Argo and Zero Dark Thirty: Skewed Narratives

Both these movies were nominated by the Oscar committee, which largely being American explains the bias towards the “save the world” complex inherent to American psyche. In terms of the pure craft of movie making, both these movies are good, but are they great enough to warrant Oscar nominations?

Argo

Let’s take a look at Argo. As I was at Warner Bros, I had the chance to get a preview of the movie before the premiere so was shielded from all the award hype surrounding the movie as soon as it was released. I also had no context about the Iran situation; even then I found the 10 second intro cringe worthy. Did we really need a crash course in Iranian history which can never do justice to the complexities of the political scene. It’s over simplification only adds to the confusion and stereotype of the western world’s perception of “middle eastern” world. A clever movie would have set the context without doing a voice over which seems like a cheap trick to evade narrative complexities.

For people who haven’t seen the movie, Argo tells the story of the daring escape of the members of the US Embassy in Iran thanks to an audacious plan plotted by the CIA. The movie is homage Tony Mendez and his brave effort to save these people and in that it serves its purpose. He did his job and he did it well, and it was probably not his place to question why.

If this was a fictional world and this was a fictional story, this movie made an excellent edge-of-the-seat thriller. Unfortunately it is not. It retells events that are about real people and when you retell a story the danger of misrepresentation and re-writing history is very large. For instance, the movie portrays with accuracy Iran’s anger with US, but does not adequately explain the cause of the hatred or how many years it had festered. It does however focus on footage of Burkha clad women totting guns, angry mobs trampling the American flag in an Islamic state. It reinforces the image that “Americans good and innocent, Arabs bad and violent”. It also neutralizes the role that the Canadian Embassy played in harboring the US citizens and in effect saving their lives.

Of course, there is no denying the brilliancy of the trick that CIA pulled off while helping these people escape but it’s not possible to look at that incident within that micro context. Whether such tricks are often played by the CIA on unsuspecting less criminal governments of the world is another question for another day. Ignoring all the missteps in messaging, the direction is great thought it sometimes gives in to Hollywood ticket-selling clichés – for instance the Iranian Guards driving the jeep over the runway to stop an outgoing flight. Wouldn’t it be more logical to have the ATC stop the plane?

As I said earlier, if you were to ignore all these nagging elements that pop up in your brain, you are going to like the movie. But an Oscar? Really? For a story half told?

Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty is somehow less offensive to me as a movie than Argo though it may have garnered more criticism. My first impressions were that this was more of grounds up approach to the events that transpired and led to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. The movie opens up with the audio footage of 9/11.

Now there has been a lot of debate around this 10 seconds of audio clip as to how it’s goal is to manipulate viewers into having the sympathetic reaction to the war on Afghanistan. I personally thought it was to set context of what led to the capture of Osama Bin Laden rather than evoke sympathy or rage.

I won’t delve into the story in detail except for saying it focuses on the life of the CIA Agent Maya (fictional representation of the real CIA agent who led the investigation) as she becomes single-mindedly obsessed with the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.  Agent Maya is a bit of a newbie when she moves to Pakistan to become part of the Find-Osama team and we get a glimpse of her humane side as she feels repulsion for the methods employed by the CIA to get information from suspects. While in my opinion, the movie makes no stand on torture, it does portray that in this specific case torture has given results. It’s also interesting to know how Maya’s repulsion to torture is so short termed and how she accepts it as part of the CIA operating manual and goes with it.

I appreciate that a women is a doing a job popularly assumed to be a man’s domain, and just telling this version of the Obama hunt is enough exposure to the fact. There is this one really weird  scene, where Agent Maya is in a meeting with senior CIA officers proposing the strategy to capture Osama from his fortified house and one of them asks her “And who are you?” and she replies “I am the motherfucker who found him”. And everyone stares at her  as if it’s really unusual to hear a woman  use a bad word. It takes back the feminist message several steps back – is it so unusual that a 21^st century woman swears in front of men that it requires a movie scene? Or that even a woman of her intelligence and capability has to swear and become “one of the men” to be taken seriously? Not entirely sure what was the subtext of the scene.

I also in general found annoying was CIA’s sense of righteousness in its pursuit of Taliban and how soon it turns into an adrenaline-jacking man-hunt.

Apart from those few things the movie was a better experience than Argo for me as it felt less propagandist.

Some thought provoking articles on the same subject

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/201311713912837487.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/torture-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty.html

For more movie reviews, go here