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Showing posts with label torturer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label torturer. Show all posts
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Saturday, February 9, 2013
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O cherished torturess, steely eyes glinting in a filthy room, the professional set of your jaw!
O venerated torturess, LCD-lit flawless porcelain skin, ultra-clean ultra-smart trouser suit!
O sweet torturess, flaxen hair falling cinematically across your mirrored shades, will your chariot bear his corpse?
O noble torturess, sacrificing youth and life to keep us safe, doing “what must be done”!
I’ll stop this bullshit right here. And if you're wondering, yes, Zero Dark Thirty is every bit as reprehensible as you’ve heard. Kathryn Bigelow has created a film where we sympathise with torturers. Our heroes are men and women who practise dark arts like placing people in stress positions for prolonged periods, putting collars on people and leading them around like dogs, shoving prisoners into tiny wooden boxes, sexual humiliation, waterboarding and just plain old fashioned punching them in the face over and over again. It’s a moral car crash of a movie, one where absolution for war crimes comes in the form of a teary close-up where we see just. what. the. personal. toll. has. been.
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| Jessica Chastain as Maya. |
Bollocks to your "personal toll", Bigelow. I couldn’t give a tuppenny fuck about the conflicted internal lives of your dead-eyed gang of war criminals. The old joke rings true; a man sits miserably in the corner of a pub mumbling:
“This pub, this very pub we're just sitting in. I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Pubmaker? No! See the wall over there, that protects our town? I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Wallmaker? And the bridge, you know, that crosses our river, I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Bridgemaker? But I tell you man. You fuck one goat….”
The heroes of Zero Dark Thirty are these goatfuckers, irrevocably stained by their crimes against humanity. It’s easy to be suckered into seeing the film as a moral swamp which no-one comes out of cleanly, but this is having your cake and eating it. Zero Dark Thirty has pretensions towards journalism rather than entertainment, every cinematic choice is made with an eye to grounding the action, everything is muted, coldly realistic, oozing a confidence gained through meticulous research. It’s one of those films that has the gumption to be a bit dull and difficult to follow because “this is how it went”.
These cinematic and aesthetic tools are deployed with precision accuracy by Bigelow in a way that adds up to a moral justification of torture. Now, I don’t believe Bigelow hungers to see prisoners humiliated and brutalised, I take her at her word when she says:
“(I’m) a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.”
But despite this she's directed a brilliant piece of PR for the CIA, a film that makes a crusading heroine out of a vicious torturer. She argues that “depiction is not endorsement”, yet the structure of the film she’s created inevitably nudges its audience towards acceptance of torture as a necessary evil.
This process begins from the opening moments. The panicked screams of those dying in the burning World Trade Centre are played over a jet black screen. In terms of propaganda, this is a “Why We Fight” sequence. It sets the stakes, justifying almost every action that our heroes will take. As far as the structure of the film goes, this makes the emotional case for revenge before we see a single photographed frame of the movie. When we cut it’s to a CIA black site, with a terrified detainee being menaced by men in black balaclavas. A link is thus made in our minds. This sweaty, panicked man is responsible for the deaths we’ve just been forced to listen to. It's crass and exploitative; the dead of 9/11 pressed into service as emotional shock troops to excuse the barbarism we’re about to see.
Real life butts into the film whenever events begin to become a bit sterile. The action was almost literally brought home for me during the recreation of the 7/7 London bombings when the doomed bus drove past the end of my street. The hunt has gotten a little esoteric by this point and Bigelow wants to reinforce who the ‘bad guys’ are, reminding us that the increasingly dry intelligence tactics we see actually have a purpose.
Unfortunately, using 7/7 to show the importance of our CIA heroes’ quest is a critically flawed move. The conclusion of the official inquiry into 7/7 found that the bombers acted independently: there was no connection with al-Qaeda and certainly none with Osama Bin Laden himself. “The London attacks were a modest, simple affair by four seemingly normal men using the internet”. So, not content with exploiting the final words of 9/11 victims, Bigelow now moves on to using our memories of the 52 victims of 7/7 to add emotional impact to the film. In fact, there’s arguably more chance that the images of torture that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison and the reports of CIA “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” influenced the bombers.
This all helps underline the importance and urgency of our hero's actions. Zero Dark Thirty is complex and methodical film that requires you to pay attention or risk losing the thread of what’s going on, but in some regards it’s also an extremely simple one. It’s a film about "THE GREATEST MANHUNT IN HISTORY", one noble woman’s quest to catch the bad guy of bad guys.
One of the common arguments I've seen to defend this film is to claim that Maya (Jessica Chastain) isn't a hero in the traditional sense. This is disingenuous. Firstly no-one can reasonably claim that she isn't the audience identification character. In the opening scenes of the film she is as visibly shocked and disturbed by the torture happening in front of her as we presumably are. As she toughens up and learns the simple pleasure of beating the shit out of restrained prisoners of war so, apparently must we. We are dragged along with her on her path to moral degradation.
As disturbing as it is to see someone becoming accustomed to sadism and consumed by obsession, I can't deny that Jessica Chastain does a damn good job in the role. She's like Agent Scully gone bad, someone who's allowed herself to become chewed up from the inside out, as if working for the CIA hollows the humanity out of you. Her sensible,ultra professional trouser suits betray no personality whatsoever, the fluorescent lighting she's under for much of the film accentuating her bony body. Even the sunglasses she wears tend to make her head look disturbingly skull-like. Maya becomes death. The destroyer of worlds.
But for all the death imagery that swarms around her, Maya is the hero of the film. At the mid-way point she's sliding neatly into the archetype of the rogue cop, she's a maverick, but she gets the job done. She's inhabiting her narrative heroism fully when she's scrawling numbers on her boss's door ("she gets results you stupid chief!"). Maya, inevitably, becomes the one person who sees things clearly, confidently saying she's 100% sure that Bin Laden is in his compound when everyone else is waffling through a series of bureaucratic cliches. By the time she's standing on a runway her hair whipping around cinematically as she awaits the delivery of Bin Laden's carcass she may as well be the reincarnation of Sarah Connor.
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| Maya Sarah Connor |
That Zero Dark Thirty uses this archetype is partly what exposes the lie that it doesn't endorse torture. If Maya so clearly occupies the heroic narrative space, then her target Osama Bin Laden (though never seen) becomes a straightforward narrative villain. With the story viewed as Maya's heroic ascension, the torture in the first half of the film becomes retroactively justified. So what of the final shot of the film, her weeping as she realises she's sacrificed so much to capture this man? This reaction is the weight of her crimes preying upon her. Her entire adult life has been devoted to catching this man, and now that she's stared into his dead eyes she has and is nothing. Maya looks down at the corpse of Bin Laden, and Bin Laden stares right back up at the corpse of Maya. But though she may have sacrificed everything, the screams of those trapped within the World Trade Centre still echo in the film. Maya's self-sacrifice becomes noble. This was a shitty job, but someone had to do it. By any means.
That Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture makes it, for all its considerable technical and cinematic charms, a truly vile film. It excuses the crimes of the CIA, allows us to view torture as a viable means of extracting information and begins to normalise it in popular culture. This normalisation is probably the most distressing consequence of all, huge swathes of the audience walking out of the cinema tutting in liberal angst at what they've seen, but on some level accepting that it was a necessary evil.
Cinema is one of the most powerful and wide-reaching forms of media in our culture. History and war become defined in the popular consciousness largely by how they're depicted in popular film. Zero Dark Thirty wears its disguise of journalistic pretension so well that it's destined to become the popular version of events. When future generations look back on the War on Terror, how Western civilisation reacted to the physical and psychological trauma of 9/11 and specifically the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty will be what they watch. What will they see? A culture that deifies torturers; that casually inflicts pain upon the desperate; that believes that the end justifies the means, no matter how horrible. Is this what we want to be?
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
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When I get confronted with a really good idea in fiction I feel a little thrill at the possibilities and potential stories it creates. I felt that liberation at the beginning of ‘Wreck-It Ralph’. Very quickly it establishes itself as a film that can become whatever it wants, a film that can drape itself in whatever aesthetic it chooses, a film that’s only limited by the imagination of its creators.
‘Wreck-It Ralph’ is the self-titled story of a video game bad guy. He’s the villain in a Donkey Kong-like 1980s arcade machine called ‘Fix-It Felix Jr’. Ralph’s existence consists of smashing up an apartment building, then battling Felix, the game’s hero. Felix inevitably wins, and Ralph is then unceremoniously thrown off the top of the building into a pool of mud. He’s been thrown off that building day after day for decades, and with the game’s 30th anniversary just around the corner, he’s suffering a kind of existential ennui. He isn’t an evil person, he’s just someone playing the role of a bad guy, and yet he’s ostracised by the community within the game. After being snubbed one too many times, he snaps, setting out into the wider world to prove that he can be heroic rather than just villainous.
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| Ralph at his support group for bad guys. |
This wider world is the games arcade that Ralph’s machine is in. When the arcade is closed characters freely travel from one game to the others. Brilliantly, the world has shades of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, with the population consisting of ‘real’ videogame characters. When Ralph attends a ‘bad guy’s’ self help group he hangs out with M. Bison and Zangief from ‘Street Fighter’, Dr Robotnik from ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ and Bowser from ‘Super Mario Brothers’. Seeing these characters fraternising with each other provides some of the funniest moments in the film and goes a long way to making Ralph feel like a ‘classic’ character with a familiar story. Clearly these writers and designers know their stuff, in wider shots you see more obscure characters walking by and graffiti referencing some pretty obscure gaming trivia. The relish with which these references are made underlines one important fact about the creators of this film: these people get it. 'Wreck-It Ralph' isn't a film made by people trying to appeal to gamers, it's a film made by them.
The original characters in the film fit in seamlessly with the classics, and all of them are brilliantly voiced and animated. John Reilly's gruff voice accentuates Ralph’s working class tenacity, capturing perfectly the stoical nature of a man caught in a Sisyphus-like scenario. The mirror of Ralph is the hero of his game, Felix, (Jack McBrayer). Going in I assumed that he’d be the villain of the piece; what better way to accentuate the story of a bad guy trying to be good than a good guy going bad? But, smartly, Felix is genuinely a nice guy. He’s got a down to earth, innate Southern goodness to him, sweetly exclaiming ‘Oh my lands!’ whenever he’s surprised. My favourite though was the hard as nails space marine captain Calhoun (Jane Lynch). She’s been programmed to have the most tragic back story possible, and spits a constant stream of hilariously hard-boiled dialogue like “Doomsday and Armageddon just had a baby and it... is... ugly!”
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| Calhoun (Jane Lynch) |
The final character I found slightly less fun. That’s Vanellope, the bratty, cheeky girl outsider living on the outskirts of the ‘Sugar Rush’ world. She’s voiced by Sarah Silverman, and while I feel like a grump for saying it, she annoyed the crap out of me. Granted, this is a film for children, and she’s a good child identification character, but she's a never-ending pun machine and she drove me up the wall.
When we’re in the world of ‘Fix-It Felix Jr’ the animators brilliantly exploit capture the blocky retro-game aesthetic; everything feels like a videogame, from the cuboid bushes to the way cake splatters in pixels across the walls. But ‘Fix It Felix Jr’ is from the 80s, and our characters travel from there into more modern games: ‘Hero’s Duty’, a space marine shooter and ‘Sugar Rush’, a sweets based kart racing game. These two, particularly ‘Sugar Rush’, unfortunately feel pretty generic, environments that could have been transplanted from any 3D animated film. Once we enter the world of ‘Sugar Rush’, we stay there and it’s at this precise point that ‘Wreck-It Ralph becomes less compelling.
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| Get used to this colour scheme, you're going to see a lot of it./ |
Nearly the whole of the ‘Sugar Rush’ sequence left a bad taste in my mouth. We switch gears from making jokes referencing videogames to jokes referencing sweets. So, our characters find themselves sinking into ‘Nesquiksand’, or pursued by angry Oreos. It’s not so much that they’re especially bad jokes, more that they have an unpleasant whiff of product placement about them. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite complaining about this, one of things I must I enjoyed in the film was seeing classic videogame characters in the background of scenes, characters which are as much corporate figures as a brand of sweets. Even so, something about product placement for Nestle doesn't sit right with me.
What’s more frustrating is that the film abandons its own compelling internal logic. Whereas the other ‘worlds’ are small and self-contained, constructed tightly around the rules of the game they’re depicting, ‘Sugar Rush’ is it’s own mini-civilisation, much of which bears little resemblance to the kart racing genre it’s supposedly parodying. It feels like you've stepped into a blander film; everything being pastel pink gets visually cloying pretty fast. I found myself wishing the film would live up to its premise and let us see some more environments, but sadly not.
It’s also here that the characters begin to come slightly unstuck. There’s a bizarrely disturbing scene where Ralph physically tortures someone for information. He picks up a talking gobstopper called Sour Bill, and licks him repeatedly until he tells him what he wants to know. Sour Bill’s reaction is sheer terror, and it’s deeply unpleasant to see our lovable protagonist torturing someone without consequence. ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ has been getting a lot of negative publicity for its torture scenes, but the torture seems slightly more sinister here. It's a worrying example of acclimatising children to the concept of the ‘good guys’ using torture to get information and at the very least the scene is a depressing symptom of a society that has grown to accept it..
But, despite the setting taking a boring and generic turn, despite the insidious corporate advertising that permeates and despite some character mis-steps, ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ remains worthwhile viewing, almost purely because the central characters are so likeable. We understand and sympathise with them, and Ralph is such a likeable, put-upon everyman that it’s impossible not to want him to succeed. ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ is a good film, one of the best non-Pixar 3D animated films yet, but unfortunately one that doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise.
***/*****
'Wreck-It Ralph' is on general release from February 8th
***/*****
'Wreck-It Ralph' is on general release from February 8th
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