Tortured logic

I haven't had a chance to see Zero Dark Thirty yet, but I certainly intend to, as I was very impressed by Kathryn Bigelow's previous movie, The Hurt Locker.  (A movie, by the way, that bears repeated viewings -- we watched it again recently on Blu-ray and found it just as absorbing and exciting as the first time we saw it).  Ms Bigelow has found herself defending her movie against a series of attacks from all sides, most of which don't make a whole lot of sense.

Long before the movie was given even limited, Oscar-qualifying release, there were suggestions that Ms Bigelow and her writers had been given access to a lot of classified information about the hunt for Osama bin Laden and especially about the raid in which he was eventually killed.  It was intimated, mainly by Republicans, that the Obama administration had given the film-makers sensitive information in the hope of seeing themselves portrayed in a more favourable light.

Now that the film is on general release, there's a whole new set of criticisms, to the effect that the movie depicts and attempts to justify the use of torture in obtaining information about bin Laden's whereabouts.  The US has denied any use of torture, though its definitions in this regard have always seemed fairly loose: waterboarding, for example, is considered to be an "aggressive interrogation technique", rather than torture.   (The late Christopher Hitchens, who underwent the procedure for research purposes, emphatically disagreed).  There have even been calls from some senior Hollywood figures, including Martin Sheen, for Zero Dark Thirty to be boycotted because of the torture scenes and the implication that they were instrumental in tracking down bin Laden.

There are a lot of experts out there who argue that torture is completely useless as an interrogation aid.  The victims are so terrified that they will invent things that they think the interrogator wants to hear, just to get the process to stop.  As a result, any information obtained this way is of no value unless there is outside corroboration. Maybe so, but Kathryn Bigelow is in no doubt that it was used by the US in the hunt for bin Laden, and has issued a robust defence of its inclusion in the movie.  Given what we know about waterboarding, illegal renditions and the continuing travesty of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, it seems all too sadly likely that she is telling the truth.

So, on the one hand Zero Dark Thirty has been attacked because the moviemakers knew altogether too much about what went down, and on the other they're being attacked for making up something that, hands on hearts, never happened, no sir! On the well-established principle that there's no such thing as bad publicity, Kathryn Bigelow is likely to be laughing all the way to the bank.

The morning guys at our local talk radio station, the redoubtable CKTB, were discussing all of this yesterday and made an interesting point.  All kinds of people are piling in on Zero Dark Thirty because of its supposed liberty-taking with the truth, yet the entirely risible Argo, a fictionalised telling of the Iran hostage rescue in 1980, is scooping up awards all over the place, despite bearing only a flimsy resemblance to the actual events.  Artistic license, it would appear, is fine as long as it flatters the right people.

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We shall be away for a few days, catching a few rays.  Back around the end of the month.