'Zero Dark Thirty': Co-Written by the CIA

While she was promoting Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow was in the habit of confirming that she adopted “a journalistic approach to film.” In light of a new declassified document revealed yesterday, we must come to the conclusion that her concept of journalistic ethics is limited. Indeed, I wonder how many newspapers would hire someone who allowed their sources to rewrite an article about them.

This is, however, what happened during the production of her movie, during which the CIA demanded and was granted permission for several script modifications of original scenarios written by Mark Boal. The collaboration between the creators of Zero Dark Thirty and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is well-known; we were not, however, aware that the agency also succeeded in exerting a direct influence over its artistic process. In other words, we are learning today that the most critically acclaimed movie of 2012 is essentially a propaganda film.

It was Adrian Chen of Gawker who obtained the approximately two-page memo from the CIA by invoking the Freedom of Information Act. The memo enlightens us to the fact that the protagonist, CIA agent Maya (played by Jessica Chastain), participated directly in the torture of the prisoner in the original script.

Chen continues: “According to the memo, ‘Boal said he would fix this.’” Indeed, in the final film Maya doesn’t touch the prisoner during this scene. The decision to have Maya abstain from the torture was as significant artistically as it was factually. Her ambivalence was a key part of her character, and critics picked over every detail of the torture scenes, including Maya’s status as an observer rather than a participant, for meaning in the debate over torture that the movie sparked.

“Wired’s Spencer Ackerman, for example, interpreted Maya’s complex relationship to onscreen torture as a sign of a complex inner life: ‘Maya is … a cipher: She is shown coming close to puking when observing the torture. But she also doesn’t object to it.’ Of course, the scene reads a bit differently if the choice was dictated by a CIA propaganda officer.”

Other modifications of the original include an interrogation scene in which a dog is seen intimidating a detainee, and a wild party in Islamabad in which an officer is featured shooting into the air with an AK-47. These elements were completely removed from the script because they presented the agency in a bad light, not because they never happened. In short, the memo shows that the CIA was very satisfied with its relationship with Boal, affirming about the screenwriter: “He’s agreed to share scripts and details about the movie with us so we’re absolutely comfortable with what he will be showing.”

Perhaps I am naive, but doesn’t a movie that claims to be serious in its examination of an organization that has been immersed in one of the most hotly debated controversies of the last decade lose all its credibility when the organization in question admits that they are “absolutely comfortable” with the film? For the Boal-Bigelow duo, compromising their artistic integrity in this way was a reasonable price to pay on the road to glory. It’s their choice. What makes me uncomfortable, on the other hand, are all the fans and critics that will continue to regard Zero Dark Thirty solely as a piece of cinema.