Whats a company secret you can share now that you dont What quietly went away without anyone noticing? Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 war drama movie that follows the decade-long hunt for a terrorist leader and the high-stakes encounter through which he is apprehended. The caveat is that a family member must be employed with the agency. Slideshow 2066662 by yachi Maya is apparently horrified by the practice, but soon gets sufficiently accustomed to torture that when a prisoner begs for mercy, she flings back at him the line that hes in charge of his own fate (i.e., if he gives the desired information, hell be spared). Bigelow is more accomplishedshe works harder to reproduce more thoroughly the events she stages and she depicts them in greater detail and with greater energybut her mode of representation is no more original. December 28, 2012. non-mutilation torture, e.g. kingfish-4400. Still, the similarities between Carrie and Maya go beyond gender. ABC News Z. Bryon Wolf suspects that Brennan is the inspiration for the unnamed National Security Advisor (Stephen Dillane) who explains to a CIA agent the Presidents hesitancy to act on partial intelligence. While Brennan has expressed disapproval of the Bush techniques, heres what he told CBS in a 2007 interview: There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists, he said. Of course, the movie cant suggest that no comparably significant information could have been gained in the absence of torture. Yes She was, he says, our go-to analyst on all intelligence questions regarding the target. The movie is exciting to watchthe director, Kathryn Bigelow, and the screenwriter, Mark Boal, organize the action to maximize suspense, subjecting Maya to a range of dangers and, at the point when she thinks that she has circumstantially located bin Laden, starting the equivalent of a ticking clock that stokes the thrills even more. A debriefer is a subject matter expert who asks questions., The CIAs press secretary, Susan Miller, declined to comment about Scheuer, but said simply: CIAs use of enhanced interrogation techniques ended in 2007.. They have thousands of agents that went to college, had prior jobs, most who's problem solving has been narrowed into the same type of thought and technique. In his book "No Easy Day", former SEAL Mark Bassionette, who was part of the mission which killed bin Laden, mentions a female CIA agent, who he refers to by the pseudonym "Jen", who worked with the SEAL team on the mission. Washingtonian magazine has suggested that Tom Donilon may also have partly inspired this character. Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter. As we learn, she was recruited out of high school to join the C.I.A. The movie shows government employees taking part in decisions regarding the deployment of mighty power and vast resources; the making of decisions of vast moment and immediate, possibly grave, even world-historical results. Silhouette of a dog by iStockphoto. However, whether it was misreported, or whether McCain misinterpreted the movie, this is a strange suggestion: Theres nothing in the movie to link Ammar with Mohammed, and in fact Mohammed is discussed as a separate character (referred to as KSM) in the movie. (This turn of events is depicted in Zero Dark Thirty.) 2023 Cond Nast. She believes a male operative would not have been described the same way. Colleagues said the on-screen depiction captures the womans dedication and combative temperament. Though viewers know that the Navy SEAL raid on the Abbottabad compound was successfulmeaning that bin Laden was killed and the soldiers got out safe and soundthe staging of it, filled with twists, turns, pitfalls, near-misses, is done with heart-pounding energy, alternating between views of the soldiers and their own point of view, through their infrared night-vision goggles. Have always wondered why during the cafeteria scene in Zero Dark Thirty, Maya thinks she isn't allowed to disclose the reason she was recruited straight out of high school. | This Sunday night at the Academy Awards, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's Zero Dark Thirty appears poised to lose the Best Picture race to Ben Affleck and Chris Terrio's Argo, and as much as awards . High school kids aren't that smart. The more cinematically educated the filmmaker, the more aware of his or her unoriginalityand the more sanctimonious rectitude attaches to the stance of realism, of the repudiation of imaginative fancy, of fictions inventive and imaginative freedom. But now having seen the moviewhich opens in New York and L.A. on December 19, with a wider release in Januarythe comparison seems more than just inevitable. I know the CIA has like a "internship" program for high-school kids but you seek them out. Described as one of the CIAs top experts on al-Qaeda, the Agency made her name public in 2010, when it honored the 12 agents killed in the Camp Chapman attack. He has said QAnon, the bogus conspiracy theory that Trump was battling pedophiles among senior Democrats, Hollywood and the imagined deep state, has often been correct. She said her role was as a subject matter expert, not an interrogator. At one point in the film, after a female colleague is killed in an attack on a CIA compound in Afghanistan, Maya describes her purpose in near-messianic terms: I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.. Its an exciting, skillfully crafted, vigorously realized film, but also a renunciation of the fuller possibilities of cinema in favor of a dully narrowed, debased op-ed political discourse of pros and cons, that enters the public debate by the rigorous exclusion of sex and ideology, intimate desires and grandiose dreams, family and friends, secrets and lies, the constantly streaming phantasmagoria of inner life. Additionally, several other characters in the movie are closely inspired by real-life individuals. Jessica Chastain, as Maya, in Zero Dark Thirty. She then boards a transport plane where she is told to sit anywhere because hers is the only name on the manifest. Zero Dark Thirty ***MINIMAL SPOILERS*** Director Kathryn Bigelow has done it again by putting out a superior product. The HUNT for Osama ~ from the INTEL side~ 4 STARS~ good movie, plot: THE HUNT FOR OSAMA BIN LADIN They married in 2014 and she took his name. "Washington says she's a killer". The resulting so-called realism is always on the verge of becoming a grotesque lie, because of filmmakers unavowedly ideological assumptions regarding the depiction of physical action as more unimpeachably real than states of mind, regarding the selection of certain actions rather than others as constituting a storyor a film. Boring, tedious and excessively attentive to minutia details while ignoring the main theme of the movie. In 2002, red-haired CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer, then known by her maiden name Bikowsky, traveled to a secret CIA prison to watch the torture of al-Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded and locked in a dog box, Senate investigators reported. If you haven't seen Argo, that's another one to see. There are those who own firearms and those who dont; those who are familiar with the potential lethal use of forcewho are or were in the military or the police, who own firearms (according to recent polls, about forty-five percent of the country)and everyone else. The character of Joseph Bradley is similarly based on Jonathan Banks, the then CIA station chief in Pakistan. Michael Scheuer has in recent years espoused conspiracy theories, and called on then president Donald Trump to impose martial law after he lost the 2020 election. Anticipating that Panetta would not be impressed with the how he was going to look on screen, Gandolfini has said, I sent a note to Leon saying, Im very sorry about everything. NATO forces in Afghanistan developed the technique of taking pictures and gathering weapons, documents, computer files etc from the aftermath of raids in order to disprove any later claims that the terrorists they had killed were unarmed civilians. Still, the similarities between Carrie and Maya go beyond gender. In January 2014, the Washington Post named her and tied her to a pre-9/11 intelligence failure and the extraordinary . Ten years is a very long time. This is perhaps one of the best examples of how accurate Zero Dark Thirty is to history. National Security Advisor (Stephen Dillane) - John Brennan. Condition: Compare the opening of Zero Dark Thirty to that of Argo, a visual montage of archival footage, with voice-over commentary, that offers a historical sketch of the troubled relations of Iran with the U.S. and Great Britain that contributed to the Islamic Revolution and Irans hostility to the West (the U.S. in particular), and thus gave rise to the events that the movie dramatizes. It made me wonder if there was some family connection or I-don't-know-what that would have made her the exception to be recruited out of high school. What does the title 'Zero Dark Thirty' actually mean? new Indeed, when it comes to hunting al-Qaida, they have at times been the norm: The CIAs first unit devoted to tracking al Qaeda, known as Alec Station, hired women analysts almost exclusively in the 1990s, according to a fascinating piece from the Daily Beast published in September. What did she put on hold in her pursuit for bin Laden? It depicts the overwhelming force of the Abbottabad raidbut it opens with violence of another sort, torture. Scheuer will not say if she agreed with her husbands ideas but said she debates him on some issues. Some details about Jen are available in the former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnettes (alias Mark Owen), book No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden. According to the book, she was recruited by the CIA out of college and spent years piecing together Bin Ladens whereabouts. (His marriage to a Muslim woman was the catalyst for this conversion.) If someone reading this was actually recruited tell us about your experience. Edit, She's a composite character-Maya is based on several female CIA officers who worked on the bin Laden case in the years before and after 9/11. Why did she accept? Bigelow and Boal's second collaboration, Zero Dark Thirty, spans a whole decade, from 9/11 to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and it centres on a CIA operative called Maya (Jessica . In the film, the CIA recruits Maya out of high school, and later it was deduced that the character is partly based on former CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer . By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Update, Jan. 16: While Cheque was named as a member of Seal Team 6, the government has never confirmed whether he was involved in the Bin Laden raid. Rather, those whose reasons are established at the outset are American torturers and civilians who accept or justify torture. The CIA had granted the filmmakers unprecedented access to agency officials, and outlets from NBC News to the New Yorker reported that Chastains character was patterned partially on Scheuer, citing her position but omitting her name because the agency said her work was classified. | Its a canny litmus test that embeds its coy ambiguities in its very form. Naw. In the 2012 Hollywood hit Zero Dark Thirty, a red-haired Central Intelligence Agency analyst played by Jessica Chastain travels to a secret CIA prison and watches a colleague waterboard a screaming al-Qaida suspect, then lock him in a box a little bigger than a mini-fridge, to make him talk. agent, Maya (Jessica Chastain), whose meticulous and obstinate investigation culminates in the military raid on bin Ladens compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that resulted in his death. Slates Emily Bazelon noted that he might most closely resemble Hassan Ghul, who told interrogators valuable information about Kuwaiti, and may have been subjected to some rough treatmentthough the C.I.A. I have watched this movie multiple times because there's so many pieces and they're mostly in the middle east with middle eastern names and I found I discovered something new every time I've watched it. 05/18/2014 10:08 Subject: Who is the real Maya in Zero Dark Thirty? In fact, the CIA reportedly gave Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow unprecedented access to information for the making of the film. With the exception of Bissonnette and Nicholas Cheque, who was killed in December 2012 during a rescue mission in Afghanistan, the squads members remain anonymous. Bazins doctrine took root not with the younger critics in his midst at Cahiers du Cinma, the future New Wave, but with later generations of filmmakersthose who, coming after the New Wave, couldnt outrun it or the history of cinema that it brought to the fore. It seems almost uncoincidental? The real reason any agency recruits this young is because they want a pure mind. The most difficult aspect of Zero Dark Thirty, the Kathryn Bigelow/Mark Boal dramatization of the ten year search for Osama bin Ladin, is not that the film depicts torture as a tool utilized by the United States of America, but that torture was used in reality, necessitating its appearance in fiction.The myth of American innocence is inexplicably powerful given the bulk of American history . A Senate investigation does not allege Scheuer personally tortured any suspects. 1. (Both names, of course, are pseudonyms.). Purpose of the making. The real agent is having more difficulties. Stills from Zero Dark Thirty by Jonathan Olley / 2012 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. the SETS were incredible. Her defenders say the operative has been treated unfairly, and even her critics acknowledge that her contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial. The character is played by Jessica Chastain. I know the CIA has like a "internship" program for high-school kids but you seek them out. Zero Dark Thirty was released just 19 months after the raid in Pakistan: It waded knowingly into a fraught slice of history just as that history was taking shape, and played a role, however hard . Something went wrong. ***MINIMAL SPOILERS*** Scheuer retired in 2021 as the Deputy Chief of Homeland and Strategic Threats, and in her subsequent interview (which was also the first interview she had ever done), she clarified that she had not been let go but had left the CIA on her own accord. The Zero Dark Thirty main character is thought to be based on an amalgam of CIA operatives, including Scheuer, though she was not central in the quest to hunt down Bin Laden. Alternatively, she could have joined the armed forces straight out of high school and then joined the CIA from there. Jessica Chastain who plays the CIA analyst is absolutely incredible. It's not the how in the question it is the "why". After The Hurt Locker's dethroning of Avatar for Best Picture in 2010, the stakes were high for Kathryn Bigelow to deliver with Zero Dark Thirty, a film that is as ambitious in scope and grand as The Hurt Locker was small and claustrophobic.Zero Dark Thirty was so big it had to fail. All rights reserved. What is a creepy fact about the human body? Some characters seem to be amalgamations of multiple real-life individuals as well. Because he was offering them vital intelligence that they had been seeking for nearly a decade. (Details about Maya were changed or eroded to protect her identity, which may account for the discrepancy between No Easy Day and Zero Dark Thirty on this score.) This is the way that all of the movies characters are depicted, and the choice isnt just a way of keeping the narrative energy juiced; its a fundamental matter of aesthetics, an element of an aesthetic ideology that, for all the primal pleasure afforded by the movie, leaves it less than an empty experienceturns it into a deceptive one.
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