I’m a big Kathryn Bigelow fan, which means that my personal impression about the very high quality of her newest film, Zero Dark Thirty, is totally unreliable. I don’t wish to review it formally here but I’ll say that it’s 160 minutes are thrilling, even though every one knows how they end. Bigelow’s film is also a superb exercise in style, despite the ugliness of the events she narrates, including the by now quite controversial opening 15 minutes, with their grim torture scenes.
Bigelow, remember, is the only woman (together with Danish Susanne Bier, for In a Better World) to have won an Oscar for best director –that was only last year, for The Hurt Locker. She hates being judged as a woman director and this is why radical feminists don’t like her, to which you need to add that she makes action films about men in a style many would not hesitate to call ‘masculine’. Bigelow has quite a few tough female characters in her films, my favourite being Angela Bassett’s Mace in Strange Days. Maya, heroine of Zero Dark Thirty, is not even her first female protagonist but I’m sure she’s the kind of character that will generate much controversy, academic or otherwise.
Maya is based on the same CIA female agent that, seemingly, also inspired Claire Danes’s Carrie Mathison in TV series Homeland. This agent is codenamed ‘Jen’ in No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden, by Navy Seal team leader Mark Bissonnette. She is described as a persistent, efficient CIA ‘targeteer’ (or analyst), who spent 5 years hunting for archvillain Bin Laden and who, despite being “100%” sure of his location, had a hard time convincing the boys’ club to act. This, no doubt, makes Maya a hero (though, personally, I’d rather Bin Laden had been captured and judged). In real life, to stress my point, women have been carrying out for years important tasks rarely seen on the screen.
Yet, here’s the problem: when seen on the screen, these tasks are, to say the least, distressing. Mark Boal, Bigelow’s screen writer, has written Maya as a kind of female companion to his own Sgt William James in The Hurt Locker: an obsessive, intense loner with no social graces. Maya has even less of a private life than James, as at least he is a father, while she makes it clear that even sex is irrelevant to her. She simply has no background, no family, no friends though, exceptionally for Hollywood films, she’s closest to a female colleague, based on another real-life CIA agent. I did enjoy much, nonetheless, Maya’s fierce determination to find Bin Laden, and I was happy to see that by the end she doesn’t gloat but cry.
What was far more complicated to accept was her participation in torture. A while ago I wrote about a very interesting female character in the TV series Battlestar Galactica, Admiral Helena Cain (see: http://kusan.uc3m.es/CIAN/index.php/CK) who also uses men to inflict torture (in this case on other women). I could say that both are degendered in that Helena and Maya occupy positions in a hierarchical patriarchal organisation that decides for them (much more so in Maya’s case). There’s a chilling scene in Bigelow’s film in which Maya and her colleagues coolly ignore President Obama’s claim (on TV) that the USA don’t torture. Frankly, my impression is that Bigelow presents torture as something ugly, barbaric and idiotic, as it mostly results in lies (which we know from the times of the Spanish Inquisition). Seeing a woman organise the ‘enhanced interrogation’ of male prisoners adds to this impression –and highlights the typical contradiction in feminism. Women may have made much progress within the CIA but Maya’s dehumanisation underlines how high the cost is.
I have no idea how this celebration of the woman who tracked down Bin Laden and sent the boys to “kill him for me” will be received by the radical, fundamentalist Muslims that support terrorism. From their point of view, this, surely, adds insult to injury. Leaving aside what did happen, what the real ‘Jen’ is like, and my very serious misgivings about Bin Laden’s execution, my point is that Bigelow and Boal have made a perplexing contribution to the imaginary of female heroism. Maya is far more human than any of those cartoonish action-film heroines that now abound but she cannot be one of those role models we need, unless we want women to be dehumanised.
The horror is that the situation Maya (…’Jen’) is involved in calls for this kind of dehumanisation. I want to believe that this is the message that Bigelow and Boal wished to send, not just about women but about any person on either side of 21st century terrorism.