{"id":568,"date":"2013-01-06T12:11:06","date_gmt":"2013-01-06T10:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=568"},"modified":"2013-01-06T12:11:06","modified_gmt":"2013-01-06T10:11:06","slug":"a-perplexing-heroine-maya-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2013\/01\/06\/a-perplexing-heroine-maya-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty\/","title":{"rendered":"A PERPLEXING HEROINE: MAYA IN KATHRYN BIGELOW\u2019S ZERO DARK THIRTY<\/em> <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a big Kathryn Bigelow fan, which means that my personal impression about the very high quality of her newest film, Zero Dark Thirty<\/em>, is totally unreliable. I don\u2019t wish to review it formally here but I\u2019ll say that it\u2019s 160 minutes are thrilling, even though every one knows how they end. Bigelow\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Bigelow, remember, is the only woman (together with Danish Susanne Bier, for In a Better World<\/em>) to have won an Oscar for best director \u2013that was only last year, for The Hurt Locker<\/em>. She hates being judged as a woman<\/em> director and this is why radical feminists don\u2019t like her, to which you need to add that she makes action films about men in a style many would not hesitate to call \u2018masculine\u2019. Bigelow has quite a few tough female characters in her films, my favourite being Angela Bassett\u2019s Mace in Strange Days<\/em>. Maya, heroine of Zero Dark Thirty<\/em>, is not even her first female protagonist but I\u2019m sure she\u2019s the kind of character that will generate much controversy, academic or otherwise.<\/p>\n

Maya is based on the same CIA female agent that, seemingly, also inspired Claire Danes\u2019s Carrie Mathison in TV series Homeland<\/em>. This agent is codenamed \u2018Jen\u2019 in No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden<\/em>, 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 \u201c100%\u201d sure of his location, had a hard time convincing the boys\u2019 club to act. This, no doubt, makes Maya a hero (though, personally, I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Yet, here\u2019s the problem: when seen on the screen, these tasks are, to say the least, distressing. Mark Boal, Bigelow\u2019s screen writer, has written Maya as a kind of female companion to his own Sgt William James in The Hurt Locker<\/em>: 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\u2019s closest to a female colleague, based on another real-life CIA agent. I did enjoy much, nonetheless, Maya\u2019s fierce<\/em> determination to find Bin Laden, and I was happy to see that by the end she doesn\u2019t gloat but cry.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, Admiral Helena Cain (see: http:\/\/kusan.uc3m.es\/CIAN\/index.php\/CK<\/a>) 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\u2019s case). There\u2019s a chilling scene in Bigelow\u2019s film in which Maya and her colleagues coolly ignore President Obama\u2019s claim (on TV) that the USA don\u2019t 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<\/em> organise the \u2018enhanced interrogation\u2019 of male<\/em> prisoners adds to this impression \u2013and highlights the typical contradiction in feminism. Women may have made much progress within the CIA but Maya\u2019s dehumanisation underlines how high the cost is.<\/p>\n

I have no idea how this celebration of the woman who tracked down Bin Laden and sent the boys to \u00abkill him for me\u00bb 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 \u2018Jen\u2019 is like, and my very serious misgivings about Bin Laden\u2019s execution<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m 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\u2019t wish to review it formally here but I\u2019ll say that it\u2019s 160 minutes are thrilling, even though every one knows how they end. Bigelow\u2019s film is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-film-studies","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}