Bigelow Unchained

Could the death of Osama bin Laden have received the same treatment as slavery in Django Unchained?

Not many people know Kathryn Bigelow for Point Break do they? The tale of two detectives breaking a surfing drugs gang on the Californian coast was described as 'Looks 10, Brains 3' by Time's Richard Corliss. It would be unfair - and erroneous - to say the same of Zero Dark Thirty, whatever your take on this film is.


Keanu Reeves plays perpetually dripping drip Johnny Utah in Point Break.

But reviewers have waded in on many aspects of ZDT, notably the thrilling conclusion (that I suspect are deeply cathartic to many Americans) and the highly contentious torture scenes that at least one reviewer suggests 'glorify' torture (although that argument sort of feels like a leap).

The best take on the whole circus, besides Michael Moore's amusingly straight-up diatribe via Facebook, could be Peter Maass in The Atlantic. Maass is apparently a vet of East Coast broadsheet attitudes, having written in the NYT and the New Yorker on both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. His suggestion is that ZDT is not to be trusted - precisely because the material gained by Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal in the making of the film to imbue it with authenticity came from the CIA.

It's a reasonable point, when you consider the angles that could be played here. How much were Boal and Bigelow given? Under what pretext? Did they themselves go in with a game plan (probably along the lines of 'don't annoy the CIA so we get the movie made with minimal fuss' - a potential game-changer in itself) and how much did they stick to it?

There's lots of factors at work here. Of equal importance is the legacy this film leaves - lots and lots and lots of reviewers, to a man/ woman Americans, have spoken of the emotional satisfaction - and even pride - they felt when they heard bin Laden had been killed by Navy SEALS in the hills of Pakistan. That's a lot of weight to push against, and without being cynical, it may be that Bigelow and Boal decided to cut a couple of (minor) corners in the belief they were on the right side of the argument. Does that do lasting damage or is it skin deep?

The threshold of truth for ZDT is infinitely higher than almost all of its contemporaries, precisely because it's such an emotionally 'engaging' (euphemism alert) event in Western and American culture. That's undoubtedly the challenge that Bigelow and Boal wanted to address when they went to the CIA for their answers, and whilst it's right that the bar is set high, it's hard not to wonder what would have happened if Bigelow decided to fictionalise elements (and I'm steering clear of the whole does torture work/ not work debate here by that inference).

So what's the answer? Leave the film to someone else? Not an option for a tough nut like Bigelow, ex-wife of Cameron that she is. Tone it down? Moot point. A left-field option (in more than one sense) would have been not to involve the government at all and simply record your own take, regardless of how controversial the subject is. Massively ballsy admittedly, and possibly a colossal act of vandalism. But how much of Jessica Chastain's character is legit and how much script rewrites?

It's interesting to look at Tarantino's Django Unchained, released a fortnight earlier in the UK, as a counterpoint to Zero. Both deal with moments that had - and have - tangible impacts on American culture. Both deal with extremely unpleasant elements of human behaviour. But where one aims to record an event as close to the 'truth' (i.e. what's discussed above), the other puts its desire to entertain front and centre.

No one can possibly say that Tarantino has meddled with the truth when it comes to Django Unchained. Because of course in this tale, there are no factual checkpoints - the whole story is fiction. But the violence, the blood, the admittedly appalling language that so offended Spike Lee, is all pretty accurate - toned down if anything according to the man himself. And yet the film has miraculously escaped censure from almost everyone, except Krishnan Guru-Murthy of course.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that the majority of the moviegoing public don't care as much about slavery as they do about a terrorist from Saudi Arabia. But is it easier to write a movie about the evils of slavery, which are shown many, many times in extremely gruesome contexts, than it is about a more contemporary issue? Are the screams of ZDT that much louder because they're that much nearer, temporally speaking?

It's fair to say the picture to the left is pretty shocking. Full disclosure: this man is eaten by dogs. That's sanctioned by his 'master' following his attempted escape of his hellish existence of beating other black men to death to stay alive. Without context, this might be one of those halfwit efforts Eli Roth or arch idiot Tom Six occasionally concoct and label 'cinema'. Is this a less appalling image because of the stylistic hues of Tarantino's direction? Because there's no explicit truth attached? Because - pardon the slight cynicism - it's expected of Tarantino, and therefore acceptable?

At the moment there's three films showing that all deal with huge events in America's history - these two plus Lincoln, Spielberg's eponymous biopic. Each is handled with its director's distinctive style; is that the only issue at stake here or is Bigelow under pressure to deliver a different sort of film due to the magnitude of the narrative? And if that's the case, why are others under less apparent pressure to deliver? Personal choice or something more pernicious at work?

Is it impossible to completely reimagine the death of Osama bin Laden? There appears to be huge psychological as well as critical implications here - a film it appears much of America was desperate to see perhaps couldn't have been done another way due to those two (crucial?) factors. Being practical, a reimagining could have been career suicide, and I guess it's fair to say the topic is of such a particularity that very few options were available to Bigelow in recreating a still-seismic event.

Perhaps thinking that a less self-consciously accurate appraisal of the political event of 2011 wouldn't be such a bad idea, I then considered this: Quentin Tarantino making Zero Dark Thirty. After Inglourious, I'm not sure after all that it's a good idea.

Pictures courtesy of msn.com and myreelpov.wordpress.com