by Mickey Huff
Maya is not believable to me. She is an awful stereotype: a driven, obsessive woman, alone with no friends. She has no depth. She is all surface. She says she prefers to drop a bomb rather than use the SEAL team. She says she knows 100 per cent that Osama is in the building. She says she is the “mother---er” who found the safe house in the first place. She assures the men of the SEAL team that Osama is there and that they must kill him for her.26
Or, as PolicyMic writer Hannah Kapp-Klote succinctly summarized, “In Zero Dark Thirty, Jessica Chastain’s character’s femininity and slight frame justify US policies that are unjustifiable.”27
Beyond playing the diversionary “gender card” by using a female CIA agent as distraction, the propaganda machine of the Bigelow/Boals team runs much deeper. In May 2013, independent journalists broke a news story that revealed the extent to which the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs collaborated with Bigelow and Boals in drafting Zero Dark Thirty’s script through a series of “five conference calls” designed to “help promote an appropriate portrayal of the Agency and the bin Laden operation.”28 Script changes made by Boals at the CIA’s request included removing the use of intimidating attack dogs in a key torture scene, censoring a scene involving a CIA officer and “drunken firearms abuse” at a party, and, perhaps most importantly, downplaying main character Maya’s involvement in the film’s opening torture scene from active participant to passive observer. Apparently, “reel” life does not mirror real life in the CIA’s mind when it comes to representing the truth about the global war on terror on the silver screen. Perhaps Gawker said it best: jokingly referring to ZDT as “The CIA Director’s Cut,” Adrian Chen observed that “Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden revenge-porn flick Zero Dark Thirty was the biggest publicity coup for the CIA this century outside of the actual killing of Osama bin Laden.”29
Zero Dark Thirty’s most powerful use as a propaganda piece involves using the silver screen to convince American audiences to accept torture and extrajudicial killings in the name of the greater imperial good—a particularly troubling example of fantasy mediating fascism, to reinvoke bell hooks’ insight. ZDT “teaches us that brown men can and should be killed with impunity, in violation of international law, and that we should trust the CIA to act with all due diligence,” observed Mondoweiss’s Deepa Kumar. “At a time when the key strategy in the ‘war on terror’ has shifted from conventional warfare to extrajudicial killing, here comes a film that normalizes and justifies this strategy.”30 Kumar’s provocative article linking Hollywood propaganda and US political policies is vital reading for anyone interested in the relationship between fantasy and fascism in the US of Empire. Kumar concluded her analysis of ZDT by observing:
Here then is the key message of the film: the law, due process, and the idea of presenting evidence before a jury should be dispensed with in favor of extrajudicial killings. Further, such killings can take place without public oversight. The film not only uses the moral unambiguity of assassinating bin Laden to sell us on the rightness and righteousness of extrajudicial killing, it also takes pains to show that this can be done in secret because of the checks and balances involved before a targeted assassination is carried out.31
Interestingly, scientific studies are now revealing that Hollywood movies can, in fact, play an active role in promoting the acceptance of specific kinds of formerly aberrant behavior within the mind of the collective audience. Consider researcher Luke Mitchell’s insightful observations in his Popular Science article, “The Science of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’: When We Can Condone Torture.” Mitchell described Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner’s work on “cognitive dissonance” and proximity to torture as it is being performed. Mitchell explained how Gray and Wegner conducted experiments with observers witnessing staged acts of torture. Those observers removed from the scene tended to feel the pain of torture less acutely, and, paradoxically, assumed the tortured was innocent, while observers closer to the event tended to assume guilt on the part of the tortured.32 Why? Here’s Mitchell’s explanation:
Gray’s research suggests that torture’s very repugnancy is what causes some of us to defend its use—we feel terrible about it, so we think there must be a reason for it. In movies, the effect may be more pronounced: The giant screen brings us even “closer” to an interrogation. We condone the torture because the cinematic intimacy causes us, the audience, to feel complicit. This proximity bias—a variation of confirmation bias we might call the Zero Effect—is relevant for scientists engaged in all kinds of observational research. It is also a crucial consideration for those of us watching interrogators at work, onscreen or in life.33 (Emphasis added.)
In other words, fictionalized recreations of graphic torture, when set in the context of a film that is presented as “based on real life events”—like ZDT—push audiences to an acceptance of behavior they might normally deem reprehensible. Constructing a bad-ass lone-wolf fiery female agent to legitimize torture, promoting extrajudicial killing, revealing black sites, and steeling American audiences for the hard work of empire—Zero Dark Thirty does all of this in powerful and provocative fashion.
CONCLUSION: BEYOND THE IMPERIAL SILVER SCREEN
We all go to movies for different reasons, hoping to be entertained, educated, inspired—and sometimes all three. Because of film’s unique power to move us emotionally, and now, in the Internet Age, to be available everywhere to everybody at any time, movies occupy a central place in our national storytelling culture like no other medium. And yet, too often, movie audiences fail to watch with a skeptical eye, and movie reviewers fail to report on films critically, while influential corporate commercial and political interests are quick to exploit Hollywood’s uniquely powerful reach to propagandize, rather than to educate.
We all bear some responsibility for the perpetuation of fantasy film propaganda that plays a vital role in justifying twenty-first century US fascism. “Such a system requires an equally powerful system of propaganda to convince the citizenry that they need not be alarmed, they need not speak out, they need not think critically, in fact they need not even participate in the deliberative process except to pull a lever every couple of years in an elaborate charade of democracy,” concluded Deepa Kumar. “We are being asked, quite literally, to amuse ourselves to death.”34
If we are to take the Oscar night words of Michelle Obama at all seriously, if we really want “our children [to] learn to open their imaginations, to dream just a little bigger,” then we’ll need to work collectively to move our Hollywood moviemaking culture beyond simplistic stereotypes, rehashed storylines, and political propaganda, to a new reality that acknowledges cross-cultural complexity, multiple points of view, and a shared sense of community and global purpose.
It’s no easy task—but let us begin by being honest about the films that Hollywood produces, and push for new mediated fantasy worlds that bring out the best in us as human beings rather than simply pandering to nationalistic goals and imperialistic designs.
DR. ROB WILLIAMS is a media educator, musician, historian, journalist, and professor who teaches online and face-to-face courses at the University of Vermont and Champlain College, and serves as publisher of Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence newspaper.
Notes
1. Michelle Obama, Academy Awards 2013 Argo White House video feed presentation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtLKn5YlulcJ.
2. The phrase “crap detectors” comes from Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching As A Subversive Activity (New York: Dell, 1969), 1–16.
3. Jack Shaheen, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People,” Media Education Foundation PDF, 206, http://www.mediaded.org/assets/products/402/transcript_402.pdf.
4. bell hooks, “Cultural Criticism and Transformation,” Media Education Foundation PDF, 1997, http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/402/transcript_402.pdf. And for more on the history of the connections between Hollywood and the political establishment of Washington DC, especially among conservativ
es and the GOP (which challenges the conventional wisdom of the Hollywood liberal stereotype), see Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and hear an interview with Ross covering the contents of the book, both historically and in current context, by Pacifica Radio’s Mitch Jeserich on the show, Letters and Politics, KPFA Radio, April 17, 2013, archived online at http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/90755.
5. See, for example, Jim Garamone, “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-Spectrum Dominance” American Forces Press Service, June 2, 2000, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289.
6. For more on the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), see http://www.newamericancentury.org. For a summary and link to full documents from PNAC published September 2000, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” see http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3249.htm.
7. John Farmer, The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009); David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2005); Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, http://ae911truth.org.
8. See, for example, Elliot D. Cohen, “The Police State and Civil Liberties,” Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, eds. Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 45–60.
9. Shaheen, “Reel Bad Arabs.” See also Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2012).
10. Kevin Russell, “Oscar Prints The Legend: Argo’s Upcoming Academy Award and the Failure of Truth,” Wide Asleep in America, http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2013/02/oscar-prints-the-legend-argo.html. Some may be noting while reading this paragraph, Iran is not part of the Arab Middle East, Iranians are not Arabs (Persians by cultural descent), and Iranians speak Farsi, not Arabic. But in the minds of most heavily conditioned Westerners (an image helped along by mass media), Iran is just another uppity Middle Eastern country whose own self-interests inconveniently clash with US imperial designs for the region.
11. Quoted in “Ben Affleck, ‘I Didn’t Want Argo To Be Politicized,’” London Evening Standard, October 18, 2012, http://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/ben-affleck-i-didn’t-want-argo-to-be-politicised-8215965.html. Given the topic of the film, that seems a difficult task, but Affleck’s consulting with CIA analysts for this and other films, and his public praise for the Agency, make his claims of not wanting to politicize the film seem misleading.
12. The CIA actually has something called the Entertainment Industry Liaison that openly states they welcome working with Hollywood for consulting, online at https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/public-affairs/entertainment-industry-liaison/index.html. The site states, “If you are part of the entertainment industry, and are working on a project that deals with the CIA, the Agency may be able to help you. We are in a position to give greater authenticity to scripts, stories, and other products in development.” For more on CIA involvement in Hollywood, see Tom Hayden, “The CIA in Hollywood,“ Los Angeles Review of Books, February 24, 2013, http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1438&fulltext=1; and Washington’s Television: “The Winners of the Academy Award and Golden Globe Are . . . Government Propagandists,“ Global Research, January 16, 2013, http://www.globalrsearch.ca/the-cia-and-other-government-agencies-dominate-movies-and-televison/53119262; See also note 26 below.
13. Noted in a number of critical reviews in the independent press. See, for example, Kevin Russell, “Oscar Prints the Legend: Argo’s Upcoming Academy Award and the Failure of Truth,” Wide Asleep in America, February 23, 2013, http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2013/02/oscar-prints-the-legend-argo.html.
14. Manohla Dargis, “Outwitting the Ayatollah With Hollywood’s Help,” New York Times, October 11, 2012, http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/movies/argo-directed-by-ben-affleck.html?r=1&.
15. Kevin B. Lee, “Argo, F--k Yourself,” Slate, February 25, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/01/down_with_argo_ben_affleck_s_iran_hostage_movie_is_the_worst.html.
16. Mike Ryan, “Ben Affleck, ‘Argo’ Director and Star, On Pinpointing the Resurrection of his Career,” Huffington Post, October 8, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/07/ben-affleck-ago_n_1946884.html.
17. Ibid.
18. David Walsh, “2013 Academy Award Nominations: ‘And the Winner is . . . the CIA,’ ” Global Research, February 25 2013, http://www.globalresearch.ca/2013-academy-award-nominations-and-the-winner-is-the-cia/5318811.
19. Peter Bergen, “Is Washington Overreacting To Zero Dark Thirty?” Time, January 24, 2013, http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/24/is-washington-overreacting-to-zero-dark-thirty.
20. “CIA Disputes ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Accuracy: Acting CIA Director Issues Public Statement,” Huffington Post, December 22, 2012, http://huffingtonpost.com/2012/112/22/cia-disputes-accuracy_n_23522811.html.
21. Bergen, “Is Washington Overreacting?”
22. See “‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Used 9/11 Phone Call Without Permission,” Project Censored’s Media Freedom International, March 8, 2013, http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2013/03/08/zero-dark-thirty-used-911-phone-call-without-pemission/; and “‘Zero Dark Thirty’ 9/11 Phone Calls Used Without Permission, Says Upset Mom Of Victim,” Huffington Post, February 27, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/27/zero-dark-thirty-911-phone-calls_n_2773255.html.
23. For further coverage of debate and controversy regarding the official 9/11 narrative see previous Project Censored annual books, all published by Seven Stories Press, including Censored 2005, Censored 2007, Censored 2008, Censored 2009, and Censored 2011.
24. Lauren Sandler, “Zero Dark Thirty and the Problem With Lone Wolf Heroines,” Cut, December 18, 2012, http://nymag.com/thecut/2012/12/zero-dark-thirtys-lone-wolf-heroine-problem.html.
25. Zillah Eisenstein, “Dark, Zero-Feminism,” Al Jazeera, January 21, 2013,http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013120121530123614.html.
26. Ibid.
27. Hannah Kapp-Klote, “Is ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ a Feminist Manifesto or a Picture of American Imperialism?,” Policymic, February 2013, http://policymic.com/articles/24836/is-zero-dark-thirty-a-feminist-manifesto-or-a-picture-of-american-imperalism.
28. Adrian Chen, “Newly Declassified Memo Shows CIA Shaped Zero Dark Thirty’s Narrative,” Gawker, May 6, 2013, http://gawker.com/declassified-memo-shows-how-cia-shaped-zero-dark-thirty-493174407. For more on the history of CIA involvement in Hollywood, which is far more pervasive than some may understand, see Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham, “Lights, Camera . . . Convert Action: The Deep Politics of Hollywood,” Global Research, January 21, 2009, http://www.globalresearch.ca/screen-propaganda-hollywood-and-the-cia/5324589. It should be noted that Ben Affleck worked on another movie with CIA ties in 2002 (where he consulted with CIA analysts), The Sum of All Fears.
29. Ibid. See also Julie Lévesque, “Screen Propaganda, Hollywood and the CIA,” Global Research, February 28, 2013, http://globalresearch.ca/screen-propaganda-hollywood-and-the-cia/5324589; and John Cook, “If You Want to Know the CIA’s bin Laden Secrets, Just Make a Movie About His Assassination,” Gawker, May 23, 2012, http://gawker.com/591284/if-you-want-to-make-a-movie-about-his-assissination. And for more on the controversy regarding the many reported deaths of Osama bin Laden, see David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? (Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2009), 1–17, and the endnote section particularly. The CIA is not only involved with Hollywood, they have long been active influencing and manipulating, when not outright scripting, and news reporting in the US. See Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media: How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php.
30. Deepa Kumar, “Rebranding the War on Terror fo
r the Age of Obama: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the Promotion of Extra Judicial Killing,” January 15, 2013, Mondoweiss, http://mondoweiss.net/2013/01/rebranding-promotion-judicial.html.
31. Ibid.
32. Luke Mitchell, “The Science of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’: When We Can Condone Torture,” Popular Science, February 22, 2013, http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/fma-why-we-con-done-torture.
33. Ibid.
34. Kumar, “Rebranding.” And regarding the origination of the phrase “amusing ourselves to death,” which Kumar expands upon, see Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985).
SECTION III
CASE STUDIES OF
“UNHISTORY” IN THE
MAKING—AND HOW TO
BUILD A BETTER FUTURE
Historical understanding defines people’s very sense of what is thinkable and achievable. As a result, many have lost the ability to imagine a world that is substantially different from and better than what exists today.
—Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick1
In their book, The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick observed that “Americans believe they are unbound by history,” preferring myth to fact.2 Their observations are salient to this section, especially if applied directly to contemporary establishment journalism in the United States.