“This isn’t happening for a reason.” -The Boy, Game of Thrones

“They were real.” -Huck, Scandal

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24′s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.
Read more

In Foreign Policy, Joshua E. Keating asked an interesting, and I think important, question: does Hollywood have a foreign policy? Based on the movies of the last half-century, he argues that Hollywood’s deeply skeptical of the rest of the world and very ready to acknowledge security threats to the United States, but deeply skeptical of the United States’ response to everything from the rise of Communism to terrorism:

But it’s fair to say that the kind of prestige films that get nominated for Oscars tend to come from one side of the political spectrum. From Vietnam-era dramas like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to the growing number of Iraq movies like Green Zone and 2009 Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker, the most celebrated movies have tended to take a critical look at America’s wars, often questioning the motives of senior officials and examining the psychological effects on the men who fight them. From Jack Nicholson’s sneering colonel in A Few Good Men to the cynical incompetence of the officers in Three Kings, the military tends not to get too positive a portrayal when the movie is about an actual war, rather than an alien invasion. (World War II movies are a possible exception, but even films like Saving Private Ryan are more about how the war affected individuals than military achievement.)

Not that the civilians fare much better. Whether they’re colluding with the communists (The Manchurian Candidate), whacking their own people (The Parallax View), concocting a war to cover up a president’s improprieties (Wag the Dog) or standing idly and incompetently by in the midst of a genocide (The Killing Fields), Hollywood has taken a dim view of U.S. policymakers and diplomats. (Steven Soderbergh’s virus thriller Contagion, entirely ignored by the Academy, is a notable exception.) They get off easy compared to global corporations, invariably the villains in films like Syriana and The Constant Gardener.

This skepticism has carried over into the depictions of terrorism in post-9/11 films. Steven Spielberg’s Munich, for instance, certainly can’t be accused of sympathy for jihadists, but took a tone of ambivalence about the ethics of counterterrorism that led critics like the New Republic’s Leon Weiseltier to accuse it of “the sin of equivalence” between the Israeli spies and the Palestinian terrorists they were hunting. Questions of accuracy and the torture debate aside, Zero Dark Thirty probably belongs in the same category: a movie with no hesitation about the evil of terrorism that also asks what a society loses by bending its own moral code to prevent it.

It’s worth noting that Hollywood’s vision of foreign policy is entirely conflict-oriented. Movies are all over wars, or the lead-up to wars. There are plenty of portrayals of soldiers on the way to a battlefield, at said battlefield, or recovering from the effects of their time in a war zone, though the latter normally focus more on soldiers’ personal reactions than any of the institutions set up to support them or the failure of those institutions. If we’re not talking about wars, movies are often exploring the lead-ups to them, particularly in the form of espionage. Argo was the rare movie that portrayed diplomats as well as members of the Central Intelligence Agency. There’s very little conversation about trade, or cultural exchange—The Sapphires, about Australian singers who perform in USO tours during Vietnam, is a rare exception—banking, immigration (except in documentaries), technology, or trans-state actors like the United Nations. The fact that Game of Thrones takes on so many of these soft-power issues, at least in the novels, is one of the reasons it’s so unusual. This focus on the military and on security issues makes a certain amount of sense: war is among the highest stakes that any set of characters can face, and ticking time bomb scenarios or climactic battles make for strong three-act structures. But focusing on those issues alone means that Hollywood is leaving lots of kinds of stories on the table, and picking ones that are more likely to present other countries as dangerous, inhospitable places.

And that’s a bias that runs contrary to Hollywood’s own interests. Beyond what it shows on its screens, the biggest factor driving Hollywood’s actual foreign policy as an industry is trade barriers, whether it’s China’s limits on the number of movies produced by other countries that can air legally on Chinese screens in a given year, or the need to accomodate content restrictions in countries with state-run ratings and censorship systems. Keating mentions China’s leverage to get movies cut to meet its standards before they air in the United States, but it’s an issue worth exploring further, especially on issues like Middle Eastern funders’ comfort with higher levels of violence than sexuality. Hollywood’s foreign policy might have initially been driven by the preferences and contradictions of American audiences’ feelings about our country’s foreign entanglements. But other audiences’ preferences, and the preferences of their governments, will matter more and more as the international audiences account for more and more of box office receipts.

Cable news gets a bad rap for being truncated and sound-bitey, but the kind people at Al Jazeera was nice enough to ask me and a couple of other critics to come on and discuss the results of the Academy Awards—for 25 minutes:

For all the talk about the billion people who theoretically tune into the Academy Awards, there’s very little conversation about the overall international reaction to the results, unless a win sparks off a very particular reaction, as was the case with Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Best Foreign Film statuette for A Separation. I don’t agree with everything my fellow panelists said, but it was fascinating to hear how Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are playing outside the United States.

Yesterday, Deadline ran a piece considering the impact of politics on the 2013 Oscar race, assessing factors from Congressional scrutiny of Zero Dark Thirty to various historical quibbles over Lincoln. Argo, the piece suggests, has one of the strongest campaigns linking the film to real-world events, and to real-world endorsers (though it’s sparked some quibbles by Canadians):

For Argo’s end credits former President Jimmy Carter turns up in an audio interview basically confirming the facts of the CIA mission he approved to get six American hostages out of the Canadian Embassy in Iran by creating a fake movie production. It was a very effective way of validating the events of the film set in 1979 and giving it added gravitas. It also didn’t hurt the film’s awards chances to have Tony Mendez, the real life CIA operative who hatched the scheme (and played by director Ben Affleck) appearing everywhere in praise of the film.

Even more than this roster of praise, the consensus seems to be that Argo, a relatively slight but definitely entertaining picture, racked up a string of awards season victories and became the leading contender for Best Picture at the Academy Awards because it’s the kind of movie that makes Hollywood feel good about itself. The ability to create fantasies compelling enough to make an audience suspend disbelief isn’t just a source of joy, the movie argues. It can be a service to the Republic!

But I think Argo has emerged as the consensus contender for Best Picture for even stronger reasons than that. In a pool of strongly politically themed-movies, Argo is at the intersection of two important trend lines. It has a gloss of relevance, but the movie exists at a safe distance from actual events, and from shameful, damaging policies, that remain the subject of heated political debate. For all that we talk about Hollywood liberalism, the Academy appears to be converging around a movie that allows us to feel as good as possible about the way the United States handles the blowback of our foreign policy.

The contrast between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty is the most obvious point of comparison between Argo and its other competitors, but it’s important. Where Tony Mendez, the CIA analyst who is the main character in Argo is safely a historical figure, an inventive hero by consensus before he became a Hollywood story, the CIA analyst who is the basis for Maya’s (Jessica Chastain) still works at the agency. More to the point, though, is that the tactics Mendez employed—convincing the Iranian government that he was shooting a wacky science fiction picture and smuggling out escapees from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran under the cover of that project—is amusing and anodyne, tradecraft that is only impeachable if you think that it’s wrong to lie to people in the name of espionage, which would be an awfully confusing position. The tactics Maya uses, on the other hand, include torture. It’s not fun to watch her watch a man be waterboarded, sexually humiliated, and beaten in the same way it’s fun to watch Tony jauntily fake a table read for his Trojan Horse of a movie. It requires a great deal more work to dig out what Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal want you to think about those horrendously uncomfortable scenes than it does to sit back, relax, and enjoy Affleck, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman engage in wacky, ethically clear hijinks. And where Argo gives us permission to revel in its finale, in which a commercial airliner races jeeps full of Iranian intelligence officers off a Tehran tarmac, Zero Dark Thirty withholds permission to enjoy an event that gave a lot of people a lot of pride in real life, the killing of Osama bin Laden, by turning that sequence into a tense, workmanlike effort that traumatizes a great many children.
Read more

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.

Over at NPR, Linda Holmes has a lovely post about the fallacies of pretending that “the masses” or “Middle America” are some sort of homogenous block of cultural consumers, or that “the lowest common denominator” is something we should have contempt for, rather than embrace:

I’ve always found the lowest common denominator kind of a cozy concept, particularly because you kind of do it by feel — it’s a translator that lets you take two things that seem to be vibrating on different frequencies and unlock them so they can fit together instead of bumping into each other.

But somehow in culture, “lowest common denominator” has become a way to describe not what’s unifying but what’s worst, as if we all come together where we are awful and stupid. In fact, when we do all come together in large numbers, it’s usually not where we are awful and stupid, particularly not because we are awful and stupid. We come together where there’s enough commonality to let people talk to each other about the same thing. How did that become a slam, unless we assume that the purpose of culture, and of our own tastes, is to efficiently separate those who favor wheat from those who are more into chaff?

The lowest common denominator on a huge scale, in fact, is probably something like The Avengers or the Oscars or the Super Bowl, none of which is embraced for its scandalous or scatological qualities, but all of which are popular simply because lots of people think it’s fun to watch them. And as silly as those things are, their commonality is actually their most redeeming quality — that it’s the lowest common denominator across surprisingly diverse populations is the best thing about the Super Bowl, not the worst. It’s certainly the best thing about the Oscars.

To paraphrase some of the rest of the piece, we watch Community in red states and worship at the altar of Mark Harmon in NCIS in blue states.

I have to say, I wonder if some of this divide comes from shifts in business models that have divided both television and movies into things with massive audiences and tiny audiences, without much space in between. In movies, we’ve increasingly got tentpoles, many of which are genre movies—which face an inherent critical bias and are siloed into “low” culture no matter how self-serious they get—and smaller independent or foreign films, with smart, adult, not very expensive movies vanishing from the scene. 2012 felt like a rare movie-going year in part because there were a number of mass hits, like Lincoln, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Django Unchained that have both done good or pretty good box office and have received good reviews and been the subject of spirited intellectual debates. The things among our common denominators weren’t inherently the lowest. But I do understand how, if you’re a devotee of those $30 million movies that are vanishing, or if it’s becoming harder for you to find independent and foreign films in theaters and they’re slow to make it to video on demand or to streaming, you might feel a certain amount of resentment. It’s not just that other people want and support other things—it’s that it feels harder to get what you want.

The same is true in television, where there remain some massive hits like Dancing With The Stars, NCIS or The Big Bang Theory, but where the ratings for new comedies in particular have quickly shrunk to the point of invisibility. Watching the struggle of something like Community to stay alive, I don’t blame people for being frustrated that more people aren’t tuning in. But the truth is that something like Community, or Happy Endings, or even 30 Rock, all the self-aware, self-referential, pop-culture examining comedies out there—they have an inherent audience ceiling. And that’s totally okay! One of the blessings of a diversified media environment is that networks will create and keep running weird shows with wacky premises and strange-but-endearing characters long after they would have been nuked in a previous era of television. What fans of those shows want is less for everyone to suddenly ditch Leroy Jethro Gibbs and discover the joys of Dean Pelton, and more for NBC to find a way to make money on its wonderful little curiosities, whether it’s an adjustment to the Nielsen ratings that gets advertisers excited about more delayed watching, or richer syndication deals with Hulu and Netflix.

In other words, if folks are still turning up their noses at what “Middle America” watches when Dan Harmon gets his eleventy-billion new shows on the air in coming seasons, the heck with ‘em. But if folks are upset about what’s getting mass audiences because they’re afraid it threatens what they like, I have more sympathy for people’s desire to get their hands on and provide support to content than they love.

Novelist Teju Cole is Twitter’s foremost literary entrepreneur. His “Small Fates” project, which compresses a person’s life and death down to 140 characters, is a fascinating exercise in probing Twitter’s limits as an art form.

But I’m profoundly ambivalent about his newest project, a series of Tweeted musings on the American drone program. On the one hand, his entry on Tuesday — essentially seven fictionalized Small Fates of people killed by drone strikes — brilliantly humanizes some of the more problematic parts of America’s targeted killing campaign. One of Cole’s victims was killed in a “signature strikes,” wherein missiles are launched not because of concrete intelligence indicating the target is a part of a terrorist organization, but because the person or group of people ” bear[s] the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban” targets. This tactic raises serious legal and ethical questions, the answer to which determines whether real people live or die. Cole’s work skillfully draws the public’s attention onto the all-too-often invisible foreign victims of our counterterrorism policies.

On the other, not all of Cole’s drone writing is so revealing. About a year ago, Cole wrote a series lumping together drones with Downton Abbey and Virgin Atlantic’s name for its first class section to show that “height” was “the commanding metaphor” of our time. At the time, it struck me as fruitless postmodern metaphor-play. I still think that now, but I’d add that, unlike his recent entry, it’s didactic and unhelpful. Virgin Atlantic’s semantic choices, while maybe obnoxious, don’t shed light on why the targeted killing program continues or what to do about it. The question “those people down there, are they really people?” that Cole suggests links the things he lists isn’t one whose answer explains the American targeted killing program. America’s use of drones in the war on terrorism is an incredibly difficult policy question, one that isn’t amenable to simple moralizing. Drawing attention to the moral stakes is one thing; reducing disagreement to a world-historical dispute over “for whose sake this world exists” is quite another.

The promises and pitfalls of Cole’s writing on drones aren’t created by his his chosen medium, as a lazy analysis might suggest, but reflective of the broader limitations of literary approaches to argument about politics and philosophy. Non-fiction has the luxury of being able to be boring: it can reflect every nuance, every subtle detail of an argument, however much rote recitation of facts that might require. Even narrative journalism, with all its literary trappings, still has a basic obligation to string together an argument based on the facts.

Fiction, by contrast, is about a universe that isn’t real. It isn’t about making an argument with facts that exist in our world; it’s about creating a new one. That world may be very similar to ours, but it isn’t the same thing. Fiction isn’t a direct argument, with clear premises and conclusions; it’s a means of pointing us in a certain direction. This can be brilliantly illuminating: think 1984 on the nature of totalitarianism. But the insights that book, brilliant as they are, could very well have wrong. Winston Smith’s world isn’t necessarily ours. We know from firsthand accounts of life in totalitarian nations that the book’s account of the psychology of repression is chillingly accurate. But other world-pictures, like Ayn Rand novels, miss the mark, yet remain stubbornly influential on the real-world outlooks of a shockingly large number of people. The seductive appeal of a worldview grounded in fiction can lead to mistaken judgments about the real world it obliquely argues about.

Cole’s blend of cultural criticism and life-like fiction in his drone writing blurs the line between non-fiction and fiction, as does the pseudo-journalistic portrayal of the hunt for bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. Both are ways to use the tools of literature, word and screen, to heighten our awareness of our real past, present, and future. That’s a laudable goal. But art can mislead as much as guide, a point that Plato first recognized when writing about art and poetry in The Republic:

There is a principle in human nature which is disposed to raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again…the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action — in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.

The irony, of course, is that The Republic itself is a fictional dialogue.

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.
Read more

Deadline, in the course of writing up Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty, which chronicles the efforts of the team that finally found and killed Osama bin Laden, notes a juxtaposition the movie makes between the Obama administration’s stance on torture

There were charges that in the heat of the Presidential campaign the Obama administration was givng unprecendented cooperation since obviously a positive film about the capture of Bin Laden couldn’t hurt his re-election chances. The filmmakers always denied that and in fact in the finished product unveiled today Obama is only seen or heard one time in newsreel footage talking about how the U.S. would never tolerate inhumane means of torture in order to elicit information even as the film’s early scenes vividly shows such uses as waterboarding and other horrific acts to get the info they desire. Not exactly a pretty picture.Other than that there is no mention of President Obama and his efforts to make this happen except occasion references to the intense interest of the President as to how this operation was going to be enacted. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is never seen or mentioned.

I can’t tell from this description if the movie’s conclusion is that torture works, or if it’s presented as a tactic that failed and is replaced by others that produce higher-quality information. This was a debate that began immediately after President Obama announced bin Laden’s death, and however it shakes out, Zero Dark Thirty will reignite this enormously difficult conversation, which has lapsed somewhat in fact of bin Laden’s death. Either way, this—and advertising for the movie that suggests that our invasion of Iraq was part of the hunt for bin Laden—suggests that Zero Dark Thirty‘s politics are going to be much more complicated than an Obama reelection vehicle would have been. Anyone who knows Bigelow’s work at all would have known how ludicrous thinking she’d produce that kind of movie is: she’s far too cagey a filmmaker for that. And it suggests that the Obama administration’s assistance to the filmmakers is something more complicated than a collaboration with a friendly filmmaker, and certainly more of a gamble.

I’m unsure about the voiceover used to sell the movie, but I remain pretty excited for Zero Dark Thirty, in part because of its focus on the role of female intelligence operatives. I’d have a proclivity for these kinds of stories in the first place, and it doesn’t hurt that, as Eli Lake recently recounted in a great feature for Newsweek on women and espionage, is actually an accurate reflection of how the hunt for bin Laden went down:

The most human moment in the trailer may be Chris Pratt asking Joel Edgerton “What part convinced you?” and Edgerton’s deadpan response, “Her confidence.” It’s a relatively new thing, this idea that we could trust women to give orders to men in uniform, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a lot of fascinating female intelligence operatives playing with that tension and those questions about reliability. In the current iteration of the James Bond movies, M stands for mother, to a certain extent, with Bond breaking into her apartment and playing fast and loose with her orders in a classic display of rebellious boundary-testing. On Homeland, Carrie Mathison is meant to seem unreliable because of her mental illness and the way it interacts with her gender, influencing her affairs with both David Estes, her boss, and Nicholas Brody, her target. But the show doubles up the reasons she shouldn’t be trusted, and then proves her right anyway. Now, Jessica Chastain, who doesn’t actually speak a word in this trailer, presented in profile, eyes huge or utterly obscured, is being presented as the person on whose shoulders the mission to get Osama bin Laden rested. That cleaving of the requirement that expertise be validated by machoness if not explicitly by gender, even by emotional stoicism, is fascinating and important. These are big, tense, horrible things the intelligence community sets into motion. And women seem to be the ones expressing the weight of that knowledge, and those decisions.