Zero Dark Thirty: Operation National Catharsis Is in the Motherfucking House

To start off with an appropriately Nixonian passive, a lot has been said about Zero Dark Thirty. Mostly it has to do with whether or not the movie condones torture; there's a welter of opinions on either side of that issue, and I don't want to touch it. Both sides, with the exception of articles by Slavoj Zizek and Kathryn Bigelow, have been sloppy in their reasoning and dishonest in their motivations. What interests me is the broader issue of "normalization": the common axiom is that the question of whether or not it normalizes torture is only pertinent because the movie is brilliant.

And it is: Zero Dark Thirty is an astonishing, terrifying movie, head and shoulders above most of the movies up for Best Picture this year (i.e. the movies that weren't Amour). It's a wildly ambitious film with an icy narrative focus, meticulously shot and designed, emotionally devastating and resonant on a level that few movies even try to approach anymore; at the very least it beats the hell out of Argo's one-liners and cheap tricks. In fact, if Get Your War On didn't exist it might even be the defining statement about the War on Terror.

Movies that attempt to peer into the oily depths of the American psyche have been pretty rare since 9/11, and Zero Dark Thirty occasionally seems to be trying to make up for every inch of lost ground. For hours it feels like the movie's whole mission is to reveal—from the barbed wire and sandbags of the black sites to the intelligence-community jargon of its heroes to, of course, the explicit depiction of waterboarding, the movie dedicates itself to showing us how things really were during the War on Terror. And not only through set pieces like the torture scenes; shots upon shots are crammed with Bush-era kitsch like AIM and old-model Toyotas. The movie frantically tosses things into discourse, knowing that over the course of the ridiculously retro decade it chronicles we got perilously close to complete aesthetic detachment from our own time. Fredric Jameson would probably sniff at the idea that a single movie could restore our culture's sense of its own continuing history, but futile or not, that's exactly what Zero Dark Thirty attempts: a total aesthetic excavation of the last decade, leading effectively right up to yesterday.

The movie focuses so much on this mandate that it narratively obliterates Osama Bin Laden, who is a total cipher throughout the movie. Zero Dark Thirty isn't a story about a hunt, isn't even really a procedural. We never see Jessica Chastain staring murderously at picture of her nemesis, and in fact we never get the sense that Bin Laden is doing very much at all, apart from hiding. The bombings and shootings that dot the film are never really attributed to Bin Laden, or even necessarily to Al Qaeda; in many cases they seem as random as gang violence, just workplace hazards whose narrative function is built on our understanding of Central Asia as a place where bad things happen. The bureaucracy embodied by Chastain's Maya operates in a dangerous environment; there's nothing more than weak implication to blame that danger on Bin Laden. There's no villain, just an environment. The hunt for Bin Laden is just a lens through which we watch that environment develop; more in the tradition of The Godfather than The Battle of Algiers, Zero Dark Thirty is an epic about America.

I'd like to dwell on that word, epic, as the basis for the rest of my analysis, because Zero Dark Thirty, for all its journalistic trappings, is well and truly a myth-making film. In fact, I'd argue that the hyper-journalistic style it affects is a critical tool in its myth-making.

Watching Zero Dark Thirty, as I've said, we're struck with the sense of a massive, disembodied process taking place: the American organization is so big and has tendrils in so many places that it's impossible to reveal all of it from the worm's-eye perspective the movie adopts, and the most it can do is point us, through Maya, at the greatest number of salient details in every scene. We never get an inkling of perspective on the causes or even many of the consequences of the American war machine; word just comes down from on high that torture is out, and so torture is out.

The point, though, is that the disembodied processes that govern life in Zero Dark Thirty start to feel a lot like magic. Their causes are obscure and their effects are unquestionable. American empire moves in mysterious ways. This is what really poisons Zero Dark Thirty: its realism is just a stylistic affectation, skin-deep, like its investigation of changes in American society.

This rule is best demonstrated by its exception, when Maya gets on a helicopter out of Central Asia. In maybe the only overtly "literary" moment in the movie, the pilot asks her where she wants to go next, and she stares at him, baffled, before bursting into agonized tears. This is a mawkish way of getting at the central message of the movie—that there's nowhere to go after we've killed Bin Laden—but it's redeemed by Jessica Chastain's heartbreaking performance. For just a few moments, the movie has the ability to see the forest for the trees, and Maya seems like a national avatar, broken enough by the War on Terror to stand in for all of us. It's raw catharsis, and it's all the more shocking because the only comparable end to a movie we've had for years is in The Social Network, which hinges on our jealousy and contempt for Mark Zuckerberg. Zero Dark Thirty's almost feels redemptive. But even this ending is ultimately hollow, because Maya's ascension to national avatar status comes too late; the whole movie has focused on her as a single actor in a complex system, a rigorously independent character who signifies nothing, and now suddenly she becomes a metaphor. Maybe it feels like a tragedy, but a personal tragedy, not a national one.

And that's the problem with Zero Dark Thirty: it focuses relentlessly on the personal at the expense of the national. The passive-voice ills that befall its antiheroes damage their sensitivities, but like Zizek identified in his review, the movie never gestures towards any damage to a whole ethical system, and certainly never looks for agents to attach to that passive voice. Maya's life is convincingly ruined by her pursuit of Bin Laden and the changing world around her, but the movie never imputes anything more far-reaching than that. The hunt for Bin Laden only hurts Maya, and the movie only lets Maya become a pharmakos at the very end, once the danger of disrupting its gearheaded visual style has passed.

I think this is what the movie's critics must be driving at when they accuse it of "normalization"—the movie's fetish for reporting detail necessarily means taking that detail at face value, seeing it as the inevitable product of social changes beyond our ken. It accepts ethical degradation dutifully, and restricts itself to examining the implications of that degradation insofar as they fit into the lives of its characters.

This is exactly how cultural hegemony works: it makes top-down change seem mythical, necessary and universal, reserving compassion and anger for the smallest and most ineffectual scales. Zero Dark Thirty implies that injustice is systemic and not simply interpersonal, but it's only an implication, and the only responses it can imagine to that systemic injustice are despair or, worse, obedience.

I've taken it for granted that this movie is attempting to make a political statement about the decay of the United States, because despite protests in support of its "apolitical" nature, Bigelow's avowed pacifism and the personal tragedy of the ending convince me that the movie is, if not a social critique, at least social. In this, I think it betrays one of the most disturbing trends in liberal thinking today: even in political movies like Zero Dark Thirty, "systemic injustice" is treated as a basically unknowable force, a fog that hangs in the air or, in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, creaks in social machinery that we can't understand. It's de-historicized, de-materialized, turned into magic. This is the failure, both aesthetic and political, of Zero Dark Thirty. For all its reportage, it's really oriented towards mystification, and for all the noise it makes, it's as critical of the bureaucracy as a sheaf of paper in one of Maya's binders.

Not Even Safe in Our Dreams: Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek

I just finished Slavoj Zizek’s slim 2012 book “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”. Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, is reviled by many other “professional philosophers” because of the obscurity of his writing and beloved by many undergraduates because of his funny accent. I guess I’m becoming the sort of person who thinks that Mr. Zizek is actually a very profound and (circuitously) lucid thinker, and I look forward to reading his larger works. I was first introduced to him by way of his appearance in Astra Taylor’s documentary “Examined Life”. When I first watched it I thought he was a babbling fool compared to the other thinkers interviewed; I thought this because he was the basically the only person in the documentary who didn’t just repeat liberal platitudes. He was saying something really new, so I reflexively dismissed him. Luckily, I’ve since managed to begin removing my mainstream-liberal-goggles, so now I can read Zizek and blog about it! Here we go, kids.

Zizek suavely evading flaming wreckage

In “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”, Zizek attempts to analyze some of the most politically aware events of the 21^st century, including HBO’s “The Wire” and the Occupy Wall St. movement. Both of these are reactions to (as my fellow blogger Boros put it) the brutality of the modern situation: the Occupy movement being a group of activists who recognize the inadequacy of democratic institutions, and The Wire being a harrowing portrayal of the perverse relationship between law enforcement and poor black people.  Since both The Wire and Occupy Wall St. are vital cultural phenomena, Zizek’s discussion of them manages to frame his critique of ideology in such a way that it becomes accessible to a layperson like me.

Zizek quotes David Simon, the creator of “The Wire”, as saying that “we pretend to engage in a war on narcotics, but in truth, we are simply brutalizing and dehumanizing an urban underclass that we no longer need as labor supply”. Given this harsh formulation, what are we to make of Simon’s humane and even positive portrayal of police officers (McNulty, Bunk, Lester Freamon etc.)? Somewhat paradoxically, since Simon has few illusions about the function of law enforcement in post-industrial urban areas, he is better able to render the goodness of the cops who are attempting to effect change within a pernicious institution. Zizek calls the acts of the “good cops” on The Wire utopian, but in an unconventional sense. Typically, a utopian action would seek to reform an institution or perfect a system; i.e. a utopic action is performed with the assumption that the “system” one is working within is perfectible. Plato’s Republic would be a classic example of this: it was an idealized version of the framework Plato was working under as an Athenian, and Plato advocated that people act with this ideal in mind. The world Simon presents in The Wire is one drowning in the arbitrary effects of corporate capitalism and neoliberal economic policies; he makes it clear that capitalism as a system, rather than people’s moral decrepitude, is at fault. The Wire has been frequently compared to Greek tragedy, but Zizek thinks that they differ in one important respect: Greek tragedy presents fatally flawed characters, The Wire presents characters living and working within a fatally flawed system. Of course, a term like “the system” is so vague that it barely means anything on its own; how does The Wire portray this flawed “system”? Zizek writes,

Here we encounter the formal limitation of The Wire: it has not solved the formal task of howto render, in a TV narrative, a universe in which abstraction reigns. The Wire’s limit is the limit of psychological realism…          

The Wire’s panoramic final scene shows a series of long shots of various locations around Baltimore. This reposeful cinematic gesture allows the viewer to process the fact that new generations of drug dealers, cops and corrupt politicians will come to replace the ones we loved or loved to hate. I will elaborate more on this in the next section, but in Zizek’s mind, one of the functions of ideology is to set up chains of equivalences- such as “people are poor because they use drugs”- when in reality, the urban  poor of Baltimore are poor because the economy has rendered them useless and they are offered little to no opportunities to transcend their situation. Their neighborhoods are flooded with drugs and terrorized both by the gangs who sell the drugs and by the police. The “System” can be apprehended through an understanding of the absurdity of the situations it creates, not as an immutable or transcendental entity in and of itself. With that in mind, I’ll now discuss the Occupy movement and Zizek’s view of the status of activism in general in the 2010’s.

           
I remember when the Occupy Wall Street movement first began. The summer after my freshman year of college I began getting the email blasts from Adbusters Magazine spreading the word about a planned occupation of Zuccotti Park, and once it was underway I avidly read every article I could find about it and watched videos of various people speaking at it (including Slavoj Zizek). I tried to soak up as much as the internet would allow. What made the Occupy Wall St. movement special? And why were most of the appraisals of it by the mainstream press so vacuous? Zizek uses his psychoanalytic training, and his readings of Lacan and Hegel, to attempt to answer those questions.

           
Zizek uses a quote from the journalist Anne Applebaum, who writes for the Washington Post, to exemplify the mainstream (ideologically-sanctioned) reaction to Occupy. She first claims that Occupy protestors (who, by the time she wrote this article, were all over the globe) are correct in their view that democratic institutions are not capable of dealing with the problems created by globalization; several paragraphs after that she chastises protestors for not using those institutions to reach their ends, and even goes on to state that Occupy and related protests will have the negative side effect of hastening the decline of existing democratic institutions. This argument is obviously fallacious, and as such nothing intelligible can be derived from it. Its unintelligibility sheds light on how ideology functions; Applebaum manages to appear reasonable by both expressing tentative praise and haughty ambivalence towards protest movements. She politely acknowledges the unsustainability of the “system” while simultaneously declaring recognition of the “system’s” unsustainability unrealistic.

           
If you’ve taken a course in logic, you know that once a contradiction has been established, anything can be asserted. Well, the liberal apologist view that I (via Zizek) debunked above results in a smug contradiction which opens a space for new ways of thinking about and understanding our situation. I offer the following formulation as a Zizekian philosophical maxim: “The more obvious a teleological explanation of an event is, the more crucial the speculative surrender of the self to the absolute becomes”.  What the fuck does this mean? Zizek here deploys French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s term “zero-point”; i.e. the economic and environmental collapse that capitalism is tending towards. In the face of coming ecological and economic crises, a politically pessimistic outlook seems justified. Pessimism of this kind is ultimately teleological because it equates the collapse of the” system” with nothingness, with the apocalypse. Zizek has many times criticized liberals for being better able to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; but isn’t this indeed how ideology functions? Pessimism about the future of capitalism is certainly called for, and the brutal truth that our lifetime is going to be spent during the slow, violent death of capitalism is a truly shitty fact to contend with. The brutality of this fact and the pessimistic outlook it inspires aren’t grounds for a fatalistic anti-capitalistic viewpoint, though. Each crisis ostensibly brought about by “capitalism” simultaneously erodes capitalism as a functioning system. This is where the “speculative surrender of the self to the absolute” comes in. Zizek writes, “The only way to sustain the Real when it gets too close-that is, the only way to avoid psychosis- is to fictionalize it”. Attempts to reform a failing, inherently dehumanizing system are literally absurd; the only way to engage with the Real of systemic collapse is by speculating about how limited and small you are; about how unintelligible the forces working on you are. This is what Occupy attempted to do: engage with reality in a world that demands disengagement and abject ignorance at any cost.

My first post dealt with novelist Don DeLillo. His book Cosmopolis centers around billionaire hedge-fund manager Eric Packer’s aimless limousine ride around New York City. At one point, Packer gets caught in the middle of a riot thrown by anarchists and communists. He dismisses the whole event as a “market factor”, and indeed, once the riot subsides, business-as-usual resumes. During the riot, however, a man sets himself on fire Tibetan monk style. Packer can’t account for the jarringness of this event. It functions as sign, or perhaps a symbol, of both the untenability of the present and the necessity of the future. It makes sense that the final chapter of Zizek’s book is called “Signs from the Future”. In this chapter, Zizek quotes Blaise Pascal: “There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition”.  Strangely, if one hopes to cultivate a rational disposition with regards to political thinking, a theological perspective is useful. John Locke says that if the government won’t heed your pleas, your best bet is to appeal to heaven. As democratic institutions become more and more useless, it would benefit us, Zizek thinks, not to adopt a dark fatalism, but rather to look to the heavens and recognize our own contingency.