I saw Zero Dark Thirty the other day. It’s not a passive experience. I’ll let others debate the issues of composite characters and the role of the euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But some things, we’re graphically reminded, are more acceptable in hypothetical scenarios.
Zero Dark Thirty offers us an alternate moral prism for the occasion. Like picking up your 3-D glasses before Life of Pi. We’re reminded (initially via 9/11 audio) that there is evil in the world. It’s no quantum leap to acknowledge that you don’t successfully confront and conquer it by playing the American exceptionalism card.
You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. You need snipers. You need kill-or-be-killed mentalities. You need bad-cop interrogators.
But you don’t empathize with these Americans. In fact, you don’t particularly like them, however necessary their calling, however effective their work.
They operate in high-intensity, amoral, zero-sum contexts. The more their humanity encroaches, the less effective they will be. There are no moral victories. We’re used to respecting and liking the people who fight for America. But we’d prefer not to know who the snipers are and who comprises an assassination team.
Once we know, we respect what they do because it has to be done–and done well. But we don’t particularly like what we respect.