Kathryn Bigelow - Torture Apologist?

[Aiguille]

You raise a good point. But I do think that there was some substantial evidence that "24" really did define how many people understood torture. Many people just had not thought about the subject, beyond having a very general impression that it was "bad." Then "24" came along and continually presented all kinds of "plausible" scenarios for when torture was justifiable and peoples' opinions solidified around that.

You wanna see something scary? Justice Scalia is one such impressionable mind.

[ShaunN]

Hi! Here is an excellent commentary on the movie and its various implications from Andrew O'hehir at Salon.


http://www.salon.com/2012/12/14/pick...911_nightmare/

This is a really good read and O'Hehir makes some great points. For some reason, the text is blacked out, but you can read it if you highlight it.

[ShaunN]

You wanna see something scary? Justice Scalia is one such impressionable mind.

I remember this! Thanks for the link. Horrifying.

[Corrina]

Here's the question I want answered: Apparently, from a review I read, the CIA get a name via torture of someone, and that name restarts the investigation.

Is this true or not?

If true, well, troubling but if you're Kathryn Bigelow, you're going to put that truth in the movie if you're making this as realistic as possible. What none of us know at this point if the moral questions surrounding that truth are addressed or told in such as way that the audience ends up thinking of those moral questions.

If not true, it's far more troubling, as it's editorializing and inserting something false about torture into the narrative.

So, I'd need to know the truth about how that name was obtained, and, if it's true, see how it's handled in context to make any kind of statement like the title of this thread.

And i don't think anyone else here can make any definitive judgement either. Not that they won't try.

[Morrison_Lad]

According to an interview I watched with Jessica Chastain, they didn't obtain any information through torture; not directly at least. She seemed genuinely shocked that anyone would think of the film as somehow endorsing the use of torture. Jason Clarke had a similar response.

[ShaunN]

Three Senators have taken the extraordinary step of writing the Chair of Sony Pictures and complaining about the way the movie depicts torture. These Senators are Feinstein, Levin and McCain. Evidently, they feel that the movie depicts some evidence as having been obtained by torture and they are afraid of how this will affect public perceptions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/us...g.html?hp&_r=0

From what I've read, I think that Bigelow and Boal fudge the issue. The Oherir article gets at this, though he suggests that how the viewer perceives the issue of torture in the movie is a Rorschach test. Others have argued that people are criticizing the film because they are not comfortable with ambiguous morality coming from Hollywood.

If these latter interpretations are correct, however, then I think a credible case can be made that Bigelow is promoting torture. If it is true that there is no ambiguity about this - i.e., that torture was not useful at all - then presenting it in an ambiguous light is just wrong. It is introducing complexity into a question that really is not that complex.

[ShaunN]

Here is another commentary - the last one I'll post - on this story. The author, Alex Gibney, makes a very compelling case that Bigelow and Boal were, at the least, extremely misleading with their depiction of torture in the movie. He argues that the movie clearly implies that torture did, in fact, have a positive effect in finding Osama Bin Laden and he points out that the film does little to show the many ways in which torture failed or created situations that were truly reprehensible. (The torture of innocent people, the fact that the CIA's faith in torture caused it to assume that anyone would break under torture, meaning it did not realizing that one tortured man had, in fact, lied to it). Gibney makes the plausible argument that Bigelow and Boal were essentially swayed by the convictions of their sources, insiders at the CIA who do and want to believe in torture. Anyway, I think that this is a really powerful argument that ZD30 does, indeed, make a case for torture and does so in clear contradiction of the established facts.

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/22/zero..._indefensible/