Representing torture in Zero Dark Thirty (2012): Popular culture as a site of norm contestation

Abstract

The global war on terror (GWOT) is undoubtedly the most recent case where a government authorized ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, a euphemism for torture. In addition to shocking stories and photographs from Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and CIA black site prisons, popular culture assists in the production of torture’s public image and indicates a site of norm contestation. Therefore, the aim of this article is threefold. First, the author shows that Zero Dark Thirty (2012, dir. Kathryn Bigelow) is constitutive for the public image of torture and its meaning-in-use. Second, she argues that the film’s representation of torture works as a popular site of contesting the anti-torture norm. Finally, she reflects on the continuum between popular culture and the politics of torture.

Keywords

impunity norm contestation popular culture torture

Introduction

Although legally prohibited by declarations, conventions, international and domestic law, torture prevails. Most surprising, though, is the fact that this observation is not only true for authoritarian regimes, but also for liberal democracies that often present themselves as defenders of human rights (McCoy, 2012; Rejali, 2000). The global war on terror (GWOT) is undoubtedly the most recent and infamous case where a government authorized so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, a euphemism for well-known practices of torture such as the incitement of sensory deprivation and overload, the enforcement of stress positions and waterboarding (Greenberg and Dratel, 2005). The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), signed in 1984,¹ leaves no doubt that under no circumstances is torture either legal nor legitimate. Acknowledging the central role that torture played in detention camps at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites worldwide, ‘the CAT may be the first casualty of the GWOT’ (Danchev, 2006: 262).

International Relations (IR) scholars have already pointed out the possible consequences of undermining the prohibition of torture in the GWOT (Birdsall, 2016; Brunnée and Toope, 2010; Liese, 2009; McKeown, 2009; Schmidt and Sikkink, 2017; Sikkink, 2013). After decade-long research on the evolution, diffusion of and compliance with international norms, critical approaches emphasize the instability and contestedness of norms (Niemann and Schillinger, 2016; Wiener, 2014). Even widely accepted norms such as the prohibition of torture might decline or even disappear if and when practices and discourses of their applicability, meaning and validity become contested. Such processes of norm contestation can be studied not only by analyzing speeches and memos but be extended to the world of cultural representations of torture. Therefore, I understand popular culture as a site of norm contestation.

The aim of this article is threefold. First, I show that Zero Dark Thirty (2012, dir. Kathryn Bigelow, hereafter ZDT) is constitutive for the ‘public image’ (Weldes, 2003: 7) of torture and its meaning-in-use. Second, I argue that the film’s representation of torture works as a popular site of contesting the anti-torture norm. Finally, I reflect on the continuum between popular culture and the politics of torture. In the following section, I situate my article within the debate on the anti-torture norm in IR and show how popular culture works as a site of contestation. The second part of the article presents a case study on ZDT. In conclusion, I discuss how popular culture indicates a site of norm contestation and why scholars should pay more attention to films such as ZDT.

Non-compliance and the contestation of norms

In regard to the UN anti-torture convention (CAT) and the prohibition of torture, contestation has been the topic of the day since the Bush administration authorized a clandestine interrogation and detention programme that was implemented in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and several black sites worldwide. ‘Enhanced interrogation techniques’, a euphemism for torture, were used for over 30 detainees but produced different outcomes as the US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program (2012) explains: seven detainees revealed no intelligence information, some provided accurate information before they were tortured and many detainees fabricated information.²

For students of IR and international law, disputes over the validity and applicability of global norms such as the prohibition of torture have become a key issue of contemporary research. In the case of the US, the Bush administration decided to define the attacks on September 11, 2001, as an ‘act of war’ but classified the terrorists as ‘unlawful combatants’ outside the protection of the Geneva Convention. The so-called torture memos document that attorneys re-defined the meaning of torture so narrowly that only a ‘sadist . . . that engages in a practice resulting in pain equivalent to death or organ failure is a torturer’ (Birdsall, 2016: 183; Liese, 2009: 31–32; McKeown, 2009: 13; Sikkink, 2013: 151). Moreover, these memos expressed the controversial constitutional position that the president as the commander in chief had the authority to supersede domestic and international law.

Compared with cases from Israel and the UK, attempts to justify coercive interrogation techniques often follow a well-known pattern. First, executives put the absoluteness of the anti-torture norm into perspective by claiming that there might be extraordinary circumstances under which the threat and excessive use of violence by state agents is necessary, even legitimate (‘the ticking-bomb scenario’). Second, governments are keen to distinguish between torture and ill-treatment, declaring isolated acts of excessive violence rather as a kind of professional misconduct than as acts of torture. Based on this distinction, third, liberal democracies still reaffirm the prohibition of incredibly cruel and horrific forms of torture while trivializing minor incidents of harsh interrogation as ‘torture lite’ (Liese, 2009: 22, 27).

Research on the authorization of torture by the US government since 2001 comes to mixed conclusions. Birdsall (2016: 177), for example, argues that the Bush administration did not simply ignore the CAT (and domestic prohibitions), but ‘went to great lengths to justify its conduct within existing international law, attempting to make their conduct appear to comply with legal obligations’. Schmidt and Sikkink (2017), however, consider that the policies of the Bush administration indicate an attempt to contest the validity of the norm itself.

Norm researchers define conflicts over the meaning-in-use, applicability and validity of norms as contestation. Because norms are fluid and ambiguous, they always require discourses on their application to specific situations (Engelkamp and Glaab, 2015; Niemann and Schillinger, 2016). The meaning of a norm is re-produced in use and thereby ‘points to a tension between stability and change’ (Niemann and Schillinger, 2016: 30). Given the fluidity and ambiguity of norms, they may become contested in two ways: contestation over the application and applicability of a norm or contestation over its validity.

While recent constructivist norm researchers already address how US agents contest the applicability and validity of the anti-torture norm, the broader societal and cultural picture is mostly missing. The puzzle is not only that democratic governments do torture and either hide or, even worse, justify it but that ‘public images’ of torture’s efficiency and necessity prevail, although these practices are widely acknowledged as legally and morally forbidden. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, parts of the public accepted that the more coercive approach to detainees might be repellent and required a rethinking of the moral consensus against torture. In November 2001, Jonathan Alter (2001) wrote in an op-add for Newsweek that the US had to ‘keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism like court-sanctioned psychological interrogations’, a proposal that Alan M Dershowitz favored as a ‘torture warrant’.³ In this article, I argue that ZDT works as a site of norm contestation where the public image of torture is reproduced. On the one hand, the film illustrates the perceived necessity and desired efficiency of torture as a violent mode of interrogating detainees. On the other hand, ZDT’s representation of torture enables a critique of the impunity of those who exercised and authorized it.

Representing torture in Zero Dark Thirty

Popular culture and the study of torture

For IR, it took some time until scholars discovered that popular culture matters politically. Popular culture, though, is itself a contested term, as Storey (2008: 5) reminds us: ‘any definition of popular culture will bring into play a complex combination of the different meanings of the term “culture” with the different meanings of the term “popular”.’ In general, popularity refers to the fact that a cultural piece is consumed by a larger number of people and distributed widely in spatial terms (Press-Barnathan, 2017). In its broadest definition, culture encompasses the discourses and practices of meaning-making (Alexander, 2003) while narrow definitions refer to cultural institutions. For this article, I understand ZDT as a product of popular culture, e.g. Hollywood style film production and distribution, which is broadly perceived, commercially oriented and creating its meaning by using multiple modes, in particular visual and narrative modes of story-telling.

In recent years, IR scholars have vividly debated whether and how popular culture matters. Scholars argue that popular culture mobilizes capacities, conveys information, shapes political attitudes, and generates affective responses (Caso and Hamilton, 2015; Grayson et al., 2009; Weldes, 2003). Popular culture can be understood as a cause or effect of politics, as a medium and mirror, as evidence and data, or as constitutive of politics and society (Neumann and Nexon, 2006: 10; Rowley and Weldes, 2015). Finally, as Grayson et al. (2009: 160) point out, ‘IR scholarship should be concerned about what happens to culture and politics when one is rendered in terms of the other.’

What happens when popular Hollywood films conceal the contested politics of torture? Cinematic representations of war and the post-9/11 world have attracted a wide range of researchers in different disciplines (Al-Rawi, 2014; Binns, 2017; Dodds, 2008; Purse and Hellmich, 2017; Westwell, 2014). Films are indeed a key site of popular culture where contested policies like torture are represented, often with the effect of reproducing and securing consent for such policies (Westwell, 2014: 225). In particular, commercial Hollywood films are global commodities that may impact how people around the world make sense of torture and its usage in the GWOT. As a mediated form of mass consumption, popular films ‘expose us to characters that we don’t encounter in our daily lives, places we will never visit, and situations that are foreign to us’ (Flynn and Salek, 2012: 5). Since 2001, different genres of mainstream US cinema have featured torture scenes rather for ‘audience’s excitement and delight’ (p. 3) than as a critical engagement with the politics of torture. Cinematic representations of torture often feature comparable images and narratives as Flynn and Salek show: first, some stories reproduce the myth that torture leads to reliable information and a confession of a planned crime. Second, the torturer is either presented as a severe man who feels forced to torture for a more significant cause under extraordinary and timely circumstances or as a ruthless sadist. Third, the visibility of the victim’s bodily pain is essential as either a driver for confession or heroism. Fourth, films often represent torturers as troubled men (and less often women), but they are rarely unsettled by what they do (pp. 10–11).

Concerning the GWOT and popular accounts of torture, Van Veeren (2009) argues that the TV show 24 ‘(re)produces key elements of the Bush administration’s discourse of the “global war on terrorism” . . . working with official discourses to constitute a new “reality” of terrorism and counter-terrorism, and therefore facilitating practices such as rendition, detention without charge, and torture’ (p. 362). Although the first season of 24 was already produced before September 11, 2001, many scholars understand the show as performative and co-constitutive of the GWOT, how it is imagined and justified. In conclusion, studies assume that representing acts of torture as acceptable and necessary under particular circumstances makes the war on terror governable (Adams, 2016). With the GWOT, torture has returned as an instrument of law-enforcement⁴ which is often represented as a ‘rite of passage to heroism’ (Hron, 2008: 28).

Many films from different genres have featured scenes of torture: The Battle of Algiers (1966, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo), The Siege (1998, dir. Edward Zwick), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005. dir. Doug Liman), Casino Royal (2006, dir. Martin Campbell), The Good Shepherd (2006, dir. Robert de Niro), Batman: The Dark Knight (2008, dir. Christopher Nolan), Inglourious Basterds (2009, dir. Quentin Tarantino) or The Passion of the Christ (2004, dir. Mel Gibson), just to name a few. Two prominent examples illustrate how popular representations of torture on the screen intersect with politics. In 2003, The Battle of Algiers was shown at the Pentagon to discuss the likely challenges the US army would face in Iraq (e.g. guerilla warfare, terrorist attacks). Various journalists and academics report that the TV show 24 inspired interrogators in Abu Ghraib but also provoked concerns by military leaders such as Brigadier General Finnegan (Hron, 2008: 30). High-ranked members of the US administration like John Yoo and Michael Chertoff, Staff Judge Advocate Diane Beaver or Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonia Scalia referred to 24 to normalize and excuse torture (Sands, 2008: 74). The ambiguities and ambivalences of how popular culture represents torture and how these representations inform politics, however, should not be forgotten (Purse, 2017; Westwell, 2011). Rejali (2012: 222) reminds us that the way in which directors assemble scenes of torture often refers to audience expectations grounded in an ‘accepted iconography’ of how inflicted pain is assumed to look.

Interpreting Zero Dark Thirty

Due to the fact that ZDT is a prominent movie, researchers have already paid attention to its ambiguity (Purse, 2017), its mythification of the ‘elusive enemy’ and the naturalization of the GWOT as a ‘long war’ (Kennedy, 2017), criticized its orientalizing perspective (Hasian, 2014) and studied its depiction of bodily violence (Burgoyne, 2015), gender (Piotrowska, 2014) and the intelligence community (Pautz, 2015). Studying ZDT as a site of norm contestation, however, remains the exception.

In terms of methodology, my interpretation of ZDT is informed by the film analytical approach of David Bordwell and its application to IR (Bordwell, 1985; Heck, 2017). In his book Making Meaning (1991), Bordwell distinguishes between two modes of analysis, i.e. comprehending and interpreting a film. The latter is ‘concerned with revealing hidden, non-obvious meanings’ (Bordwell, 1991: 2). The meanings of a film, though, ‘are not found but made’ (p. 3). Bordwell explicates four possible types of meaning-making. The referential meaning indicates the construction of the film world, including intra-textual elements such as time, space and the narrative, but also extra-textuals such as conventions and genres. Together with the explicit meaning, it constructs the ‘literal’ meaning of a film. The implicit and repressed meanings of a film are more abstract. For the implicit or symbolic meaning of a film, ‘themes’ are key. Finally, the repression of symptomatic meaning ‘is like a disguise’, Bordwell (1991: 9) writes. I will return to these different types of meaning-making in conclusion.

In practical terms, the site of production, selected film sequences and the film’s public reception by critics and politicians are discussed in the next section. I will then present key themes within the film which signify sites of norm contestation.

Setting the scene

ZDT is an ‘important contribution(s) to the public discourse in which the meanings of these events are negotiated’ (Heck, 2017: 366). As one critic wrote, ZDT ‘is an exercise in instant history and hot-after-the-fact mythmaking’ (Powers, 2013: 303). To date, ZDT has been one of the most prominent accounts of the CIA’s search for Osama bin Laden. Distributed and screened worldwide, available at Netflix (and other platforms) and controversially debated in the US, it is still a popular and influential film. ZDT is a hybrid genre, including elements of a docudrama and action thriller.⁵ So-called docudramas ‘set historical and political events “in scene”’ (Heck, 2017: 368) and reassemble first-hand accounts of real events with fictional elements. Like a typical Hollywood genre film, ZDT draws on news headlines and actual events between 2001 and 2012. Although it is a fictional thriller with composite characters and invented storylines, there might be no clear-cut line between fact and fiction for viewers. As a commercially oriented docudrama and action thriller, ZDT reduces the complexities of the GWOT to a simple narrative structure of protagonist/antagonist. The story is character-driven with female CIA agent Maya as the main protagonist and Ammar/Al Qaida as the antagonist.⁶

ZDT is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Mark Boal and produced together with Megan Ellison. Bigelow is widely known as a successful filmmaker and was the first female director to win an Oscar for Hurt Locker in 2009. ZDT was released in mid-December 2012 in the US, one-and-a-half years after bin Laden was found and killed in early May 2011. Finding bin Laden played an essential role for the US administration as he was perceived to be the mastermind of Al Qaida and the personified enemy (Jeffords and Al-Sumait, 2015). ZDT fictionalizes this story based on real CIA documents made available to Bigelow and Boal. However, both emphasized that the movie is not a documentary.⁷

The detailed research of Bigelow and Boal for the script of ZDT provoked an investigation into unauthorized access to classified documents and files (Leopold and Henderson, 2015).⁸ The cooperation between the CIA, Bigelow and Boal already started in 2010 when both were preparing for a film called Tora Bora addressing the supposed hideaway of bin Laden in Afghanistan (Leopold and Henderson, 2015). Regarding the making of ZDT, documents made public via the Freedom of Information Act confirm that ‘the C.I.A. eagerly cooperated with the filmmakers, arranging for the writer and director to meet with numerous analysts and officers who were identified as being involved in the hunt for bin Laden’ (Mahler, 2015). Bigelow and Boal ‘won unprecedented access to secret details about the bin Laden operation, and how they got agency officers and officials to review and critique the ZDT script’ (Leopold and Henderson, 2015). Sources claim that CIA officials also requested some scenes to be deleted or changed.

Public debates in the US centred on the question of whether ZDT presented torture as an efficient means and whether its narrative was authentic and accurate. In her critique of the film, Jane Mayer (2012) asked in The New Yorker: ‘Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?’ Mayer argues that Bigelow fails to show that torture does not work. While politicians rejected the image that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ had been used to obtain the decisive intelligence information that led to bin Laden’s compound, ZDT suggests otherwise. Senators Diane Feinstein (Democrat), Carl Levin (Democrat) and John McCain (Republican), in an open letter to the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, made the criticism that the story ZDT tells is ‘grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Osama bin Laden’.⁹ Bigelow replied to her critics that the real scandal does not refer to the depiction of waterboarding in ZDT (or the question of unauthorized access to classified documents and CIA agents), but the actual torturing of detainees in black sites legalized by the US administration. Bigelow wrote:

I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen.¹⁰

Given this contextual information about ZDT, the following sections focus on the film itself. The leading characters of ZDT are composite roles while some detainees refer to a real person. ZDT tells the story through the eyes of the protagonist Maya (Jessica Chastain) who is very ambitious and focused on finding and finally killing bin Laden. She is accompanied by her supervisor and CIA agent Dan/Daniel (Jason Clarke) who forms a role model for the application of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Ammar (Reda Kateb) is the key antagonistic character representing a detainee and Al Qaida member who unravels the identity of bin Laden’s favoured courier. After years of intelligence work, the search for this courier leads to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan where he is killed by Special Forces. Maya is the main character who moves the story forward. She is a traditional reluctant protagonist who grows as a person by accepting torture as a method to reach her goal, i.e. to find and kill Bin Laden. After a set-back when a colleague is killed by a suicide bomber, Maya’s commitment to the cause reaches its climax. She is a traditional loner who knows better than her supervisors, follows her own lead, succeeds and finally takes off into an unknown future in the closing scene.¹¹ Her characterization follows the traditions of a cowboy protagonist which is a familiar character in many action and thriller movies. The cowboy is a lone hero who gets the job done before he – traditionally a male character – rides off into the sunset.

Several scenes in the film focus on torture: when Ammar is waterboarded by Dan, when Maya herself orders the torturing of the detainee Abu Farraj (Yoav Levi), when Dan advises Maya to be more careful regarding interrogation techniques, and when Maya and two colleagues listen to President-elect Obama’s TV interview on CBS News. Accordingly, the film shows different locations where torture is carried out (black sites and camps). The word ‘torture’ is mentioned only twice in the movie, by President-elect Obama saying ‘America does not torture’ and by the character of Hassan Ghul (Homayoun Ershadi), an Al-Qaida financier, telling Maya ‘I have no wish to be tortured again. Ask me a question, I can answer it.’ Close to the end, the fictional National Security Advisor refers to ‘detainees who are questioned under duress’.

Visualizing acts of torture

The opening sequence of ZDT sets the frame and leads the spectator right into the story (Burgoyne, 2015). It abstains from photo-journalistic images but invokes a highly emotional audio-collage of ‘9/11’ based on emergency calls. A black screen displaying text saying ‘the following motion picture is based on first-hand accounts of actual events’ is shown. Then dramatic voices tune in, the screen turns black again. Next, the text ‘11 September 2001’ appears, the voices get louder and more spectacular, and then stop suddenly. As Coll (2013) writes:

Before any actor speaks a single fictional line . . . Zero Dark Thirty makes two choices: it aligns its methods with those of journalists and historians, and it appropriates as drama what remains the most undigested trauma in American national life during the last several decades.

The torture sequence that follows continues the film’s framing in three ways: first, and typical for the genre of a docudrama, the distinction between known facts and fiction is obscured when viewers witness the torturing of Ammar. One could imagine that interrogating detainees and using waterboarding sounds and looks like the scene presented, but the majority of spectators may not be able to verify or confirm this depiction. Thus, the film creates a ‘fictional truth’ that the so-called Saudi group and the interrogation of Ammar have been crucial to finding bin Laden as viewers recognize later.

The sequence opens with a shot from below the riddled iron roof of an interrogation facility, with light falling in. At first, Bigelow uses the view of a detainee rather than one of the CIA agents, but perspectives change. The aesthetic style of the scene, shot with a handheld camera, using close-ups, and following the gaze of Maya, drags the spectator right into the action as a passive accessory. Handheld camera shots throughout the film emphasize this participatory point of view so that viewers can experience the action. In the torture scene, for example, the camera focuses on Ammar over the shoulder of Dan as if viewers are standing right behind him.

Based on these perspectives, the scene extends the subject positions and shows the unequal power relations between the characters. Dan is presented as the superior who is physically taller than Ammar and Maya. Bigelow emphasizes his position by using perspectives from below and front shots where Dan looks down at Ammar. Within minutes, Maya transforms from a faceless witness covered with a mask to a visible agent who assists with the torturing of Ammar.

While Maya and Dan seem to represent different subject positions at the beginning of the story, Maya is becoming more and more like him in the course of the film. The torture sequence introduces Dan as the perpetrator who has the power (and willingness) to use techniques of ‘enforced interrogation’ to break Ammar and gather information about the Saudi group. Ambiguity, however, remains. The depiction of Ammar as the depleted, beaten but apparently clueless detainee contradicts established enemy images. Dan is the masculine and violent character while Ammar represents the disciplined and controlled terrorist suspect. Moreover, Maya, representing the gaze that aligns the spectator and the scene, is disgusted by Dan’s brutality but does not doubt torture’s necessity.

Following the commemoration of the victims of 9/11 in the opening sequence of ZDT, the torturing of Ammar appears as an act of retaliation. The validity and application of the anti-torture norm are renegotiated here in light of this collective trauma. Referring to the innocent victims of ‘9/11’ creates a ‘public image’ where torturing is a reaction to a crime committed against innocent civilians. Ammar is not presented as an honest guy but defined as guilty:

Ammar [screaming]:

Why are you doing this to me?

Daniel:

You’re a terrorist, that’s why I’m doing it to you.

Whenever agents attempt to contest the general applicability of the anti-torture convention, it reveals a hierarchical, normative and exclusive relation between identity and difference, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Liese (2009: 42) argues. The dialogue shows how enemy images, even the notion of a ‘terrorist’ itself, can be invoked to legitimize waterboarding. Comparable to the Inquisition, Dan applies torture to reveal the truth from a man who is already defined as convicted. The scene leaves no doubt that Ammar is guilty. In its traditional portrayal of the antagonist as the ‘Other’, ZDT fails to provide background information on Al Qaida’s goals or Ammar’s political motivation to join a terrorist network. As Ammar confirms to Dan and Maya, ‘I wanted to kill Americans’, but the film does not say why. Only the ‘white’ and ‘Western’ characters act intentionally and normatively, i.e. protecting civilians from the next terror attack.

Throughout the story, torture is associated with standard techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, loud, distressing sounds and sexualized practices of abuse and humiliation with the aim of finding bin Laden’s hideaway. Although the torture scene is graphic, the presentation of violence shows a cleaned-up version suitable for mass consumption. Whether torturing detainees is efficient, though, remains ambivalent. On the one hand, torture is presented as a strategic and tactical method of gaining intelligence information under time pressure. On the other hand, the graphic depiction of Ammar being waterboarded and its inefficiency – he never reveals any useful information under torture – depicts torture also as a disciplinary practice of punishment and revenge. What is surprising, however, is the fact that the psychological consequences of torture on the torturer and the tortured (Flynn and Salek, 2012: 10) are almost absent from the movie’s narrative.

The way torture is visualized in ZDT mirrors vital elements of the US torture debate that defines torture as a necessary but extra-legal practice. Torture is presented here as both a routine as well as an exceptional and emotional excess of violence. ZDT’s narrative representation of torture, however, is more ambivalent when it comes to the question of efficiency and necessity. Ammar talks freely without any mental disorder after he had been tortured and seems to trust Dan and Maya to some extent. For the emplotment of ZDT, somehow torture worked.

Invoking the ticking bomb

The film presents several attacks that structure the space and time of the plot: at a lobby in Khobar, Saudi Arabia (no date shown, 22 dead as the news footage says);¹² London attack (7 July 2005, possibly real news story on survivor, change-over of news coverage voice and images of Bradley, Maya and Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan); Marriott Hotel Islamabad (20 September 2008, real news coverage, probably CNN as the reporter says); Camp Chapman (no date shown, Afghanistan, voice of news reporter which might be fictional);¹³ attack in New York City (1 May 2010, real news voice, plus news images of a public hearing).

The ticking-bomb scenario is a well-known trope for undermining the absoluteness of the torture prohibition (Lise, 2009: 24). When faced with terrorist threats and extraordinary circumstances, some state agents argue that it is necessary to balance human rights norms, the protection of civilians and the defence of national security. The ticking bomb scenario, Westwell (2014) argues, is a widely used trope that is reproduced by many popular films and TV shows: ‘The message in these films seems clear: torture is necessary and it works’ (p. 226). The danger of a new attack is a constant driver for action. Dan, for example, asks Ammar when the next attack will occur, and Ammar at first seems to answer but plays with Dan, saying ‘Sunday’, then ‘Monday’, ‘Saturday’, ‘Tuesday’, and so on. Because ‘partial information will be treated as a lie’, Dan then puts him in a small box. The final image of the scene is shot from within the box looking at Dan’s close-up. Torture is also introduced as a means to soften, even break the detainees. Before they waterboard Ammar, Dan tells Maya that ‘it is going to take a while. He has to learn how helpless he is.’

Later, in conversation with the CIA station chief at the embassy in Islamabad, Joseph Bradley, Dan expresses his frustration with the outcome of Ammar’s questioning and announces he is going to ‘turn up the heat. He needs to give us the Saudi group now.’ The ticking bomb scenario reaches its climax after CIA agent Jessica has been killed by a suicide bomber at Camp Chapman when CIA station chief Joseph, angry at Maya’s exclusive focus on another lead, shouts ‘I don’t fucking care about bin Laden. I care about the next attack. You’re going to start to working on American Al Qaida cells. Protect the homeland.’

ZDT represents the ticking bomb scenario as an impelling, yet ambivalent and desperate motif. While torturing Ammar or other detainees has not helped to prevent any attack, it revealed information about bin Laden’s favourite courier. In the end, torture appears as a necessary means for gathering intelligence although it did not help to prevent attacks.

‘We don’t torture’ . . . any more

As Birdsall (2016: 177) has argued, the Bush administration did not merely ignore the prohibition of torture but searched for a way to comply with its legal obligations. While the torture memos document these efforts, dialogues on the justification of torture are not very present in ZDT. Torture appears to be a normalized and routinized practice of interrogation. Three scenes are instructive here.

The first scene features a dialogue between Dan and Maya. Explaining why he is leaving for Washington DC, Dan says:

Daniel:

I’m fine. I’ve just seen too many guys naked . . . I need to go do something normal for a while . . . You should come with me . . .

Maya:

I’m not going to find Abu Ahmed from DC . . .

Daniel:

Look Maya, you gotta be really careful with detainees now. The politics are changing and you don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes.

Maya:

I know.

Dan is sitting in a plastic chair while Maya is looking down at him giving her now the superior position as he is leaving the frontline. It remains unclear whether Dan is expressing homophobic fears here, has lost any personal interest and desire for torturing (he doesn’t want to have a take on a detainee when Maya asks him) or is abandoning torture as an inefficient practice. Hence, he responds to Maya’s frustration about the interrogation, that Abu Farraj, an important detainee, is ‘either going to withhold or die from the pressure you are putting on him’. The dialogue also conflates ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ with sexualized practices of humiliation. Advising Maya to be careful because there might be an investigation suggests that Dan (and Maya) know that their actions are politically (‘politics are changing’), even legally (‘oversight committee’) disputable.¹⁴ Nevertheless, both hardly ever doubt that torture is a necessary and useful means for collecting intelligence.

A second scene, located in a briefing room at the US embassy in Islamabad, features a real TV interview with President-elect Obama where he declares that ‘America doesn’t torture and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world’ (Obama, 2008). This statement interrupts a conversation between Maya and two collogues for seconds. Then, the dialogue between the characters continues without any reference to Obama’s statement. This silence is telling as it symbolizes the detachment between the previously mentioned changing politics in Washington DC due to the incoming new president and the intelligence work on the ground. When journalists revealed the CIA program in 2002, Washington Post reporters cited an official who supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists: ‘If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job’ (Priest and Gellman, 2002).

A third scene takes place in the last third of the film in Washington, DC when George White, chief of the CIA Afghanistan–Pakistan department, is asked by the National Security Adviser, whether he can confirm that the person in the compound is bin Laden and not a drug dealer, he responds:

George White:

You know we lost our ability to prove that when we gave up the detainee program. Who the hell am I supposed to ask? Some guy in Gitmo who is all lawyered up? He’ll just tell his lawyer to warn bin Laden.

Here, George criticizes the legal protection of detainees, which prevents the CIA from getting reliable information.

The absence of (self-)reflection is an important and often overlooked motif in ZDT. Although opinion polls on torture should be handled with care (Blauwkamp et al., 2018; Gronke and Rejali, 2010), the persistence of discourses to excuse or even justify torture is surprising given its national and global prohibition.

Conclusion

ZDT and the public debate that unfolded around it create the public image of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ as a necessary yet violent practice that lacks moral (self-)reflection or legal prosecution. The contested politics of torture are represented as a normal and excusable practice that creates a ‘new’ consensus around torture’s necessity when ‘we’ fight terrorism. Based on its referential and explicit meaning, viewers can comprehend how and why torture was applied. The symbolic and symptomatic meaning of ZDT, however, reveals the ambiguities of doing so. On the one hand, violence is unmasked as an affective and bodily practice which articulates revenge and retaliation. On the other hand, the myth of torture’s necessity and efficiency is re-imagined by the film. Torture might not be legal but is excusable under specific circumstances. As the film shows, agents do not face any social, psychological or legal consequences from torturing detainees. Without a clear normative position on violence, ZDT lacks a critical perspective on the GWOT and reproduces the governmental story of torture’s necessity. In conclusion, I want to raise three questions that refer to popular culture as a site of norm contestation and the continuum between culture and politics.

First, ZDT is (and any film has to be) highly selective in its representation. In addition to its imitation of an authentic documentary aesthetic, the film is clearly a commercial Hollywood production. For the purposes of the fictional movie and its entertaining qualities, it misrepresents and conceals essential aspects of the ‘real’ story (Bergen, 2012). There is no indication in ZDT that FBI agents opposed the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and preferred a traditional rapport approach with detainees as former FBI-agent Ali Soufan (2011) explained. Given the flow of 157 minutes of drama and action, ZDT is unable to show that it took eight years after the first detainee was tortured to find Bin Laden. It was President Obama who then authorized the final mission to capture (and kill) Al Qaida’s leader. ZDT, however, portrays Obama as a coward opposed to the cowboy-style character of Maya. In conclusion, ZDT and its representation of torture is primarily about ‘us’: it is our violence that is not legally sanctioned but morally justified, our trauma of ‘9/11’, our passion to find bin Laden and our revenge to kill the enemy. Such a one-sided positioning on ‘Us’ has normative implications for whether and how violations of the anti-torture norm can be expressed and prosecuted. As we know, in most cases, the impunity of US perpetrators who authorized torture or the tortured continues.¹⁵

Second, public attitudes towards supporting torture have informed political and academic debates for over a decade. A recent poll by the ICRC asked ‘Can a captured enemy combatant be tortured to obtain important military information?’ and 46 percent of the respondents in the US answered yes.¹⁶ Many scholars remain sceptical whether and, if so, how popular representations of torture impact the politics of violence and public opinion, and vice versa (Kearns and Young, 2017; Miller et al., 2014). Conrad et al. (2018) show that US-Americans seem to be more supportive of torture when it is directed at individuals who are perceived as threatening. Given the post-9/11 security discourse, suspected Arab terrorists fit well into this threat frame. Popular culture, then, assists in constructing and reproducing such racialized enemy images. Additional contextual factors influence individual and public attitudes towards torture. The public are more supportive of torture when the suspect is not only an outsider but also perceived to be guilty (Kearns and Young, 2017: 4). While many experts agree that torture does not work, popular Hollywood films and TV shows tend to suggest otherwise. Kearns and Young conclude that an experimental study on 24 showed that ‘participants who saw torture depicted as efficient were more likely to support torture’ (p. 13). The construction and distribution of enemy images, threat perceptions and torture’s pretended efficiency may help to gain more support for torture if required. Remarks by President Trump on the efficiency of torture already indicate that such violent practices may not be off the table.¹⁷

Finally, it remains our scholarly aim to deconstruct the myth that torture is sometimes necessary, efficient and excusable. One way to do so is to discuss films like ZDT in the classroom.¹⁸ The film illustrates (CIA hyper-) masculinity and practices of violence, conveys images of terrorism, torture and (racialized and gendered) identities. It is also worth comparing – not only in educational terms – ZDT’s depiction of the GWOT with representations of terrorism and torture in non-Western cinema (Al-Rawi, 2014). Based on my teaching experience at university level, I believe more can and should be done to support IR students’ ability to critically reflect on how popular films assist in the validation and contestation of global norms. Much more comparative and long-term research in the media’s application in IR in higher education, as well as methodological reflection and critique, are necessary. There is too much at stake here if Hollywood movies and TV shows become sources of ‘information’ that support the belief that torture is sometimes permissible.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the critical comments made by the reviewers. For all remaining inconsistencies and shortcomings, I take full responsibility.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Gabi Schlag

Notes

Author biography

Gabi Schlag is a senior lecturer at the University of Tübingen. In her research, Gabi focuses on the relation between visual cultures and global politics as well as representations and performances of political violence. Recently, she has published a book chapter on the study of emotions and visual representations of migration.

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