The reaction to Zero Dark Thirty has been plagued with unfounded accusations

By Will Ross

Were you not already embroiled in the controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thirty, a political thriller based on the search for and assassination of Osama bin Laden, you may have picked up the impression that it is a finely made film, but one that either implicitly or explicitly condones or even valorizes the US government’s use of torture.

This is an understandable impression for the layman to have, but its widespread acceptance by those who have not even seen the film is fearful. For not only is such a position not founded in actually watching the film — a prerequisite to all rational opinions of art — it is also founded in media pieces that have propagated the claim without having seen the film themselves.

The false-starting gun was fired by Glenn Greenwald in a Dec. 10 article in The Guardian. Having no experience with the film except for reading reviews of it, he concluded that the film glorifies torture by portraying it as having been essential to finding bin Laden.

Backlash was immediate. Greenwald defended his piece by condemning an alleged “blackout on discussing film reviews that appear in major media outlets prior to the film’s opening. “If writers at major media outlets who review the film all say the film shows torture being helpful in finding bin Laden,” said Greenwald, “then people are going to talk about that.”

In fact the film did have defenders who denied any torture glorification, but Greenwald apparently decided that he could accept the perceived majority impression as the true one. When publicly commentating on reactions to art one hasn’t seen, any dissent whatsoever must be fully acknowledged, but Greenwald’s underresearched opinion was taken as legitimate as often as it was taken to task.

Since then, many pieces have surfaced condemning the film for a myriad of faults, without having seen the film — often apparently inventing its plot as they go along. One such piece in The Huffington Post, “Why I Won’t Be Watching Zero Dark Thirty”, baselessly states that the film portrays Muslims in a negative and stereotypical light. That a Huffington Post piece could say the film “capitalize[s] on an already tense environment of suspicion and fear” without the author having seen the film and without a single supporting quotation should be a scandalous breach of integrity. Instead, it has blended into a sea of similar pieces and passed by unnoticed.

Such behavior normalizes biases and ignorance in discussions of art, as if rational consideration of the evidence is unnecessary if someone else has done it for you. It only leads to imposed narratives and confirmation bias; it came as no surprise that when Greenwald did see the film, he did not see the complex allegory that most critics did, but a “cartoon,” one undeserving even of the word “art.”

But art it is, and if more commentators — prosecutors and defendants alike — read the film closely, they would notice a scene that explicitly marks the torture as unnecessary: the intelligence was simply buried in the files all along. Instead, they change course, denouncing director Kathryn Bigelow for evading criticism (she isn’t) and claiming that the film was approved or even funded by the CIA (it wasn’t).

Sadly, condemnatory hearsay comes with the territory of Oscar season. But the discourse around Zero Dark Thirty has ruined a rare opportunity to discuss a movie that actually approaches modern political issues with intelligence and gravitas. Instead of soberly weighing available facts, responses to the film have been driven by passion alone. And while passion ought to fuel discussions of politics and art, it should never touch the steering wheel.