Zero Dark Thirty: Bad Questions Get Wrong Answers
I suppose you could say I knew the answer to this question before I asked it, but it would have been hypocritical of me not to go see the movie Zero Dark Thirty before opining on it, and I've given it some time for the narrative to really sink in so I can take it as the work it presents itself as rather than the work I assumed it would be. Assumptions are like assholes, after all - everyone has one and it usually stinks. The joke going around the Internet is, "Jessica Chastain won a Golden Globe for Zero Dark Thirty? Cool. I didn't know Best Actress In A Film Advocating Torture was its own category though..."
We have tread the moral grounds of this argument many times before as human beings, and no sooner was Guantanamo Bay opened for business than I for one knew we were about to do something really, really stupid - believe that the ends we wanted to achieve could justify whatever means we took to get there.
That is the question, after all - do the ends justify the means? The universal question that pretends morality is a zero-sum game in which there can be a neat accounting.
Zero Dark Thirty contains torture. (Spoiler alert.) The people being tortured, we're led to believe, are The Bad Guys; after all, the central narrative of the film is about finding Osama bin Bad Guy and shooting him in the face for 9/11, and films tend to follow their narrative arcs pretty cleanly. So we see people being tortured who ultimately help make some elements connect together, because to some degree they're related to Al Qaeda, so as uncomfortable and dehumanizing as the scenes are (and they're supposed to be - and they *should be*) they know things that we know now because we beat it out of them.
You can argue a lot of things. The key piece of intelligence that the protagonists get comes not from torture but from trickery, after failing to get a piece of intelligence from a detainee they nonetheless 'get it' when the act they failed to prevent occurs, and they bluff cooperation and receive it in return. But that entire relationship and dynamic is predicated upon the torture and relies upon it - his participation is coerced, and comes only because of what came before, not merely because of the trick that makes it so much easier to continue going along once you believe you have already and all you can do is suffer needlessly to protect nothing at all anymore. The piece of intelligence does not come from torture - but would not have been gotten without it.
Things are messy and complicated. Being moral is hard, sure, when you're getting shot at - and there are intelligence failures commeasurate to any successes that are obtained. In the end, the vital clue comes out of a lost filing cabinet it had sat in all along - but that it mattered at all was known only because of the torture of detainees, who are by no means innocent but are nonetheless human beings with whom we can, and must, continually choose the means by which we interact - because what you do means something, in the end what you have done to your fellow human beings is how we take the measure of a man and how that man must measure himself in every mirror he sees his own face in.
Zero Dark Thirty doesn't shy away from the mess. Complexity is present, and maddening, sidestepped only by the protagonist's determination and her faith in something she cannot adequately name or explain, in her growing need to accomplish a game-changer that will make it all worthwhile - to do something of worth that validates the worth of the sacrifices made along the way. It's a holy mission: "I feel like God left me alive to do this," she says, though undoubtedly I paraphrase. The summary is holy directive and where reason is not enough to justify the completion of that sacred duty, faith must justify it instead. When the work is done and the wits have done all they can, as the information grows stale it's just faith moving forward, faith that galvanizes others and sees it through.
We see a minor character who mouths the words we're supposed to know. "Torture's bad. It's illegal. You shouldn't have, and you should have known better." Unfortunately, the only character to say these words we are to dismiss automatically as *evil* - on our side, sure, but only barely because he's the decision stopping them from getting Osama bin Bad Guy, and he's not just a lawyer but the Grand High King Of Lawyers Everywhere, the White House's lawyer to advise on the matter. He says what we all should say, and the words have been mouthed: Torture is bad, mmkay?
We see the movie through to the end, and there cannot possibly be spoilers here, because this movie is based on something that actually happened and that everyone knows about, the gripping tale is how it happens, not what happens. Osama bin Bad Guy gets shot in the face, and the harrowing trial that has brought us from the protagonist's first day to *today* is over. She has felt this weight more personally than anyone else and having carried it is now left senseless and reeling in the sensations that go with standing up unburdened by pain for the first time in a long time.
We see her face as the realization sinks in and the release comes, and there's just that one question: was it worth it?
Her answer is yes, written in tears upon her face - yes, it will have to be because there are no other options. It will have to be worth it, we have no other options. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and the living shall have to call the accounting to the best that they are able.
And that is why I say that while we are shown torture, intimate and unsmiling, and can reject it when we see it as the evil we know it to be - it is those tears, that seductiveness, that says in desperate times we must take desperate measures and it was all worth it. It takes the lesson we have watched and stands it on its head, because we are feeling, not thinking, and it feels like when the accounting must be made with the story we have seen, the answer must be "it was worth it" because we would have to fall apart if it were not, and there is nothing more that we can do anyway to balance the scales - what's done is done.
That is the seductive poison. Because it asks the wrong question - "was it worth it?" - the question we can answer and still feel good about ourselves somehow when we lay our heads to rest. The right question all along was "was it wrong?" and the answer is yes... and more damning still, we knew the answer to that before we even did it, and yet we did it anyway in full faith that absolution would come in the end: it would all be worth it.
It was wrong. We did it anyway. That wasn't the story, though, that wasn't the question. So she cries, and it will all be okay because it is over now.