Hugo Rifkind
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Depressingly enough, people are talking about torture now not because of Obama’s failure or even torture itself, but because of Zero Dark Thirty, a film by Kathryn Bigelow in which folk get tortured for America before Osama bin Laden gets got. This is depressing, actually, from two wholly different directions, because Jack Bauer was merrily torturing people for America years ago and you’d think we could have done all this then. But maybe leftist opinion writers don’t like admitting they watch 24.
The criticism, anyway, is that Bigelow suggests that torture (in the state-sanctioned forms of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and locking people in small boxes) led directly to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. As the CIA has declared explicitly that it didn’t, the theory goes, this is a blatant and shameful attempt to rationalise torture and, ultimately, to excuse and advocate it.
Weird argument, this. In essence, it boils down to saying, ‘You’re claiming torture is right because it works, but actually torture is wrong, because it doesn’t work.’ But surely — surely — if torture is wrong, then it is wrong whether it works or not. Bizarrely, it’s Bigelow’s critics who are providing the rousing defence of torture here, by suggesting that if it had led to getting bin Laden, it would have been fine. Frankly, I’m not at all sure they’ve really thought this through.
The conviction, of those against it, that torture doesn’t work is a cop-out. It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it sort of argument; a wormish wriggle to avoid complicity in anything at all. In fact, you can’t possibly know whether it works. For those truly against, the only honest stance is one that admits to weighing up the values of their society and the lives of the people who live in it, and deciding that those values weigh more. And I know that this isn’t a terribly satisfactory position, and I know that, for the individual, it’s probably rather contingent upon not having had somebody you dearly love blown up by a terrorist bomb. But I’m afraid it’s the only solid place to stand.
Zero Dark Thirty is, in fact, the opposite of the film its detractors claim it to be, to the extent that I wonder how many of them have even seen it. I mean, sure, maybe it does leave you assuming that the torture scenes in the first half have a stronger link to the gunplay of the second that it frankly ought. But America’s war on terror did involve doing this stuff to people, whether it happened in this particular instance or not. This is a film heavy with shots of pale, terrified young men, smeared with blood, a long way from the sun, and probably never getting out. Bigelow’s gaze at the torture is unflinching, from the acts themselves to — almost more upsettingly — the horrifying charisma and even tenderness of the truly excellent torturer. And her message is that this is what you get.
When you put the old rules on hold, when you get down in the gutter to grapple with the dirt, this is what you get. You stop being pure and you stop being holy. Your victories, whether they come about as a result of all this or not, become compromised. Your morality becomes tangled, your certainties ebb, your assailants become your victims. Your people become complicit, your objective values become subjective and you, frankly, become a mess.
What Bigelow doesn’t suggest, at any point, is that all this is worth it. Indeed, I’d say she goes quite a long way in suggesting the reverse. How dim some people are. How very, very dim.
It’s a bummer, no question, about HMV. Four thousand jobs are at risk, and I’ve friends among them, so I’m keen not to be flip. But there’s something curious, all the same, about our budding nostalgia for high-street retail chains. We’ve had Jessops and HMV falter already this year, and some suggest there will be many more to follow, tumbling like dominoes now the banks have the balls to pull the plugs.
Sad, yes. The thing is, though, didn’t we all used to hate high-street retail chains? Weren’t they the things that did for our little local record shops and bookshops and all the rest? The Panglossian in me would like to think that, in the future, our chains will all be online, and our streets will bustle with the wares of picturesque smallholders. He’s wrong, though. It’ll be estate agents and Poundland.
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