Panetta: Enhanced interrogation did not lead to bin Laden

'Zero Dark Thirty' is the most vile and immoral war film I've seen in years

“Revenge of the agonized killers” would have been a more appropriate title.

Now I must say this – in decades of watching Israeli and international war cinema, I don’t remember a film as immoral, vile and self-righteous as Zero Dark Thirty. This narcissistic movie, with all its aesthetic portraits of torture and assassinations, not only enjoys and fetishizes the violence it depicts but also justifies and rationalizes it. It is not – as some more naïve viewers said – a “complicated” or “controversial” way of promoting “a debate” on torture, but the other way around. Torture and assassinations are presented as effective though unpleasant ways of preforming heroic acts. The film completely ignores collateral damage, the innocents who are killed and abused and the inherent abuse of power (and think in that context not just about the acts carried out by the U.S, but also by its allies, in Pakistan for example), which are part of the argument for conducting warfare within a different normative and legal framework. But the problem goes even deeper. Zero Dark Thirty is so self-righteous that it makes the blunt orientalism of The Hurt Locker actually look good. There, the director seemed to have understood that some people like “the action” – but we never saw that kind of emotion in Zero Dark Thirty. After all, no American would like torture or killings. Bigelow’s portrait people at war runs contrary to anything we know about human nature and violence everywhere and at all times. If the director would have shown the sadism and corruption that comes when you cross certain boundaries, then some viewers would have felt uncomfortable, and gone home really thinking or talking about what they saw. But I don’t think the film would have been such a success in such a case. Holywood is giving Kathryn Bigelow prizes because she makes Americans feel good about themselves and the wars they wage.

I am not judging those wars themselves here or even the practices of torture or extra-judicial killings, but rather the way they are told and discussed. When you take ZDT and The Hurt Locker together, you understand that Bigelow actually thinks that in the more than 11 years of wars in three countries, the sole and only victims were Americans. This is the worst kind of propaganda, one which is directed at the bleeding hearts and liberals who seem to enjoy their action flicks with a sauce of “moral dilemmas” and remorse. Be sure – the old style of war films was way more honest and moral because it praised the hero’s actions and therefore assumed at least certain responsibility for them. Naturally, the Arabs are just as dead in both genres.