger issue with South Park that I’ll touch on in a bit.

Beyond the bombing not accomplishing anything, aside from destroying basketball courts and movie theaters, the troops on the ground are also satirized in “Farty Pants” as incompetent and foolish in a way that’s classically South Park. While the child characters are more often insightful and critically capable, the adults around them are usually irrational and are prone to mass delusions or obsessions meant to, at least for one thing, poke fun at the notion of caring strongly about something. Here, the obsession/delusion is the military men deployed to Afghanistan mistaking the goat the South Park boys are trying to return for the musician Stevie Nicks. This is both an obvious bit of raw humorous absurdity and also probably a dig at Nicks’ appearance, as the show is pretty consistently some kind of problematic in this vein—misogynistic or sexist, racist, homophobic, and so on. When the captured boys and the goat are used in a video by Osama bin Laden which is widely broadcasted, this provokes the final conflict and leads to Bin Laden’s death when the US troops, who were presumably unable to locate the man in all this time, zip right over to just the right spot. A shot of the two forces deploying and fighting has this intentional artificiality and sense of understatement to it that works with the (deliberately) crude visual style of the show and that also further undermines the sanctity of the conflict. Furthermore, the Americans accomplish their mission not out of patriotism but out of a desire to protect “Stevie Nicks” and have their USO show. The actual killing of Bin Laden is kind of incidental. After Cartman does this whole Looney Tunes-inspired routine that leaves the man disoriented on the ground and cartoonishly blackened from an explosion, some random American soldier just walks up and executes him without fanfare in the lull after victory has already been declared. In all likelihood, this is meant to be satisfying or funny for the American audience and maybe demeaning for Bin Laden (if he somehow saw it—this death, and the title’s focus on his “Farty Pants,” and the jokes about him having microscopic genitals and wanting to be intimate with camels and only speaking racist nonsense gibberish, and so on), but it also inadvertently further critiques the war effort. It’s a small death and unremarkable—and it took all this destruction just to accomplish it. Admittedly, I am reaching for some of this, but the fact that the episode only becomes unavoidably, obnoxiously nationalistic during its final moments is still noteworthy.

What we as good as end with is this line—as the boys wrap the base of a little American flag in a coat in a manner reminiscent of the blanket-wrapped scrawny tree from A Charlie Brown Christmas, suggesting a similar level of fullness of feeling and empathy and meaning: “America may have some problems, but it’s our home, our team. If you don’t want to root for your team, then you should get the hell out of the stadium.”

If you don’t support our bloody revenge war, then just leave is a sentiment you see variations of all the time here, especially from conservatives. And if you watch a lot of South Park, this sort of “twist” of the final message of a given episode feels pretty consistent and is the “larger issue” I alluded to before. It lends credence to those critiques of the series that say its ultimate position is one of inaction and apathy. Willfully under-informed and uncaring for aesthetic- or clout-related reasons, because the opposite state is not cool. That the specific conclusions, which supposedly reflect some position of political or moral superiority, are often explicitly or implicitly conservative in nature is obviously problematic. There’s another great example earlier in season five, in the unfortunately titled “Cripple Fight”: That episode comes pretty close to articulating a heavy-handed but still reasonable critique of institutionalized homophobia and discrimination (in the Boy Scouts) just to end with a sudden shift toward Libertarian Nonsense about populations who are targets for bigotry needing to earn the respect and equal treatment they deserve by personally winning over their oppressors, as opposed to allowing the government or courts to force equality. You can practically feel the brain worms seizing the reins in some of the narratives. I would generally say most episodes have this mix of good and bad aspects to them, which is why I wouldn’t recommend the show without caveats. Still, South Park can be wildly creative and frank in ways that other mainstream media can’t/wouldn’t, and when the critique is actually pointed in the right direction, it’s quite great. And when it isn’t great, it can still be revealing.

The boys’ final sentiments in “Farty Pants” feel more or less of a kind with what you can take away from Zero Dark Thirty. I don’t necessarily think the movie “likes” torture or feels a great deal of nationalist pride, but it depicts the men and women of the American armed forces and intelligence still accomplishing their goal “for God and country.” The South Park kids aren’t at all likely to idolize soldiers or to be excited about pledging allegiance to the flag most of the time, but it’s their country, so they’ve got to stick up for it when the chips are down and when people from other countries start speaking a bit too frankly about us. This is maybe even worse than actual zealotry—It’s a shrug, a “might as well.” When in America, right? Before Jessica’s death, I couldn’t tell you what Maya’s motivation in Zero Dark Thirty is supposed to be. There’s no sense of patriotism or that she’s motivated by greed or psychopathy or sadism. She’s just… there, and the eventual added component of personal revenge makes her drive seem less cold. A “killer,” she’s called a couple of times, which is presumably in reference to her aptitude but which feels like not-so-subtle commentary as well when we’re looking at her affect and perhaps at her lack of social prospects. The “Might as well!” of it all is perhaps more chilling than one of her superiors insisting, during a heated and one-sided meeting at one point, that the men and women serving in this anti-Al-Qaeda capacity need to “bring [him] people to kill.” This instance of bloodthirstiness is at least prefaced with and buttressed by a sense of duty to the victims of terrorism, though. To be above it all instead is appealing in theory, but in most real-world contexts just makes you seem fundamentally annoying, weird, and wrong, if not inhuman…

 

Probably the biggest hurdle in the way of writing this piece has been finding an appropriately conclusive note to actually end on. It was more or less a coincidence that I decided to write about Zero Dark Thirty at this time—I technically started with some initial thoughts in May of 2023 and picked it up again on a whim because I wanted to finish some incomplete essays as a late-added New Year’s resolution—but I realized that I’d accidentally stumbled into something meaningful and incredibly relevant.

The 2002 “Letter to the American People” that has been attributed to Osama bin Laden went somewhat viral via TikTok in the fall of 2023 after the October 7^th Hamas attack on Israel and with Israel’s retaliatory military action against Palestinians, especially in Gaza. I don’t want to just summarize the news, but this intensification of that situation and the subsequent interest in the “Letter” followed pretty closely on the heels of this most recent 9/11 anniversary and a little discourse on Twitter about young Americans who were born too late to remember that attack or the widespread reactions that followed—particularly the hatred directed at “Muslims,” as a nebulous group. For my part, I was old enough to understand 9/11 but too young (and also too insulated by privilege, admittedly) to fully appreciate and process the responses to it over the subsequent years. I had that “benefit” of not really needing to pay attention to what you might reductively call “politics,” came to finding them vital and important later than I should have, and have been on a journey since then that I won’t get into here.

Cutting to the chase: What’s old is new again, and never really left. Among other criticisms, with varying levels of legitimacy/lunacy (and bigotry), the “Letter” specifically, very early on, calls out America’s support of the colonization of Palestine and identifies it as part of the justification for attacking us. Now, seeing and hearing the response, or lack thereof, from the US government, where the nominally more progressive of our two viable political parties is currently in office, and from individual supposed liberals or progressives of varying levels of actual authority has been pretty eye-opening and often infuriating. That we’ve essentially, repeatedly given what amounts to a blank check to an apartheid state whose past and current words and actions are extremely suggestive of an attempt to erase from existence an entire population of people (read: genocide) is disgusting. That both of our dominant political parties—both sides of the political spectrum if you buy that lie of representation—have been more or less equal in their support of all this, that some enthusiastically endorse it, because these happen to be Palestinians who are being hounded to the point of total nonexistence is sickening.

  In trying to tie everything together here in a way that doesn’t (further?) highlight my artistic and political ignorance—or else get my blog nuked—I’ve considered various angles, various degrees of personal exposure and of attempted intellectualism, but the raw feeling beneath it all is just “sick.” The political message which Zero Dark Thirty more tacitly communicates but which South Park speaks loudly and proudly is sickening for how bipartisan it ultimately is. I don’t normally drink and write, but when I finished watching Zero Dark Thirty, I did have a drink that first evening when I started trying to put my thoughts together. I wasn’t sure where to begin and felt a bit hopeless contemplating the screen. That block was a mix of the usual early friction that comes with writing things like this but also, I think, other feelings that were harder to untangle—the previously much-discussed way that I got drawn in by a movie I thought I should have been better able to resist, but also just the vague feelings of sickness and powerlessness that watching it stirred up. For reasons both deliberately textual and accidentally extratextual, Zero Dark Thirty did effectively align me emotionally with Maya in that final scene since it left me with feelings that were hard to decipher and with essentially the same questions as her: Where do we go from here? And how do we get there? I’ll spare you my “black-pilled,” admittedly still incredibly privileged, personal musings on those subjects, for the most part.

Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation outside Israel’s embassy in DC back in February, as I was in the process of trying to finalize this piece, is an act that was heavily debated and evaluated online by people with more philosophical and political clout than me, but I think it’s safe to say that taking such a step wouldn’t be necessary in a society where people didn’t feel completely powerless to be heard and, critically, to bring any sort of meaningful change. That death was, predictably, being treated by the usual parties as the end-result of “mental health” issues or as proof of some insidious indoctrination in an effort to discredit the message it was meant to send. There seems to have been clarity and sense to Bushnell’s thoughts and actions leading up to that point (see, for example, the intentionality and steps taken to make sure that the act couldn’t be ignored). It is still ultimately a statement that does nothing in and of itself, however. Maybe awareness has been raised in some way we haven’t seen the full impact of yet (maybe, looking back from the future, the recent protests on college campuses were galvanized by it), but it certainly speaks to Bushnell putting principles into action—choosing to suffer and die in a horrible way that, perhaps reductively, you could see in and of itself as an act of solidarity, casting off the privilege we have in this country and briefly suffering in step with the many Palestinians who have been displaced, tortured, harassed, assaulted, detained, and murdered by Israel in all the time it’s been trying to achieve its dream of a purified nation on stolen land. And here I sit in my privileged cell, writing my ineffectual words.

What I think (thought, as one of my abortive efforts toward larger meaning) is interesting about Zero Dark Thirty is how little presence Osama bin Laden ultimately has. He doesn’t really exist for the vast majority of it apart from just his name and as a vague suggestion of a person/character on the periphery, and when he does “appear” very, very late in the story, he’s usually obscured in some way, to the point that the movie almost creates a feeling of uncertainty regarding whether he’s really Him or not and if he’s even really dead in the end. Which is to say, if they actually killed the wrong man, as they absolutely do bring back a body. You could read the way that he’s so consistently shrouded (by shadow or a body bag or careful camera angles) and the way that Maya reacts so ambiguously to seeing his corpse as downright conspiratorial if you wanted. “I shot the third-floor guy,” says the SEAL who killed him; meanwhile, Maya simply nods to confirm the identity officially. There’s this consistent reluctance to show him clearly or even associate his name with his corpse. Or his presence-while-still-absent could be symbolic in some sense, much the same way that the real man was kind of a symbol or at least a lightning rod for US aggression post-9/11, and how he was maybe more meaningful to us for what we projected onto him and sublimated into the hunt for him than for the things he actually said and did.

Toby Keith’s death while I was writing this piece was another coincidence but also another way in which this subject has just felt “right” to me—right for this time in particular, like a lucky lightning strike. Notably, Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” takes an act of terror committed for larger political and religious reasons and turns it into a personal rivalry in a way designed to resonate with a crowd and make revenge feel justified. Since he is (was) a country singer, naturally his framing of the situation is more or less that of a bar fight: “A mighty sucker punch came flyin’ in from somewhere in the back. Soon as we could see clearly through our big black eye, man, we lit up your world like the Fourth of July.” The concept/cartoon character of “Uncle Sam” has a “list” of names for revenge; the inanimate Statue of Liberty is “shakin’ her fist,” like a broad in a parking lot as someone’s rival’s pickup truck peels out while spraying gravel everywhere. All the pageantry and grit is meant to overcome the fundamental obstacle presented by the fact that all of this is also patently ridiculous, that governments and militaries are great, inhuman, bloodless things and that they have to be imbued with human meaning, warmth, and sense through emotional projection. So our country has a black eye; so Maya’s close personal friend is killed. South Park has the sense to see the whole hype thing as just a USO show but not enough to actually escape the gravitational pull of the pathos of nationalism.

I think/thought about how absurd the concept of an “enemy” is in the real world. Fiction is full of rivalries and antagonistic relationships to the point that it’s a given even a story about children will probably have some sort of singular figure that’s constantly there and that the protagonists are hyper-focused on overcoming. We readily accept that contrivance of plot whenever it happens in our media. In the real world, though, such a relationship sounds ridiculous, antisocial, and psychotic in the most literal sense. People would look at you weird if you started talking about this one guy you have this longstanding personal hatred of, who you see yourself having some sort of climactic final confrontation with. In a way, Bin Laden did America a favor with his drip-feed of recordings across the years given how it made him fill that role for us. I can remember that much: The news comes on and there’s a new message from Bin Laden, our National Enemy, reminding us again why we hated him, that he was still out there, and that he was equally antagonistic toward us, affirming or justifying the sense that we were in a dramatic, intimate conflict with someone specific, a conflict ultimately lent further legitimacy and weight by media like Zero Dark Thirty. In that way, the absurdism of the mass obsession gets filtered or softened through a comfortable lens of conventional plotting and fictional dress-up. But still, maybe, having a relationship of that sort with such a man says as much about us as it ever did about him.