Two Cheers for Zero Dark Thirty's Torture Scenes

Updated 8:58 a.m., December 11

One scene features a bloodied, disoriented and humiliated man strapped to a wall with his pants around his ankles. A second scene depicts the same man having liquid forcibly poured down his throat; later, he's shoved into a box that could barely hold your stereo. And all of this takes place in the first 45 minutes or so of Zero Dark Thirty, the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It's enough to make you wretch. It's arguably the best and most important part of the movie.

Kathryn Bigelow's new film about the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden begins with an unsparing, nauseating and frighteningly realistic look at how the CIA tortured many people and reaped very little intelligence. Never before has a movie grappled with post-9/11 torture the way Zero Dark Thirty does. The torture on display in the film occurs at the intersection of ignorance and brutality, while the vast, vast majority of the intelligence work that actually does lead to bin Laden's downfall occurs after the torture has ended.

You wouldn't know this from the avalanche of commentary greeting the film. Bigelow is being presented as a torture apologist, and it's a bum rap. David Edelstein of New York says her movie borders on the 'morally reprehensible' for presenting 'a case for the efficacy of torture.' The New York Times' Frank Bruni suspects that Dick Cheney will give the film two thumbs up. Bruni is probably right, since defenders of torture have been known to latch onto any evidence they suspect will vindicate them as American heroes. But that's not Zero Dark Thirty.

Bigelow instead presents a graphic depiction of what declassified CIA documents indicate the torture program really was. (A caveat: The CIA has actively blocked disclosure into that program, going so far as to destroy video recordings of it.) The first detainee we meet, in 2003, is a bruised and mentally unstable man forced to stay awake by having his arms strapped to thick ropes suspended from the walls of his undisclosed torture chamber. Or, in the bureaucratic language of former Justice Department official Steven Bradbury: 'The primary method of sleep deprivation involves the use of shackling to keep the detainee awake.'

Later, the detainee ' apparently Amar al-Baluchi, nephew of 9/11 conspirator Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or based on him ' is shown to be kept hooded in that position, in a dark room while deafening music blasts. (Specifically, 'Pavlov's Dogs' by cerebral early-'90s New York hardcore band Rorshach.) He is interrupted by his captor, CIA agent 'Dan,' who informs him: 'When you lie to me, I hurt you' and that 'partial information' will be treated as a lie. The detainee is stripped from the waist down to be humiliated in front of a woman CIA agent ' the film's protagonist, Maya; more on her in a second ' before being stuffed into a wooden box the size of a child's dresser. That would be the 'confinement box,' one of the earliest torture techniques the CIA used on an al-Qaida detainee known as Abu Zubaydah. (The agency wanted to put insects in it, to heighten Abu Zubaydah's fear levels.)

The film goes on like this for about 45 brutal minutes. 'Uncooperative' detainees are held down by large men and doused through a towel with water until they spew it up. (There's no 'boarding' in this 'waterboarding.) Helpless detainees are shown with rheumy eyes, desperate for the torture to stop, while their captors promise them nourishment and keep their promises by forcing Ensure down their throats through a funnel. Amar al-Baluchi, mocked for defecating on himself, is stripped and forced to wear a dog collar while Dan rides him, to alert the detainee to his helplessness.

These are not 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' as apologists for the abuse have called it. There is little interrogation presented in Zero Dark Thirty. There is a shouted question, followed by brutality. At one point, 'Maya,' a stand-in for the dedicated CIA agents who actually succeeded at hunting bin Laden, points out that one abused detainee couldn't possibly have the information the agents are demanding of him. The closest the movie comes to presenting a case for the utility of torture is by presenting the name of a key bin Laden courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as resulting from an interrogation not shown on screen. But ' spoiler alert ' the CIA ultimately comes to learn that it misunderstood the context of who that courier was and what he actually looked like. All that happens over five years after the torture program initiated. Meanwhile, the real intelligence work begins when a CIA agent bribes a Kuwaiti with a yellow Lamborghini for the phone number of the courier's mother, and through extensive surveillance, like a police procedural, the manhunt rolls to its climax. If this is the case for the utility of torture, it's a weak case ' nested within a strong case for the inhumanity of it.

Nor does Bigelow let the CIA off the hook for the torture. 'You agency people are sick,' a special operator tells Dan. Dan, the chief torturer of the movie, is shown as not only a sadist but a careerist. 'You don't want to be the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes,' he tells Maya before decamping to Washington. Other CIA bureaucrats are shown sneering at the idea of canceling the torture program ' more fearful of congressional accountability than of losing bin Laden. Maya is more of a cipher: she is shown coming close to puking when observing the torture. But she also doesn't object to it ' 'This is not a normal prison. You choose how you will be treated,' she tells a detainee ' and Maya is the hero of the film.

'It's a movie, not a documentary,' screenwriter Mark Boal told The New Yorker. 'We're trying to make the point that waterboarding and other harsh tactics were part of the C.I.A. program.' That quote has electrified the internet as a statement of intent to gussy up the importance of torture. But the fact is torture was part of the CIA's post-9/11 agenda: dispassionate journalists like Mark Bowden presents it as such in his excellent recent book.

Zero Dark Thirty does not present torture as a silver bullet that led to bin Laden; it presents torture as the ignorant alternative to that silver bullet. Were a documentarian making the film, there would surely be less torture in the movie: CNN's Peter Bergen considered an early cut of those scenes overwrought in their gruesomeness and reminds that senators who have investigated the CIA torture program reject the idea that torture led to bin Laden.

At the same time, the film makes viewers come to grips with what Dick Cheney euphemistically called the 'dark side' of post-9/11 counterterrorism. Meanwhile, former Bush administration aide Philip Zelikow, who termed the torture a 'war crime' in a recent Danger Room interview, will probably find the movie more amenable than Cheney will. What endures on the screen are scenes that can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American.