>>”While much of the truth remains classified, there is still a general feeling that if a movie’s veracity has been called into question, it instantly becomes invalidated. But is this really a fair assessment?”

Hold on a minute. The fact that torture led to bin Laden has been disgarded by the very people that actually were present and part of the hunt for the man. It was complete bullshit. There is no “classified information”-controversy here. There is a unanimous consensus about this fact.

There are other problems with Bigelow’s film; mainly that it is more or less a modern propaganda film. And the torture-part plays exactly into that. It makes up a lie to serve the typical pro-torture party line: ‘torture has a constructive function, and benefits the interests of the US’.

I can sympathize with you on the “based on a true story”-part. But when it comes to a film like this, that holds such political weight, this element is crucial. And especially when the deviation from truth actually contributes to a controversial political implication. It becomes increasingly more important when the film is full of partial political views and ideas; like Bigelow’s film has (it’s basically a film that would have been made the same way if it were supervised by the CIA and the government – which it also was, to some extent).

This is the reason why this film should be held more to account for its content than, say, The Social Network. Because it’s a propaganda film.

It’s easy.

Label it ‘Inspired by true events’ and take their liberties with the story.

Or…

Don’t fudge the facts and label it ‘based on a true story’.

Both are legitimate.

Ultimately its all about the story. If taking liberties make the movie better then take them. If sticking to the story makes it better, then do that. All we wanna do is be entertained either way and this ‘based on a true story’ hot trend/phenomena that Hollywood is going through right now doesn’t make a better film.

If movies stick completely and strictly to the facts, even the ones that are centered around exciting events, they’re going to be boring as shit. There’s a reason why even at the end of nearly EVERY non-documentary film (which also bend the truth from time to time), whether it’s based on real life events or not, there’s that spiel that says that it’s a work of fiction and that any resemblance to real people, places, things, and events is coincidental.

I always kind of wanted to write something COMPLETELY ridiculous and say it’s “based on a true story”. Of course, I’m not saying WHAT the true story is. Here’s this movie with spaceships fighting dragons and people with superpowers. I had a dream about that once. My movie is based on a real dream that I had, and that’s a true story. There, ANYTHING can be based on a true story.

I also think that there’s no coincidence that most of the films that fall victim to the “But did it REALLY happen this way?” debate are awards-season favorites and that the people starting the arguments probably often do so to discredit the film for no other reason than to give the advantage to another film, because after the awards shows come and go, the controversy often goes away too. It’d be interesting to see where these controversies originate. I mean, when it’s a matter of politics or religious views, there are going to be people from the other side that attack it sight unseen, and a lot of the time it’s just to get attention for themselves, but I wonder how often it’s the work of opposing studios trying to get people riled up in an effort to drum up support for their own projects?

@Johnny I agree

Personally I think although filmmakers definitly have a responsibility to be somewhat true to the events they are portraying, the audience has an equal responsibility to not just take every moment in a film as fact.

There’s a subtle difference between fact and truth. If a film based on true events is tastefully done in the way it tells its story, but changes some facts and details, then I don’t see the problem.

The difference here is that the film is so close to a critical political argument involving the use of torture. It will be held to a higher standard, and rightly so. It is worth remembering that a of of the believe anything based on a true story as essentially fact.

It is interesting though how willing an audience is to accept the use of torture in other films.

I’ve been thing about this recently. Movies based on real people and events never 100% accurate. But some movies definitely take more liberties with the facts in an attempt to tell a better story (better, of course being relative.
I’ve found that once I find out the true story after watching the fictionalized version, it does take away from my appreciation of the film. Like when I found out Rudy fudged a lot of the facts, like that no one in his family was telling him he couldn’t do it and shouldn’t try. And the scene with the players laying their jerseys on the coach’s desk saying “play him instead of me” didn’t happen (they always tried to play all seniors by the last game). And while Rudy was the only player carried off at the end of the game, it was really done as kind of a joke by the other players, not out of respect for him. Knowing this, the movie has less of an impact for me now.
There’s tons of movies that do this. Last King of Scotland’s character played by James McAvoy was made up, an amalgam of real people, and the events and timeline were altered as well. Denzel Washington said that in The Great Debaters, they gave the debate team a loss that they didn’t have in real life saying “we can’t have them go undefeated.”
I kind of feel it’s lazy film-making. If the facts aren’t deemed compelling enough that you need to change them to fit your idea of how a movie should be, then maybe you’re not the right person to make the movie. But it can be tough to translate a real story to the big screen. Even documentaries have to pick and choose what they decide to put in their movies, so I guess fictionalized movies should get a bit of leeway. It’s just when they go too far, it’s misleading to the audience.

>>”So if Bigelow is such a propagandist, why was her original screen play on the subject to focus on the US/CIA’s failures in locating UBL and focusing on the Tora Bora debacle? (She was weeks away from filming her original screenplay before fate intervened.) Would that have been propaganda as well?”

The film isn’t propaganda based on precisely how the film started and precisely how it ended. It’s propaganda based on many elements of the film and how she portrays it — many of which she has brought over from her previous films. And don’t forget that the government, and in a large degree CIA, managed the information used in her project. That’s why Peter Maass in the Atlantic makes the point that “it represents a troubling new frontier of government-embedded filmmaking.” He continues: “An already problematic practice – giving special access to vetted journalists – is now deployed for the larger goal of creating cinematic myths that are favorable to the sponsoring entity (in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA).” Furthermore, the change of course, however big it was, doesn’t change the fact about the end product that we see on a screen.

An end product that includes pro-torture allusions, and that — typical from Bigelow’s previous film — is portraying the Muslims as bloody and violent people who hold the monopoly of the attacks (the only exception being the assassination of bin Laden). Our main character experiences this “threat” close-up, and is also shocked to hear that one of her friends, a “mother of three” (because somehow that means more than the fact that she was a CIA-agent), has been killed by a suicide-bomber at a CIA-base in Afghanistan. News footage of the attempted Times Square bomber is followed by the New York mayor’s pronouncement, virtually a reproduction of Bush’ outlandish and biased “they hate our freedom”-answer, that “there are some people around the world who find our freedom so threatening that they are willing to kill themselves and others to prevent us from enjoying them.” One CIA official dramatically reminds us: “They attacked us on land in ’98, by sea in 2000, and by air in 2001. They murdered 3000 of our citizens in cold blood.” Nobody is ever heard mentioning the brutal atrocities and devastation that the USA has brought upon Muslims the last 60 years, including the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, committing terrorism that far exceeds anything their enemies have ever done or been claimed for (including the bombing of Afghanistan right after 9/11). Not once does the film endeavor to dig into why “they hate us”. This essential question is brushed off with the extremely imprudent propaganda-statement I mentioned above: they hate our way of life (a usual propaganda-tool of governments that Dustin Hoffman’s character famously satires in Wag the Dog).

“The CIA and the US government are the Good Guys, the innocent targets of terrorist violence, the courageous warriors seeking justice for the 9/11 victims. Muslims and Arabs are the dastardly villains, attacking and killing without motive (other than the one provided by Bloomberg) and without scruples. Almost all Hollywood action films end with the good guys vanquishing the big, bad villain – so that the audience can leave feeling good about the world and themselves – and this is exactly the script to which this film adheres”.

Let me just end by quoating a very important sentence from Greenwald’s review of the film:

”I have a very hard time seeing liberal defenders of Zero Dark Thirty extending their alleged principles about art to films that, unlike this film, are actually unsettling, provocative and controversial. It’s quite easy to defend this film because it’s ultimately going to be pleasing to the vast majority of US viewers as it bolsters and validates their assumptions. That’s why it seems to me that the love this film is inspiring is inseparable from its political content: it’s precisely because it makes Americans feel so good – about an event that Ackerman says makes him “very, very proud to be American” [the assasination of Osama bin Laden] – that it is so beloved.

Whatever else is true about it, Zero Dark Thirty is an aggressively political film with a very dubious political message that it embraces and instills in every way it can. David Edelstein, the New York Magazine critic, had it exactly right when he wrote that it “borders on the politically and morally reprehensible”, though I think it crosses that border. It’s thus not only legitimate, but necessary, to engage it as what it is: a political argument that advances – whether by design or effect – the interests of powerful political factions.”

PoliticalJunk would have existed if Sean was into politics guys…

Jessica is looking real good in that pic… and no.

Re Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow wanted to show torture, not hide it, but the way the film was structured might lead uninformed viewers to the conclusion that torture leads to results, so torture is okay. Kudos to Bigelow for her good intentions, even if they were subverted.

In real life a top US official ordered all videotapes of waterboarding to be destroyed because they were so horrifying that it would create massive anti American feeling. The waterboarding in the film seemed to be aimed at an elementary school audience.

Mark Boal redeemed himself with the ‘they killed my monkeys’ scene, whereby the intelligent torturer had his humanity so washed away by torturing that he couldn’t see that the (Saudi?) guards were demonstrating massive humanity by killing the monkeys, who were there as a form of psychological torture, which communicated to the prisoners ‘you’re no better than caged animals, but we treat the animals better than you’.

Plus the massive amount of innocent people imprisoned and tortured wasn’t really focused on.

When a film is embedded partisan film making as ZDT clearly is then yes, it should have the same standards as documentaries. (I’m with Greg all the way re ZDT.)

Such films are rare however and telling a story is usually the main focus, which I don’t generally have a problem with, e.g. the invented airport chase at the end of Argo.

A film maker like Tarantino can make fictions about the 2nd world war or westerns which are not just pieces of entertainment but contain razor sharp insights into slavery, (that slavery was indeed a holocaust), into why some members of the US military in Iraq who killed civilians weren’t cold blooded murderers, that the definition of who is a terrorist depends on your point of view and why people opposed to American policy became suicide bombers (though Battlestar Galactica beat him to that, which I guess is why the UN had a battlestar Galactica day at it’s headquarters) which ZDT singularly failed to do.

@18 Of course it is pro-American. But as I mentioned under the last article, it’s not the kind of classic, outright propaganda we are used to. Ideas like self-doubt and hesitation is instilled to make it “realistic” and “objective”.

And as you mentioned Sean: ” I would agree that I probably lean liberal but I certainly don’t define myself by politics.”. Neither does anyone else. Paul Nystrom explained in his “Philosophy of futility” the reason the lower class are politically passive, is a mix of consumerism and distractions from political life. Consumerist behavior discourages social interactions. Apathy is further encouraged by the limited debate in the political arena, so the lower class sees no point in becoming politically active, as the media is entirely elite propaganda (it reflects the views of the powerful). How they think and act politically is based on what the media tells them.

I think that’s why it’s important to note your previous statement that this film is “only as political as you want to make it”. You, for example, didn’t see it as political as myself, Hopkins and Gerry, because the political views in the film only reiterate the political views that you are acquainted with. You would have easily been able to disregard films like Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Wills, because the opinionated visions of these films differ so much from the ones you have.

There is a reason why the majority don’t find it astonishing how these political Hollywood-films time and time again portray Arabs as these inhuman characters; because they inherit the role they have always had in Hollywood-films the last 30-40 years. People have become so used to it, that it is “normal”. Even in the TV-series Homeland’s most anti-American scene, where we see an American terrorist attack (of course it’s not portrayed “terrorism”, but a “mistake”) on civilian Arabs, giving reason to the terrorist, the common Arab resister (who only exists in the role of a terrorist, as non-resisters are often agents of the US) is still portrayed as a fierce and gruesome bad-guy. He has his reasons, but he is still the bad guy, he is still in the wrong end of the spectrum, and we are still absolute, despite our faults.

The same goes for a lot of other party-line standpoints in this film, that is consumed by the average viewer as if it were standard procedure, and not half truths or propaganda. And those lacking the mind to question the film, simply consent to the mere fact of it being “entertainment” (this is after all what they as consumer-oriented beings have been indoctrinated to be fond of since their birth); although the political orientation of the film enters their mind, it is standard from what they are usually bombarded with, and has therefore become a normal part of their everyday view. That is why a minimal appearance of “self-doubt”, that may take up only a fraction of the time of the otherwise pro-USA film, makes the movie “critical” and “objective” to them. And in reality this balanced view is an acknowledgement of our own supremacy: “we are psychologically complex full of doubts, while the opponents are one-dimensional fanatical killing machines”.

@22 The last time I checked Film Junk almost exclusively reviewed North-American films. And naturally, North-American films portray North-American foreign policy in a positive light. You start reviewing Russian, Chinese and Turkish films that are in the same fashion as ZD30, and I will happily decompose those for you too.

I hardly doubt that they would be as appealing as the American ones though, as the US has the most advanced propaganda-machinery in the world, which it has inherited from the Cold War. That is why when I call a Russian or Chinese film propaganda, nobody protests, and when I call bin Laden a terrorist, there is no disagreement. But as soon as I call an American film propaganda, or as soon as I call the US the biggest terrorist-state, and leaders like George Bush or Obama criminal thugs, I get a wave of protest against me, demanding an explanation.

Congratulations Sean, you made an insult on me! Ironically enough, your demeaning comment criticizes the length of my comments, at the same time as it is requesting discussion.

Let’s just reflect on your own contribution to this discussion: It’s not from your comments, which are too short and insolvent, but your lengthy article, which was — and this is important — generated out of the dispute about ZD30.

[Oh, my thoughts are running wild anticipating your next funny offense! I wonder whether or not you can top yourself this time]

Posted by Sean on January 22nd, 2013 >
To get back on track, here’s a question: why is no one calling Argo American propaganda? Is it just because the event happened so long ago that no one cares anymore?

i was actually about to, but i’d have to give it another watch (you can’t rely on internet’s opinion, you’d fail for shure). right now, i couldn’t care less about ben affleck’s great & forgettable flick

@25 “the reason the lower class are politically passive, is a mix of consumerism and distractions from political life”

I disagree with your description of the lower class… by which I assume you mean the working class? The working class are highly political but not in the ways commonly associated with the middle class. They simply don’t have the leisure time to engage in debates or rallies. I would think they are a demographic where politics are in their best interests because economic policies (particularly austere neo-liberal ones) directly effect them. I don’t want to patronize the working class but I don’t think they are apathetic to politics. Your description is more in line with lethargic middle class sensibilities who have the time and money to indulge extensively in mindless consumerism and are cushioned from political consequences.

@30 “we are all political beings”

I am not sold on this idea myself but while we are political beings, not everything is inherently politicized.

@18 “Also, your comment about being liberals is confusing. Wouldn’t liberals be the ones who disagree with what happens in the movie and the methods used. I would agree that I probably lean liberal but I certainly don’t define myself by politics.”

One aspect that one has yet touched upon is how distant the audience is not only from the Islamic terrorist but also the CIA. The fact that all of ZD30 is contained within an environment outside of North America alienates the reason why torture is being carried out. The audience should feel ‘I am responsible for this’ during the waterboarding scene. Freedom comes at a price. Democracy works because of slavery. These are how things work in this world. How some audience can condemn the CIA without feeling guilt is another way ZD30 is liberal propaganda. The CIA are dark and complex but also scapegoats.

To counter ZD30’s torture scene would be Mark Walhberg’s interrogation in Three Kings (an anti-war film in its own right). Instead of alienating the audience from Saïd Taghmaoui, they, like Walhberg, begin to see from his perspective and understand why he’s angry. Now that’s art.

@29 “why is no one calling Argo American propaganda?”

Argo’s a joke. It is so unaware of itself that calling it propaganda wouldn’t even be worth it.

Unfortunately the original topic has been hopelessly hijacked, so forgive me for jumping into this again.

I think I’m starting to understand La Menthe’s point, though it seems overstated: A massive conspiracy, headed by the politically powerful, the media, and commerce, aims to keep people apathetic toward politics; therefore, since you do not recognize a political bias in ZD30, it is proof that such a bias exists.

Why does it always have to be a conspiracy? Can’t we just acknowledge that some people, regardless of their social class, are capable of thinking on their own and may choose apathy of their own free will?