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Mark Crispin Miller [MCM] Is Kathryn Bigelow the Leni
Riefenstahl of Bobama's "war on terror"?
January 7, 2013 5:41:38 PM ESTnewsfromunderground
[email protected]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/letter-kathryn-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty
A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty's apology
fortorture
By peddling the lie that CIA detentions led to Bin Laden's
killing, you have become a Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of
torture
Naomi Wolfguardian.co.uk, Friday 4 January 2013 12.40 EST
Director Kathryn Bigelow holds her 2010 Academy Award for The
Hurt Locker. Photograph: Paul Buck/EPA
Dear Kathryn Bigelow,
The Hurt Locker was a beautiful, brave film; many young women in
film were inspired as they watched you become the first womanever
to win an Oscar for directing. But with Zero Dark Thirty, you have
attained a different kind of distinction.
Your film Zero Dark Thirty is a huge hit here. But in falsely
justifying, in scene after scene, the torture of detainees in "the
global waron terror", Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot,
two-hour ad for keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes
againstGuantnamo prisoners out of jail. It makes heroes and
heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other
peoplebased on their race something that has historical
precedent.
Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was redeemed
by the "information" it "secured", information that, according to
yourscript, led to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of
manufacture of innocence to mask a great crime: what your script
blithelycalls "the detainee program".
What led to this amoral compromising of your film-making?
Could some of the seduction be financing? It is very hard to get
a film without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt
Locker,funded and financed. But according to sources in the film
industry, the more pro-military your message is, the more kinds of
help youcurrently can get: from personnel, to sets, to technology a
point I made in my argument about the recent militarized Katy
Perryvideo.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/16/katy-perry-military-pop-cultural-complexhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ciahttp://www.guardian.co.uk/law/torturehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/film/movie/149492/zero-dark-thirtyhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/film/kathryn-bigelowhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/naomiwolfhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/letter-kathryn-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty
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It seems implausible that scenes such as those involving two
top-secret, futuristic helicopters could be made without Pentagon
help,for example. If the film received that kind of undisclosed,
in-kind support from the defense department, then that would free
up millionof dollars for the gigantic ad campaign that a film like
this needs to compete to win audience.
This also sets a dangerous precedent: we can be sure, with the
"propaganda amendment" of the 2013 NDAA, just signed into law bythe
president, that the future will hold much more overt corruption of
Hollywood and the rest of US pop culture. This amendmentlegalizes
something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of
pro-government or pro-military messaging in media,
without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.
Then, there is the James Frey factor. You claim that your film
is "based on real events", and in interviews, you insist that it is
a mixtureof fact and fiction, "part documentary". "Real", "true",
and even "documentary", are big and important words. By claiming
such terms,you generate media and sales traction on a mendacious
basis. There are filmmakers who work very hard to produce films
that areactually "based on real events": they are called
documentarians. Alex Gibney, in Taxi to the Dark Side , and Rory
Kennedy, in Ghostsof Abu Ghraib, have both produced true and
sourceable documentary films about what your script blithely calls
"the detaineeprogram" that is, the regime of torture to generate
false confessions at Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib which your script
claims ledstraight to Bin Laden.
Fine, fellow reporter: produce your sources. Provide your
evidence that torture produced lifesaving or any worthwhile
intelligence.
But you can't present evidence for this claim. Because it does
not exist.
Five decades of research, cited in the 2008 documentary The End
of America, confirm that torture does not work. Robert Fisk
provides another summary of that categorical conclusion. And
this 2011 account from Human Rights First rebuts the very premise
ofZero Dark Thirty.
Your actors complain about detainees' representation by lawyers
suggesting that these do-gooders in suits endanger the rest of us.I
have been to see your "detainee program" firsthand. The prisoners,
whom your film describes as being "lawyered up", meet withthose
lawyers in rooms that are wired for sound; yet, those lawyers can't
tell the world what happened to their clients because
thedescriptions of the very torture these men endured are
classified.
I have seen the room where the military tribunal takes the
"testimony" from people swept up in a program that gave $5,000
bountiesto desperately poor Afghanis to incentivize their
turning-in innocent neighbors. The chairs have shackles to the
floor, and are placedin twos, so that one prisoner can be
threatened to make him falsely condemn the second.
I have seen the expensive video system in the courtroom where
though Guantnamo spokesmen have told the world's press sinceits
opening that witnesses' accounts are brought in "whenever
reasonable" the monitor on the system has never been turned ononce:
a monitor that could actually let someone in Pakistan testify to
say, "hey, that is the wrong guy". (By the way, you left out
thescene where the CIA dude sodomizes the wrong guy: Khaled
el-Masri, "the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a
similarname to a militant named Khaled al-Masri.")
In a time of darkness in America, you are being feted by
Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path your
career hasnow taken reminds of no one so much as that other female
film pioneer who became, eventually, an apologist for evil:
LeniRiefenstahl. Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will, which
glorified Nazi military power, was a massive hit in Germany.
Riefenstahlwas the first female film director to be hailed
worldwide.
http://news.antiwar.com/2012/12/13/human-rights-court-cia-tortured-sodomized-german-citizen/http://archive.truthout.org/073109Chttp://www.humanrightsfirst.org/2011/05/03/five-reasons-why-torture-did-not-help-us-forces-find-bin-laden/http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-torture-does-not-work-as-history-shows-777213.htmlhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt1294790/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P31RzaYp-Kghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0MPcN08Zchttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/movies/awardsseason/kathryn-bigelow-on-zero-dark-thirty.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0http://rt.com/usa/news/propaganda-us-smith-amendment-903/
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Leni Riefenstahl directing her crew at the Nazipart rally in
Nuremberg, 1934, for her film Triumph of the Will. Photograph:
Friedrich Rohrmann/EPA
It may seem extreme to make comparison with this other great,
but profoundly compromised film-maker, but there are real
echoes.When Riefenstahl began to glamorize the National Socialists,
in the early 1930s, the Nazis' worst atrocities had not yet begun;
yetabusive detention camps had already been opened to house
political dissidents beyond the rule of law the equivalent of
today'sGuantnamo, Bagram base, and other unnameable CIA "black
sites". And Riefenstahl was lionised by the German elites and
acclaimed for her propaganda on behalf of Hitler's regime.
But the world changed. The ugliness of what she did could not,
over time, be hidden. Americans, too, will wake up and see
throughZero Dark Thirty's apologia for the regime's standard lies
that this brutality is somehow necessary. When that happens, the
samecommunity that now applauds you will recoil.
Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be
remembered forever as torture's handmaiden.
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