Zero Dark Thirty: A Filmmaker's Notion

According to the PBS program Frontline in 2015 (and what appeared in 2012/13 to be the majority of film, journalistic and political critics), the film Zero Dark Thirty was uniquely responsible for putting forward the CIA’s version of the story that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden and in so doing made sure that the effectiveness of the EIT program was firmly fixed in the minds of millions of Americans. This article uses a semiotic approach to explore the textual aspects of Zero Dark Thirty in order to review the director Kathryn Bigelow’s complex messages which may also be providing a viewpoint within the film which examines the immorality of such torture techniques and supports the idea that where torture is concerned the ends can never justify the means.

Book Description: Inspired by Michel Foucault’s examination of state subjugation and control, this book considers post-structuralist notions of the ‘political technology of the body’ and 'the spectacle of the scaffold' as a means to analyse cinematic representations of politically-motivated persecution and bodily repression. Through a critique of sovereign power and its application of punishment ‘for transgressions against the state’, the collected works, herein, assess the polticised-body via a range of cinematic perspectives. Imagery, character construction and narrative devices are examined in their account of hegemonic-sanctioned torture and suppression as a means to a political outcome. Screening The Tortured Body: The Cinema as Scaffold elicits philosophical and cultural accounts of the ‘retrained’ body to deliberate on a range of politicised films and filmmakers whose narratives and mise-en-scène techniques critique corporeal subjugation by authoritarian factions.