As far as I know, this is the first Kathryn Bigelow film I’ve seen. I enjoyed it throughout it’s 2hr and 31 minute runtime, but it’s left me questioning why I should enjoy a film like this.
The ‘highlight’ of the film for me was a scene in which a CIA operative has summoned a doctor, who operates closely with Al Qaeda’s top brass, to a military base. There’s a long build up of tension before he sets off a bomb and kills 22 people. It’s a great bit of film making but I’m just not sure if these real deaths should, or even could be made ‘entertaining’
I’m actually struggling to identify why I feel like there’s something awry here. Maybe what disturbs me is that I knew what was going to happen through cinematic cues in the soundtrack, and through lingering shots of the car through a long lens, maybe it’s a recognition of the sequence being doctored to provoke emotions and being used as a plot device. The entertainment factor of viewing this material is kind of dissonant to the tragedy.
But what’s the alternative? I’m not sure how I’d go about recreating a mass murder on film. Sure you can get philosophical, if we argue that any amount of recreated suffering is immoral, then all non-fiction films would have to be condemned. Even fictionalised suffering could, and probably does mimic real suffering to some extent.
But one of the main purposes of theatre is to go on an emotional journey in a context without stakes. If empathising is part of ‘entertainment’, then watching people suffer on screen doesn’t seem as bad anymore, even if the characters are representing real people. Oh god, maybe even empathising is a selfish thing to do!
But you can still be entertained by other aspects of cinema, could all of them have an empathetic purpose, or could a few be superficial? If your Zero Dark Thirty experience is improved by a superficial element put in the film by Kathryn Beaverhoe on purpose would that be immoral?
If the answer’s yes then that all seems to depend on a causal connection between the real event, the dramatised event, and your experience. If your experience had ‘little’ resemblance to the real event, and there is a causal chain between them, like I’ve shown, then it seems like either the film has misled you, or you have misrepresented/ mistranslated it.
But even if that has happened, I don’t really see any moral consequence, so long as everyone is not intentionally misleading (which is a whole other issue.) I.e. so long as Kathryn Bungalow and her team didn’t stop short of, or extend the truth deliberately. But with that comes more and more questions about what authentic expression is and on the other hand, what is allowed to be exaggerated or emphasized. Is it all just 1 big lie ?!??!
I haven’t actually solved anything here I’ve just asked a lot of questions, shit.
Coming back to the nasty feeling I felt when watching that scene again though. I could probably describe that as like whiplash. I was engrossed by the situation, Kathryn Drumsolo had convinced some part of my brain that what was going on was actually happening, then as the shock waves ripple over the desert I woke up and felt manipulated, these are just actors, I’m not dead at all, you lied to me. But I suppose, to end this train-wreck of a blog post on the most highfalutin note possible, the best thing you can hope for in a film is a convincing lie.
ideaskip 