Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Cinema and the Epistemology of War
- 2 Good Kill? US Soldiers and the Killing of Civilians in American Film
- 3 ‘5,000 feet is the best’: Drone Warfare, Targets and Paul Virilio's ‘Accident’
- 4 Post-heroic War/The Body at Risk
- 5 Disappearing Bodies: Visualising the Maywand District Murders
- 6 The Unknowable Soldier: Ethical Erasure in The Master's Facial Close-ups
- 7 Visible Dead Bodies and the Technologies of Erasure in the War on Terror
- 8 Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Absence in Zero Dark Thirty
- 9 Invisible War: Broadcast Television Documentary and Iraq
- 10 Nine Cinematic Devices for Staging (In)visible War and the (Vanishing) Colonial Present
- 11 Afterword: Reflections on Knowing War
- Index
8 - Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Absence in Zero Dark Thirty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Cinema and the Epistemology of War
- 2 Good Kill? US Soldiers and the Killing of Civilians in American Film
- 3 ‘5,000 feet is the best’: Drone Warfare, Targets and Paul Virilio's ‘Accident’
- 4 Post-heroic War/The Body at Risk
- 5 Disappearing Bodies: Visualising the Maywand District Murders
- 6 The Unknowable Soldier: Ethical Erasure in The Master's Facial Close-ups
- 7 Visible Dead Bodies and the Technologies of Erasure in the War on Terror
- 8 Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Absence in Zero Dark Thirty
- 9 Invisible War: Broadcast Television Documentary and Iraq
- 10 Nine Cinematic Devices for Staging (In)visible War and the (Vanishing) Colonial Present
- 11 Afterword: Reflections on Knowing War
- Index
Summary
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's 2012 film about the ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden, has provoked competing accusations: that it is either anti-war or pro-war, anti-torture or pro-torture, and left wing or right wing in its political convictions. The heat of the assertions on either side of the debate (Naomi Wolf (2013) famously accused Bigelow of being ‘torture's handmaiden’) illustrates the extent to which the film's subject matter – the post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategies deployed by the US military and government agencies – itself continues to provoke vociferous political and cultural discussion. Not for the first (or last) time in American cinema history, a film becomes the site at which a nationally felt ambivalence – in this case, about US actions carried out in the name of the so-called ‘war on terror’ – is explored. Zero Dark Thirty has caused controversy not only because of its subject matter, but because of its ambiguity. The debates around the film have focused most intently on key elements of what is presented on screen: the scenes of torture, the character of Maya (played by Jessica Chastain), and the killing of bin Laden. These have provoked strikingly contrasting interpretations, drawn from the same film-making decisions, and the same screen details. Thus Zero Dark Thirty has become what Frank Tomasulo once, in relation to a different war film, called a ‘national Rorschach test’ (Tomasulo 1990: 147). In this essay I want to unpick these ambiguities, to consider if Zero Dark Thirty gives voice to or counters a felt ambivalence about the war on terror, by examining what has sometimes slipped from view in the heated discussion of its scenes of torture and killing. That is, what absences might the compelling presences of Zero Dark Thirty obscure?
AMBIVALENCE AND PRESENCE: LOCATING AMBIGUITY
The film's moments of ambiguity – moments whose intended import can be interpreted in more than one way – are numerous, and I will examine some of these in what follows. Such a preponderance of ambiguity has the effect of producing political ambivalence at the structural level: that is, the film itself literally becomes a container for contradictory ideas and interpretations, allowing spectators who hold contrasting views to each see their convictions reflected in the text itself.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Disappearing WarInterdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World, pp. 131 - 148Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017