The Snuff Film the NRA Ignores

Funny how all the gun-fetishists clutching their pearls over violent movies and video games have nothing to say about a movie that really does glorify  and normalize extra-legal violence.

 

JoAnn Wypijewski at The Nation: 

I readily suspend disbelief for a visionary or even skillful artist. 

 

Zero Dark Thirty is the work of neither. It functions less as art than as a snuff film. Its torture sequences, and the photographs or videos of nameless prisoners that reappear throughout the film’s long lead-up, stoke the viewer for the climactic killing that everyone knows is coming. They do not excuse or glorify torture; they do something worse: they draw the audience into accommodating it.

If there be genius in this film, it is a counterfeit. The state inures the people to violence and tolerates enough dissent to convince most that barbarism doesn’t disqualify their nation from being on the side of right. It is an exquisitely calibrated system. So, assassination, of course; drones and bombing, sure; mass incarceration and death row, OK; torture, maybe… The film mimics this, while distilling conflict in the power battles of its CIA heroine, Maya, played by the otherwise inert Jessica Chastain.

SNIP

It seems almost quaint now to recall that in 2004, when the first photographs from Abu Ghraib appeared in the press, the body in pain—stripped naked by our soldiers, shackled to cell bars or bunks, hooded and made to hold a pose for hours, stacked in a pyramid, forced to masturbate—shocked the conscience.

America’s torture policy was already being debated by then, and Jack Bauer was already brutalizing his way toward America’s salvation every week in 24. Almost nothing that was done to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib had not already been done to the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, or to prisoners held at black sites, forward operating bases or Guantánamo. Harvard’s Law School and Kennedy School of Government had already embarked on a project, underwritten by the Department of Homeland Security, to assess the efficacy of “coercive interrogation,” targeted killings, indefinite detention, etc. (Later all but one of those assessors would conclude that a little torture was sometimes necessary, provided it was accompanied by the proper oversight.)

SNIP

As Zero Dark Thirty dramatizes with such devotion, a corpse is America’s singular achievement in the war on terror.