We always watch a slew of movies during the holidays, and this year was no exception. Most of the films we saw were sort of lackluster. The only one that really took me by surprise was Zero Dark Thirty by director Kathryn Bigelow.
I was expecting to like it and for it to be hard to watch. I read an article in Newsweek that intrigued me, describing it as the first film to reveal a post-war-on-terrorism mindset. The article seemed contradictory and fuzzy to me. What could it mean to be a post-war-on-terrorism film when it chronicles in some ways the decade of war itself?
I actually believe that this film gives us the primary narrative we need as Americans to believe we “won” this war. It is not just the victory of killing Osama bin Laden, the chief symbol of the war on terror. It is the way he was killed.
The war-on-terrorism period is dramatized in the film by the opening scenes of interrogation. They are hard to watch, but not nearly as hard as I think they should be. Even the waterboarding doesn’t seem so beyond the pale. (And, what is more, in the narrative of the film, it works.) Maybe these scenes are just so much a part of our vocabulary that we’ve codified them and don’t respond emotionally. Maybe those Abu Ghraib photos are now filed in our consciousness as “wartime photos” in a way that strips 
them of some of their initial power. But I think it’s primarily the filmmaking. This is a super-cool film. It is icy. It is crystalline and gorgeous and feels like a beautiful, well-controlled staging of events more than messy reality. It is “just the facts,” and the facts will vindicate everyone in the end.
We also have our Homeland-esque heroine, CIA agent Maya, played by the cool and beautiful Jessica Chastain. Unlike the Claire Danes character in Homeland, however, this woman has no mental illness, no erratic behavior, just singlemindedness and a penetrating analytical mind. Just what we want and expect intelligence to be. The interrogations are “the past.” The past was brutal. The one character who I think ends up most damaged and chewed up in the film is the interrogator, Dan, played by Jason Clarke. The rest of the film is populated mostly by suits. And when Leon Panetta (in another piece of mythological brilliance, many higher ups are not actually named, played by James Gandolfini) is asked about Maya and told, “She’s smart,” he looks back and delivers one of the best lines in the film: “Jeremy, we’re all smart.”
The core of this film is the last half hour, the mission itself. And from the first sound of those helicopter blades cutting the air and the images that looked much more like a video game of mountains than real mountains, I felt a strange thrill. Here we go.
Knowing the conclusion does not diminish at all the pleasure of watching this reenactment. In fact, it seems part of the film’s power that there is no suspense. I had read the detailed account of what happened, heard the Seal Team Six member who was there talk about it on 60 Minutes and I had the plot pretty well down. But through the night-vision goggles, as the team set their explosives, blew the gates, traversed the property, even walked away from the downed helicopter, all the way to the end, I was riveted.
This film is an answer to Blackhawk Down. The similarites extend to the actual stealth blackhawk going down in the compound. Instead of a platform for chaos and devastating loss, this is a minor glitch in the operation. This, my friends, is how we won the war.
As such, it’s an incredible piece of mythology as well as filmmaking. There is even some pointed criticism in the film of the inability to torture people into giving intelligence after Obama’s election in 2004. We can’t fight this the same way– there is not the will or the manpower assigned to the task. We won’t do the ruthless things we did before– and that, too, can make us feel better. This “second half” of the war on terrorism, which is drawing to a close when troops leave Afghanistan in 2014, although built on the information gathered and the fighting of the first half, seems strategic and, in its way, bloodless. Seems like a video game. Like a series of drone strikes.
Of course, I am completely conflicted about my response. This is not at all my kind of movie. I have no investment in feeling that America was somehow “heroic” in this conflict. I don’t think we were, and the mistakes, the casualties, the entire misguided and costly war in Iraq, the damage to a generation of men both here and in the Middle East, the arrogance of thinking we can continue to kill through drone attacks and secret missions without consequences, that abuse of our power in the world– I hate it all. I am not proud of it.
But this film shows us exactly who we want to be, and suggests it is who we really are. Seal Team Six are a group of great guys, focused and smart, ordinary, friendly and serious. they are not boors. They have ambitions and plans and know their mission. They are skilled and they don’t hurt women and children. They are methodical. They bring us bin Laden and a trove of information from the compound, and they do it with minimal casualties.
If there is a post-war-on-terror world, this is what we want it to be. This is our closure, in a way, our representation of how we won a war we could not win. Everyone should see it.