Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is not a war story in the traditional sense. There are no speeches to rally the troops, and, in fact, there are no troops to rally. Instead of examining the ethics or ideals behind our war on terror, the film gives us a detailed look at the strategies and intelligence that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. This approach makes for fascinating storytelling, but ironically, the climactic Navy SEAL invasion of bin Laden’s compound plays out more like a high-tech robbery than an administration of justice. Zero Dark Thirty’s publicity team has characterized the film as “The Greatest Manhunt in History,” yet as the story unfolds, it is clear that the greatness here is not meant in a moral sense. The film rushes from detail to detail with an analytic precision, never stopping to address the broader ethics of the characters’ actions. What emerges is a procedural, in the truest sense of the word; the film speaks volumes about how bin Laden was killed, but fails to say why.
Maya, the CIA agent who leads the hunt for bin Laden, best embodies the film’s procedural approach to storytelling. Ever since graduating high school, Maya has single-mindedly devoted herself to tracking down Osama bin Laden. She is so obsessed with her mission that we don’t learn much about Maya, outside of her work. She resists overtures of friendship, and perhaps more disturbingly, she does not hesitate to torture in order to get the answers she wants. Kathryn Bigelow holds Maya up as a hero because of her perseverance, pragmatism, and potentially dangerous tunnel vision. For the viewer, she is a symbol of the American military’s relentless power, even as she sacrifices her morals to reach her goals. Through Bigelow’s portrayal of Maya, we get to the main problem of the film: it sets up a false dichotomy between power and morality when the two are, in reality, intimately connected. Examples from psychology undermine the suggestion that we must choose between the two.
Kurt Gray, a cognitive philosopher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has found that subjects who were asked to think of themselves as moral agents are physically better at lifting weights than those who weren’t. In a similar study involving weight lifting, Gray found significant strength differences between subjects who were asked to donate money to charity, and those who were given money to keep for themselves. It may not seem surprising that moral conviction translates into physical strength, but Gray’s results cast some doubt on Bigelow’s portrayal of CIA officials whose moral indifference seems to propel their mission forward.
Because the film presents a misleading dichotomy between morality and power, we may understand it as a chronicle of how far our nation has drifted from its moral foundations. We might, for example, turn to the bureaucratization of the American war machine for an explanation. The division of labor, the focus and obedience of its individuals, and the creation of ever more intricate hierarchies are not just components of modern state bureaucracies—they extend to the military too. Sandy Koll, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, argues that bureaucracy naturally suppresses morality. In the endless drive to establish predictable procedures, bureaucracies grind down charismatic individuals, and they fail to account for the unpredictable. Bigelow documents in painful detail the resistance that Maya must overcome, as she realizes that her superiors are more interested in following procedure than in securing larger objectives. George, Maya’s boss, proves more interested in padding his résumé with easy, unimportant targets than providing Maya with the resources she needs. Just as Maya ignores the broader significance of her actions in favor of the details securing her goal, the CIA bureaucracy forgets its broader mandate by focusing too narrowly on its procedures and customs. Koll argues that we can create a more moral bureaucracy by releasing the rigid rules that govern behavior and by allowing more room for innovation.
Finally, the film provides, at least for a fleeting instant, the possibility that we can do things differently. In the background of a CIA lunch break, we overhear newly minted President Obama giving a television conference and saying in no uncertain terms that the United States does not torture. He describes the new stance as “part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.” The protagonists pay little attention to Obama’s proclamation, but it shines as a sign of hope in the otherwise bleak moral universe of the film. As the war’s death toll continued to climb, Obama turned to an authority based on morals instead of force. In doing so, Obama demonstrated that morality not only strengthens us as actors, but also attracts allies to join our cause.
Chris Winship, Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard, argues that people and nations may be attracted to collaborate through the sheer force of attraction to moral authority known as moral power. We naturally gravitate toward people we believe to be guided by a moral mission. Moral power explains how in Boston, an alliance of inner-city ministers, the Ten Point Coalition, successfully took on the issue of gang-related youth violence and homicide. Previously, police had attempted to step-up enforcement against gangs, but they had faced allegations of racial profiling from minority communities. The Ten Point ministers shared the police’s interest in increased enforcement, but they also served as watchdogs to ensure this enforcement was done fairly and without bias. The ministers were able to rally the community to trust and collaborate with the police, and together they secured an eighty percent decline in Boston’s homicide rate during the 1990s.
The success of the Ten Point coalition can be used as a template for the United States in our broader mission of bringing the perpetrators of terror to justice. By convincing the world that the United States does not sink to torture or targeting civilians, we will undermine our enemies and build our alliances. To do this, we must show that we are ready to recommit to the difficult process of moral self-examination. Zero Dark Thirty has already attracted plenty of criticism for its ambivalent attitude towards on torture, but so far, these attacks have only played into the procedural nature of the film. Rather than taking on the moral issue of whether torture is justified in and of itself, critics have instead focused on questioning whether or not torture was critical to hunting down Osama bin Laden. The tacit agreement of such arguments is that if torture were a crucial tool for gaining this intelligence, it would somehow be justified. We need to take a step back from questions of utility, and question the meaning of our actions beyond whether they serve our immediate goals. Bigelow’s film has started the conversation by showing us “how” the manhunt operated, but the discussion will not be complete until we ask ourselves “why.” Only then will can we truly claim that we have achieved the greatness to which Zero Dark Thirty aspires.