I continue to believe that Zero Dark Thirty is a much more comprehensively anti-war film than the debate about whether it suggests torture works would indicate. And so I was interested to read Mark Boal talk to Vulture about what it was like to write those sequences, and about how he wanted the emphasis to be on what it was actually like to be in the room when someone was being beaten, waterboarded, and humiliated:

The scene that has been the focal point of all the discussion has been the opening scene of the film, and it was definitely among the hardest to have in my life, let alone include in the script. I’ve had to revisit it over and over again after the film came out, and those torture scenes are incredibly painful. And they’re meant to be! I wanted to show the brutality and inhumanity of the situation, and you see the prisoner’s brain getting scrambled by the pressure and the punishment that’s being put on him. It was a dark and painful place to go as a writer, and I still don’t think I’ve totally shaken it off, to be honest with you.

The story includes scanned pages of the script, which are even more revealing than what Boal says in the interview. Maya’s reactions in that sequence aren’t an acting choice: they’re baked into the script. When she says I’m okay, the script clearly notes that “She’s not.” At one point, “she is on the verge of vomiting.” “The stress and strain on her face is enormous” as she participates in Ammar’s waterboarding—though the movie makes clear that the damage to him is more considerable than it is to her. At the end of the scene? “Dan and Maya exit. They’ve learned nothing.”

I don’t think that Kathryn Bigelow and Boal did themselves any particular favors in the way they’ve talked about Zero Dark Thirty. Describing it as a quasi-journalistic enterprise and insisting on the film’s neutrality may have seemed like a way to provide political cover to it, but refusing to stake out a position left them with essentially nothing to defend but their process as the debate over the movie heated up. Releasing the script and talking about their intentions could have opened up a debate about whether the film lived up to those intentions, a conversation that would have struck me as both politically and artistically useful.

I did not particularly like Fox’s The Following, Fox’s new drama, which stars Kevin Bacon as an alcoholic former FBI agent who comes out of retirement to hunt down James Purefoy, the pretentious, Edgar Allen Poe-quoting serial killer, who has escaped from prison and trained a whole bunch of other serial killers to fulfill their own dark fantasies and enhance his own legend. The whole thing struck me as a slick but empty excuse to put extraordinarily grotesque violence on television in an attempt to compete with cable, as if violence itself, rather than the things that lead up to violence, were what make cable dramas sophisticated. Over at Vulture, however, Matt Zoller Seitz has a theory about what the show’s really about:

Once you become attuned to the show’s anti-logic, the mix of gnawing dread and random mayhem might trigger the gloomy adrenaline rush of the 2001–2004 period. Hijackings, collapsing skyscrapers, subway explosions, shoe bombers, anthrax attacks, terror alerts, weapons of mass destruction: The Following evokes an alternate-world version of that horrendous time. Watch the skies. Sleep with the lights on. Trust no one. Those co-workers or next-door neighbors or smiling security guards that you deal with each day could be in cahoots with an ice-veined genius-madman. Portions of the first few episodes reminded me less of The Silence of the Lambs or Se7en than a zombie or body-snatchers picture, one in which every character but the lead could secretly be, or potentially become, a monster. Parts of The Following feel like 24 with serial killers instead of terrorists. It’s an apocalypse story as long-form nightmare. The whole world is losing its mind.

It’s an idea that that actually makes me like The Following even less.
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I saw Zero Dark Thirty in Los Angeles, prior to its screening for critics in Washington, DC tonight, and consequently am reviewing it somewhat earlier than my colleagues in the DC critics’ corps. This post contains extensive discussion of plot details in the film, including the final scene, because it is impossible to discuss the most important issues in Zero Dark Thirty without doing so.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which was in production before bin Laden was killed by American soldiers on May 2, 2011, is one of the difficult movies I’ve ever had to write about. Long before most critics or policy analysts had seen the film, it became the subject of intense debate over whether it presented torture as an effective weapon in the war against terrorism. It’s true that Zero Dark Thirty will be politically unsatisfying to observers who would have liked to see it thoroughly rebuke the idea that any instance or threat of torture ever produces information that can become actionable under any circumstances. As a matter of politics and policy, that’s where my own preferences lie, and I’d like to see the more low-level but still repulsive use of this trope, the threat of torture in police interrogations, slink ignominiously away from popular culture, where it’s become entirely normalized.

But Zero Dark Thirty, quite rightly, makes the argument that whether or not torture is efficacious is not where our debate about its employment should be taking place. Instead, it has a much more radical project. Zero Dark Thirty a shattering, visually stunning argument that we’ve warped our own souls in pursuit of a goal, the killing of Osama bin Laden, that has left us fundamentally empty and dislocated.

The main character in Zero Dark Thirty is a young Central Intelligence Agency analyst named Maya (Jessica Chastain), who, as part of her brief to aid in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, arrives at a black site to witness the torture of a detainee named Ammar (Reda Kateb, in an extraordinary performance that should be one of several contenders for Best Supporting acting nominations) by an agent named Dan (Jason Clarke). When they first meet, Dan remarks on Maya’s lack of preparedness for the work they do at the black site, commenting on “You, rocking your best suit for your first interrogation.” But when Dan tells her “You know, there’s no shame if you want to watch from the monitor,” Maya refuses, insisting on being in the room with him, his team, and Ammar, and in the process provides the key to understanding Zero Dark Thirty: what Maya is willing and able to look at, and what she is capable—and not capable—of seeing.
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The first thing I did after getting home last night was to go to a performance of A Christmas Celtic Sojourn, an amazing group performance put on by Brian O’Donovan of WGBH up here in Boston. It’s a totally tremendous performance, and I highly recommend making it a stop on your holiday calendar next year, if you’re in the area. But I particularly wanted to pull out this poem, which O’Donovan read towards the end of the show, because it reminds me that, while I spend a lot of time writing about art’s ability to help us work through the worst in human nature, it can also be a light that holds back the darkness. More of that in 2013, I think:

Though There Are Torturers
by Michael Coady

Though there are torturers in the world
There are also musicians.
Though, at this moment,
Men are screaming in prisons,
There are jazzmen raising storms
Of sensuous celebration,
And orchestras releasing
Glories of the Spirit.

Though the image of God
Is everywhere defiled,
A man in West Clare
Is playing the concertina,
The Sistine Choir is levitating
Under the dome of St. Peter’s,
And a drunk man on the road
Is singing, for no reason.

This post discusses plot points through the December 10 episode of Homeland.

Judging from some of the things that I’ve heard you say in comments and on Twitter, a lot of you are frustrated to the point of quitting with Homeland. I’m not sure I’m at that point yet—there are too many good performances, and too many strong emotional moments for me to walk away from yet. But increasingly, it seems like a show that’s sacrificing its best potential to plot mechanics that don’t necessarily even make much sense, to the sense that it needs to be exciting, rather than deeply felt, or tender, or psychologically astute. The name of the show should lend itself to the considerations of inner life, our sense of home and what makes it and the threats that come to it from ourselves as much as from our enemies, all things Homeland did beautifully last season. But instead, it’s turning outward in a way that feels less distinct than the show once did.

There are good moments in this episode, but often, they aren’t enough. Carrie’s suspicions of Galvez, telling Quinn “He is a Muslim,” only to find out that he’s forced himself back into the field too soon, would have been a nice character moment for the show, and a good repudiation of the correlation between Islam and terrorism that the show’s dispelled only fitfully. But we don’t know Galvez at all as a person, only as a functionary of Estes’. He’s barely a character. The mole storyline has been so dormant until this episode that I was choosing to believe that the show had wisely decided to abandon it. Instead, the whole moment is a perfunctory bump on Carrie’s path to finding Nazir still hidden in the plant where he held her captive.

The best sequence, by contrast, was one between characters we’ve come to know well. “I don’t want to fight anymore, even for something. I’m tired of fighting,” Jessica told Brody as they returned from confinement, musing on how well they’d done for so long. “Since we were sixteen, and all we wanted was to be together. We were all okay.” Even if Brody had never been turned, the dissolution of their marriage after his return from war would have been a worthy subject for a television show, and it’s the storyline that Homeland has respected most, trusting its initial elements—Jessica’s relationship with Mike, Brody’s sexual brokenness, his affair with Carrie, Brody’s relationship with Dana—to be genuinely moving without ornamentation.. Brody’s admission that “I tried, too, to deal with everything that happened. But that was beyond me. I was fucked the moment I left for Iraq. We all were,” would have worked in that context, which may be why it carried the weight that it did.

And even though we know that’s not the case, the simplicity of the means by which they admit their marriage was over was beautiful even in their pulp surroundings. Brody seems about to tell the full truth to Jessica when he begins, “The time that Carrie came over here to the house, on the day Elizabeth Gaines was shot and Tom Walker died, Carrie said some crazy things to Dana and to you. She said things about what I was going to do.” And there’s a particular sadness to Jessica stopping him, explaining, “Don’t. Not now. For the longest time all I wanted was for you to tell me the truth. I wanted to know it all. I don’t have to know anymore. I just don’t want to…Carrie knows, right? She knows everything about you. She accepts it. You must love her a lot.” Again, if Brody were only a wounded veteran, it still would have been haunting to hear Jessica admit that she can’t handle knowing the fullness of what her husband suffered and who he became, to surrender him to a woman with a greater capacity to absorb his pain.

In a way, this episode made me realize something about Homeland: the show would be more interesting if it were willing to invest as much in exploring the perspective of someone who hates the United States as it has in exploring Carrie’s zeal to defend it, or Brody’s broken embrace of his family even as he takes pleasure in killing the vice president. That’s a risky thing to do, going truly inside the head of a terrorist without endorsing his or her perspective, though Showtime managed to pull it off to a certain extent in Sleeper Cell, aided by a tremendous performance from Oded Fehr. But Homeland has never really seemed interested in doing that with either Abu Nazir or Roya. That’s lead to both machinery that never really made sense or was explained, like Nazir’s work with Hezbollah. And it’s left psychological blank space in the show, as when Nazir gets Carrie alone and chooses to rail against…argula?

Carrie’s confrontation with Roya in this episode carried the same promise and the same lack of fulfillment. Carrie mentions Roya’s family losing land, but we don’t know any of the details, nor how she came to know and be recruited by Nazir, and the scene never gets there. Instead, Roya rattles Carrie, asking her “Have you ever had someone who takes over your life, pulls you in, gets you to do things you would normally never do?…Do you have anyone like that?” knowing full well, of course, that she does, and his name is Nicholas Brody. When Carrie admits that she’s been so influenced, Roya turns the tables on her. “Well. I’ve never been that stupid,” Roya tells her, declaring her independence of choice. “You idiot whore. You think you understand me or what my family have lost and suffered? You think is just some fucking game?” When she switches into Arabic, the only thing we learn about what she’s saying is a clue that makes Carrie realize that Abu Nazir is still in hiding, the show sacrificing a chance at psychological insight for plot mechanics. Carrie may think that she fucked up the interrogation. But Homeland botched the sequence, too, choosing story over its characters.