For anyone still skeptical of just how influential
Hollywood’s movie messages are in the cultural and political realms, one need look
no further for proof than the political football called Zero Dark Thirty.
After appearing in limited release late last year, the film Zero Dark Thirty goes wide in theaters
this month. Created by screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow, the
filmmakers behind the 2010 Oscar-winner The
Hurt Locker about a bomb-defusing adrenaline junkie in the Iraq war, ZD30 dramatizes an even more
controversial subject – the real-life takedown of elusive terrorist icon Osama
bin Laden.
Once word got out earlier last year that the Obama
administration had granted the filmmakers access to classified information
about the military operation, and that the film would be released just prior to
the presidential election, conservatives cried foul and worried that the movie
would exaggerate Obama’s role and serve essentially as an extended campaign ad
for him. This concern was understandable considering that Hollywood was already
doing everything in its power, onscreen and off, to reelect their Messiah. The
left in turn dismissed these complaints as Republican paranoia.
But it didn’t quite turn out that way. First, the filmmakers
avoided any seeming political impropriety by releasing the film after the
election. Then, once the movie hit theaters and began garnering reviews, the
left was aghast to discover that it opened with a graphic and extended scene
depicting the waterboarding of a terrorist suspect, a scene that seemed to
affirm what many conservatives had been insisting all along – that the hotly debated
enhanced interrogation under President George W. Bush produced results that
contributed to the intelligence which ultimately led us to bin Laden.
is a clear vindication for the Bush administration’s view of the War on
Terror. Moreover, ‘ZD30’ subtly presents President Obama and by extension the
entire Democratic establishment and its supporters in the media as hindering
the effort to find bin Laden by politicizing harsh interrogation techniques and
striking a pose against them that was naive at best.
The left, which had worked very hard to demonize Bush over the
issue of enhanced interrogation, quickly took politically intimidating action
to squelch any suggestion that Bush’s “torture” worked. Democrat Senators Dianne
Feinstein and Carl Levin, and RINO John McCain (who had actually been tortured in captivity during the Vietnam war),
sent a letter to the movie’s distributor, Sony
Pictures, calling Zero Dark Thirty “grossly inaccurate and
misleading,” and urging Sony to add a disclaimer to that effect: “We believe
that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for
Osama bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film’s fictional
narrative”:
We understand that the film is fiction, but it opens with the words ‘based
on first-hand accounts of actual events’… [T]he movie clearly implies that the
CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques were effective in eliciting important
information related to a courier for Osama bin Laden.
… [T]he fundamental problem is that people who see Zero Dark Thirty
will believe that the events it portrays are facts. The film therefore has the
potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading
manner.
The senators
concluded that the filmmakers and the studio “have a social and moral
obligation to get the facts right.” Actually, what the Senators want is for the
filmmakers to revise inconvenient
facts. They are also launching an investigation into the filmmakers’ ties to
the CIA. Had ZD30 supported the
left’s stance on enhanced interrogation, of course, none of this would be
happening.
In a statement of
their own, director Bigelow and screenwriter Boal countered that their film is
not political and does not take a position on whether torture led to the location
and killing of bin Laden:
This was a 10-year intelligence operation brought to the screen in a
two-and-a-half-hour film. We depicted a variety of controversial practices and intelligence
methods that were used in the name of finding bin Laden. The film shows that no
single method was necessarily responsible for solving the manhunt, nor can any
single scene taken in isolation fairly capture the totality of efforts the film
dramatizes.
CIA Director Michael Morell then waded into the controversy with a letter to CIA
personnel stressing that “Zero Dark
Thirty is not a documentary” and “the
film takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being
historically accurate”:
The film creates the strong impression that the
enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and
interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin. That impression is
false. As we have said before, the truth is that multiple streams of
intelligence led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was hiding in
Abbottabad. Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but
there were many other sources as well.
Notice how Morell doesn’t deny that waterboarding was one of those
useful streams of intelligence. He finished by noting ambiguously that “whether
enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to
obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of
debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.”
When Hollywood’s axis deviates even slightly from its usual
leftward tilt, the progressive powers-that-be leap to correct its course. Look
for example at the controversial 2006 miniseries The Path to 9/11, which Clinton
alumni felt made them look soft on terrorism. Democrat lawmakers led by Harry
Reid threatened to pull ABC’s license if the miniseries aired, which it only
managed to because minor cuts were made that placated the left. The miniseries never
aired again and still cannot be obtained on DVD because the studio’s head
honcho is a friend and supporter of the Clintons.
Now, a film that the left smugly assumed would bolster Obama’s
hagiography is actually empowering the right on Bush’s legacy and the issue of
enhanced interrogation – and the party of censorship is once again pulling out
all the stops to intimidate and suppress.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 1/4/13)
