Via: Tuned In
Does Zero Dark Thirty glorify torture? I cannot tell you. I haven’t seen it yet. Nor—at least as of his writing of his column Monday—had Glenn Greenwald. But Greenwald, writing in the Guardian, became a prominent voice attacking Kathryn Bigelow’s movie for an extended sequence of torture that—some people who have seen the movie say—the film implies helped the U.S. find and kill Osama Bin Laden. (Not everyone who’s seen the movie agrees with this interpretation.) Greenwald, who has written passionately for years about civil liberties and the war on terror, says the movie “propagandizes the public to favorably view clear war crimes by the US government, based on pure falsehoods.” Not wanting to make one more sweeping judgment of a movie on the basis of a few other people’s viewing, I’m going to leave the glorifying-torture question there. But I can talk about Greenwald’s larger argument, which says a lot about how different kind of people view art, how they judge it and what they think its purpose is. Namely: is it possible that a movie, a book or any other creative work can be deceptive, misleading, propagandistic, even immoral, yet still be great? “This, of course, is a long-standing debate about film specifically and art generally,” Greenwald notes in his column. But it’s a debate that seems to be resolved pretty plainly in his mind: no, it can’t. A good chunk of his critique is not just aimed at Zero Dark Thirty and secondhand reports of its content. It’s also about the critics who have given it rave reviews, even when, like David Edelstein of New York magazine, they criticized its depiction of torture (“borderline fascistic… an unholy masterwork“). Greenwald objects, as much as anything, to “the reaction to the film: the way in which its fabrications about the benefits of torture seem to be no impediment to its being adored and celebrated.” Is it really so difficult to accept that one failing of an artwork—if Greenwald’s description is in fact correct—does not disqualify it for being praised for
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: December 11th, 2012
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