Steve Coll has a very good essay on “Zero Dark Thirty” in the New York Review of Books. Coll won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.”
Basically Colls writes that if you’re going to make big claims about the accuracy of your movie … you should be ready to get real criticism if it’s inaccurate. He says director Kathryn Bigelow writer Mark Boal have tried to have it both ways:
Boal and Bigelow have offered two main responses to the criticism they have received. One is that as dramatists compressing a complex history into a cinematic narrative, they must be granted a degree of artistic license.
That is unarguable, of course, and yet the filmmakers cannot, on the one hand, claim authenticity as journalists while, on the other, citing art as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for bin Laden, and therefore might be, for some, defensible as public policy. Boal and Bigelow—not their critics—first promoted the film as a kind of journalism. Bigelow has called Zero Dark Thirty a “reported film.” Boal told a New York Times interviewer before the controversy erupted, “I don’t want to play fast and loose with history.”
But that’s apparently what Boal (and Bigelow) did…
“The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniqueswere the key to finding Bin Laden,” Michael Morell, the acting CIA director, wrote to agency employees in December. “That impression is false.”
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein and the two senior members of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John McCain, coauthored a letter calling the movie’s version of recent counterterrorism history “grossly inaccurate.” The senators said the film’s flaws have “the potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner.”
‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading’ by Steve Coll | The New York Review of Books
January 17, 2013
