Is feminism worth defending with torture? [View all]

[DonViejo]

How Kathryn Bigelow's thrilling Osama-hunting saga faces the thorniest moral dilemmas of the "war on terror"

BY ANDREW O'HEHIR

None of us living today can know how historians of the future will judge the whole “war on terror” phase of American history. Will it remain a contentious point of ideological division, like McCarthyism or the 1960s, or will it become a national embarrassment to be swept under the carpet, like the Salem witch trials or the fulsome speeches in defense of slavery delivered on the floor of Congress? And then there’s the possibility that the terrorist-hunting mania of the years since 9/11 has driven us so completely nuts, and bankrupted us so thoroughly, that a balanced view of this age will only become possible after the whole edifice comes crashing down. To quote the most intelligent, most farsighted and most deeply hypocritical of our slave-owning Founding Fathers, I tremble for my country when I consider those future conversations.

In the first few minutes of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s mesmerizing and troubling chronicle of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a young female CIA agent named Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, arrives at a “black site,” apparently in Pakistan. She enters a cell where a fellow agent played by Jason Clarke is questioning a purported al-Qaida moneyman. Away from the job, Clarke’s character turns out to be a likable guy, but here he’s an expert practitioner of the “enhanced coercive interrogation techniques” so popular in the early stages of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The detainee is hung by the ceiling with chains, repeatedly beaten and sexually humiliated, forced to soil himself and finally smothered with a towel that is then drenched with an entire jug of water. (That particular enhanced technique became especially well known.)

Whether Bigelow and her screenwriter and off-screen partner Mark Boal are actually arguing that torture is effective, or that it yielded useful information that helped lead to the killing of bin Laden, is ambiguous and sure to be the subject of much debate. Personally, I find the symbolic significance of this agonizing and confrontational scene more alluring. Bigelow, the first and only female director to win an Oscar, knows something about being a woman in a macho environment. This is the first of her films to have a female protagonist, and it’s hard to avoid the possible parallels between her and Maya. Beyond that come the bigger questions signified by Maya’s presence in that room. Does a society that produces female CIA agents (and reelects a black president) gain the right to commit atrocities in its own defense? Is torture justified if the torturer is a university-educated woman, and the tortured a bigoted Muslim fundamentalist?

I think those are excellent questions for us to ask ourselves, arguably defining questions of the age, and I think the longer you look at them the thornier they get. I certainly incline toward the predictable left-libertarian response that torture and other illegal and unconstitutional actions (like, say, the government assassination of United States citizens on secret evidence) are immoral and unjustifiable in almost every instance. But you’ll notice that I’ve left myself a little wiggle room, and if we’re honest we recognize that morality is always relative, and only available in shades of gray. Whether you want to view this as coincidence or reflection of the Zeitgeist, there are several important films this season in which questions of morality, political leadership and good intentions loom large in the air, in the immediate wake of a presidential election conducted around just these issues, however murkily articulated. (The dog-abusing robot with the funny underwear vs. the Muslim brother from another planet. Have you forgotten already?)

read more:
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/is_feminism_worth_defending_with_torture/