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The Elusive Enemy: Zero Dark Thirty and the American Worldview

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2016

LIAM KENNEDY
LIAM KENNEDY*
Affiliation:
Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin. Email: Liam.Kennedy@ucd.ie.
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Abstract

As a new paradigm and frame for US geopolitical imperatives, the war on terror poses particular challenges of representation. Like other media today, American cinema screens the war on terror – that is to say, it functions both to show and to conceal the conditions and effects of perpetual war. It dramatizes the hauntology of this war and it also mystifies and demystifies its violence. This essay focusses on the example of the film Zero Dark Thirty to consider how the film re-presents the aporia of representation that structures the production of the war on terror as a field of perceptible reality and reflects the geopolitical priorities of an American worldview. Central to this aporia is the mystification of the “elusive enemy” and the naturalization of a “long war.” The hunt for Osama bin Laden has been a symbolic narrativization of this aporia and the essay comments on how Zero Dark Thirty re-presents this.

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Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 965 - 980
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

1 As warfare has become increasingly intangible, filmmakers and photographers have sought to identify and represent the abstractions of power and violence in the conduct of war. See Žižek, Slavoj, “A Holiday from History and Other Real Stories,” in Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, ed., Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2003)Google Scholar, n.p.; Stewart, Garret, Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hariman, Robert, “Watching War Evolve: Photojournalism and New Forms of Violence,” in Kennedy, Liam and Patrick, Caitlin, eds., The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 139–63Google Scholar.

2 Jameson, Fredric, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Larry, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60, 356CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the (in)visibility of capitalism see Toscano, Alberto and Kinkle, Jeff, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015)Google Scholar.

3 Of course, this contemporary cinema is conditioned not by late capitalism and Cold War paranoia but by neoliberal capitalism and a new formation of precarious American global hegemony.

4 These phrases appear in the National Security Strategy of the United States (Sept. 2002). See www.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf, accessed 30 January 2015.

5 Even the December opening was curtailed to selected cinemas in New York and Los Angeles – technically making the film eligible for Oscar nominations – and nationwide release was held back until January 2013. See Erica Orden, “A Stealth Release Plan for ‘Zero Dark Thirty’,” Wall Street Journal, 10 Jan. 2013, at www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324442304578233962595943342, accessed 15 Jan. 2015.

6 Republican Peter King, chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, requested an internal Department of Defense “review of illegal disclosures of classified information to Hollywood filmmakers.” See Lee Ferran and Matthew Mosk, “After Leak, Rep. King Demands ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Disclosure Report,” ABC News, 6 June 2013, at http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/leak-rep-king-demands-dark-thirty-disclosure-report/story?id=19338380, accessed 4 Feb. 2015.

7 Ben Child, “Kathryn Bigelow Denies White House Favourtism over Bin Laden Film,” The Guardian, 11 Aug. 2011, at www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/11/kathryn-bigelow-bin-laden-film, accessed 5 Feb. 2015.

8 See Steve Coll, “‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading’,” New York Review of Books, 7 Feb. 2013, at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty, accessed 20 Jan. 2015.

9 Ann Hornaday, “‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the New Reality of Reported Filmmaking,” Washington Post, 13 Dec. 2012, at www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/zero-dark-thirty-and-the-new-reality-of-reported-filmmaking/2012/12/13/3630ce2c-4548-11e2-8e70-e1993528222d_story.html, accessed 3 Jan. 2015.

10 Roger Cohen, “Why ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Works,” New York Times, 11 Feb. 2013, at www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/opinion/global/roger-cohen-why-zero-dark-thirty-works.html?_r=0, accessed 5 Jan. 2015.

11 “Taking on Terror,” The Economist, 24 Jan. 2013, at www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/01/qa-kathryn-bigelow, accessed 9 Jan. 2015.

12 Dexter Filkins, “Bin Laden, the Movie,” New Yorker, 17 Dec. 2012, at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/bin-laden-the-movie.

13 Steven Zeitchik, “‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Hunts for Bin Laden – and More,” Los Angeles Times, 6 Dec. 2012, at http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/06/entertainment/la-et-mn-zero-dark-thirty-20121209, accessed 16 Jan. 2015.

14 Filkins.

15 Hornaday.

16 Ibid.

17 “Kathryn Bigelow Addresses Zero Dark Thirty Torture Criticism,” Los Angeles Times, 15 Jan. 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/15/entertainment/la-et-mn-0116-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty-20130116, accessed 14 Jan. 2015.

18 “Taking on Terror.”

19 “Katherine Bigelow on Making ‘Zero Dark Thirty’,” ABC News, 1 Nov.2013, at http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/video/dark-thirty-director-kathryn-bigelow-latest-film-18188084, accessed 20 Jan. 2015.

20 Filkins.

21 See, for example, Tyler Sage, “Unreliable Narrative: Zero Dark Thirty, Torture, and Truth,” Bright Lights Film Journal (April 2013), at http://brightlightsfilm.com/unreliable-narrative-zero-dark-thirty-torture-and-truth/#.VvVOuWSLSqA.

22 The British photographer Simon Norfolk uses this phrase to refer to elements of contemporary warfare that are “inscrutable, uncontrollable, beyond democracy.” Simon Norfolk, “War/Photography: An Interview with Simon Norfolk,” bldgblog, 30 Nov. 2006, at http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/warphotography-interview-with-simon.html.

23 Steven Shaviro, “A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty,” The Pinnochio Theory, posted 18 Jan. 2013, at www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1114, accessed 23 Feb.2015.

24 “Katherine Bigelow on Making ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.”

25 Keenan, Thomas, “Mobilizing Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 2–3 (2004), 435–49, 441CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 “The Power of Shame,” The Economist, 3 Dec. 1998, www.economist.com/node/178039, accessed 3 March 2015.

27 Several critics have analysed the ethical and emotional responses invited by the film's opening scenes. Shohini Chaudhuri argues that the “sanctioned brutality” depicted becomes normative, prefiguring a moral (and moralizing) script in Zero Dark Thirty “in which torture and other questionable methods … are presented as necessary and effective, justifying the self-appointed forces of good going over to ‘the dark side’ to defeat their enemies.” Shohini Chaudhuri, “Documenting the Dark Side: Torture and the ‘War on Terror’ in Zero Dark Thirty, Taxi to the Dark Side, and Standard Operating Procedure,” Screening the Past, 40 (2015), at www.screeningthepast.com/2013/10/documenting-the-dark-side-torture-and-the-%E2%80%9Cwar-on-terror%E2%80%9D-in-zero-dark-thirty-taxi-to-the-dark-side-and-standard-operating-procedure. Hilary Neroni provides a psychoanalytic perspective to accentuate the unconscious drives and fantasies at work in the scenes and that underscore the biopolitics of the linkage between torture and truth. Neroni, Hilary, The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

28 See Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “The Monitor Mentality, or a Means to an End Becomes an End in Itself: Kathryn Bigelow's ‘Zero Dark Thirty’,” Notebook, 19 Dec. 2012, at https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-monitor-mentality-or-a-means-to-an-end-becomes-an-end-in-itself-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty, accessed 4 March 2015.

29 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1980), 143 Google Scholar.

30 Amoore, Louise and Goede, Marik de, “Introduction: Governing by Risk in the War on Terror,” in Amoore and de Goede, eds., Risk and the War on Terror (London: Routledge, 2008), 5–20, 8Google Scholar.

31 Ibid, 8–9.

32 Vishnevetsky.

33 Mark Danner, “Torture and the Forever War” (2010), at http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/d/Danner_10.pdf, accessed 14 March 2015.

34 “DoD News Briefing: Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers,” Department of Defense (12 Feb. 2002), at http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:efQ21KhcJ:www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t02122002_t212sdv2.html+rumsfeld+known+knowns+feb+12+2002&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=2, accessed 12 Nov. 2014.

35 Alyss Rosenberg, “‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the Emptiness of the War on Terror,” Think Progress, 9 Jan. 2013, http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/01/09/1419141/zero-dark-thirty-4, accessed 3 March 2015.

36 “Katherine Bigelow on Making ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.”

37 “Obama's Remarks on Bin Laden's Killing,” New York Times, 2 May 2011, at www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/middleeast/02obama-text.html?pagewanted=all.

38 Peter Maass, “Don't Trust ‘Zero Dark Thirty’,” The Atlantic, 13 Dec. 2012, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12/dont-trust-zero-dark-thirty/266253, accessed 24 March 2012.

39 Butler, Judith, “Photography, War, Outrage,” PMLA, 120, 3 (2005), 822–27, 823CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Hornaday, “‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the New Reality of Reported Filmmaking.”

41 Fredric Jameson includes All the President's Men in his critique of the “conspiratorial” American cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s, arguing that the films’ allegorizations of “postmodern capitalism” are insufficient representations, failing to cognitively map this phase of capitalism, though revealing aspects of its workings through this very “failure”. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping”; and see Jameson, Fredric, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI, 1995)Google Scholar.

42 Slavoj Žižek, “The Empty Wheelbarrow,” The Guardian, 20 Feb. 2005, 22.

43 Ibid.