F--K You, Zero Dark 30: F--k You, F--k Yu, F--k U

I am a supporter of Kathryn Bigelow. Anyone can tell you that women are vastly in the minority among major US film directors. I'm trying to think of some more, and I only come up with Nora Ephron, really. Unimpressive, right? Bigelow broke new ground in 2009, when she became the first woman to get a Best Director Oscar, as well as the first woman to get a DGA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film.

By all reports, The Hurt Locker (the film for which she won) is an amazing movie, and I'm sorry I haven't seen it yet. But that's not to say that I've liked all her work: 

• Strange Days was a complete clusterf--k of poorly-advised ideas (um, rape plays a huge part in that movie - including futuristic scifi innovations on rape). 
• Near Dark was a fantastic movie, and one of the best vampire pix ever, really, while 
• K-19: The Widowmaker bored me to tears, but I saw it ages ago and don't recall it well. 
• Point Break may not be a deep and wonderful movie, but it's a fun action macho-fest, and it's actually quite cool that a woman made it.

So why am I deeply upset about Zero Dark Thirty? Its quality seems high, given the overwhelming-positive critical response to this pic that will get a limited release on December 19th, then a wide release in mid-January 2012. The quickest way to explain my issues today is to simply state this: all proceeds should go to fund better medical and psychiatric treatment for every soldier deployed to Afghanistan, as the hunt for that loser is pretty much the cause of all this. Today, that's my end-point here...

This is so gratifying, I think it almost counts as masturbation.

Behind-the-scenes facts support my strong reaction: ZDL was originally a movie about the failed hunt to find a terrorist mastermind known as "Osama something-or-the-other." When actual events intervened and the real OBL was located and killed, the story was changed - from the failed search to the successful attack on that murdering zealot's Pakistani compound. So my problem is that this movie ignores all of the Americans, British, and other forces that have been hurt so badly in Afghanistan.

So many nice cars in the frame, it's a Bay film!

Many, many people have died or been permanently injured, physically and/or mentally, because they are members of various armed forces that were deployed to Afghanistan. There are many problems in that nation, and it contributes to worldwide misery - in the form of heroin and money that terrorists make off the sale of same - on a scale so vast that any nation has some interest in destroying those crops and giving the people who grow it a new way to earn money. That Osama guy is the reason those soldiers were deployed.

Nor is it stupid or wrong for these soldiers to be there, but the toll it has had is massive. And I can't ignore one big fact: a lot of modern media is centered on the "porn" version of various things. You get women's-lifestyle-porn in the form of two Sex and the City movies, you get violence-porn in the form of absurdist gun-fests like Gamer (the hero shoots a drawer open?) and the two Crank films, and you get torture-porn in the form both Hostel pix and Turistas and the Saw sequels and the like. Also: everything by Zack Snyder is porn.
Most everybody who isn't a neo-Nazi wants to punch Hitler in the face; I doubt few people are apathetic on that topic. Most everybody wants to be intimate with the most attractive person that they've ever seen - or to win the biggest award in whatever hobby or interest they have, and/or to achieve the absolute pinnacle of however they personally define the word "success." And tons and tons of people wanted to kill OBL with their own hands.

It therefore seems thoughtless and f--ked up and manipulative to get a movie - about 20 months after the real-life event - dedicated to the mission to kill the world's most-hunted terrorist. I have seen, on the street and in the news, people who walk around with shiny cyborg parts because they were ordered to help restore peace to a nation plagued by brutal combat since the 1979 Soviet invasion; I doubt any of them prefer their new appendages over the ones they lost. And I doubt most of them had much say in the orders they received or how they were carried out. And that's aside from the civilian casualties...

So how can any American studio or filmmaker just ignore such suffering and loss, all to give everyone the "strangle-Hitler-porn" that we all desire? Actually, maybe it's worse than that: maybe it's "patriot porn." In the face of such real tragedy, that is abhorrent in a very similar way to my documented hatred of films about September 11th, 2001. It all feels hollow and s---ty.

It might not be Ms. Bigelow's fault, entirely; many people have lauded The Hurt Locker specifically for putting a realistic (and high-quality) face on the trauma experienced by so many people deployed to Iraq. This doesn't mean that Kathryn is now required to do the same for the conflict in Afghanistan, either. But it does mean that she should be sensitive to the shallow, overtly-crowd-pandering concept at the center of the revised script she worked on. 

The death of a notorious vile loser like OBL is hardly the most important story to be told of the fallout of those September 2011 attacks. The real story is of the awful fates of both natives and foreigners in the Middle East and Western Asia. The idea that a studio will profit from this kill-real-evil-folks-porn is, to me, nauseating.

Actually, the only way I won't be vomitously-disgusted by the inevitable big box office figures for Zero Dark Thirty is if Annapurna Pictures and Columbia Pictures donate all their profits to make sure that any Afghanistan-deployed soldier - American or not - receives the support, care, and social reintegration that they so deeply deserve. Honestly - and not as a lawyer or a film-blogger, but as a person -  anything less feels a bit close to letting famous murderers profit off of the crime memoirs they write in jail. Those soldiers wouldn't be there, and the innocent civilians of various nations wouldn't have been hurt, if not for the hunt for a... I can't even come up with a curse that's sufficient...

This (and that post about Sept. 11th films) is as close as I think I'll ever come to writing a "personal politics" piece. It is true I haven't even seen ZDT. And some people may disagree over Kathryn Bigelow's intentions - they may be right - but this seems like a big no-brainer to me. Any difference of opinion is welcome...