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" Zero Dark Thirty arrives in theaters this week wreathed in several controversies. The strangest one was started by Bret Easton Ellis claiming that the film&amp;#039;s director Kathryn Bigelow is overrated as a director because she&amp;#039;s a &amp;quot;hot woman.&amp;quot; He himself, in one of the weirder pieces of writing to appear this year, has published an extended self-criticism of his own Twitter feed on The Daily Beast. A simple apology would have been sufficient. A more serious controversy has followed the representation of torture in the film, which actually moved from the incestuous world of film criticism to Congress. Both controversies are kind of fake, though. They were begun by people who hadn&amp;#039;t seen the new film. But their existence also demonstrates how upsetting Zero Dark Thirty is, and not just in what it shows, but in the way it shows it.  You probably already know that Zero Dark Thirty has been drawn from extensive interviews with the participants in the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The film is something entirely new, so far as I know \u2014 an attempt to reimagine the recent past as exactly as possible. It imitates the long-form magazine story, while remaining pure thriller. It&amp;#039;s the level of detail that&amp;#039;s so engrossing. When Maya, the main character, arrives in Pakistan, her desk is dusty and there is an antiquated computer on it. I am one-hundred-percent sure both of those details were carefully culled from an interviewer repeatedly obsessing over tiny questions. That&amp;#039;s how you get those little details that make a story sing. This film is full of them. It&amp;#039;s the determination to remain scrupulously correct to the story that both makes this film what it is and has also sparked the controversies. Good guys are not supposed to torture. Or at least not like this. Because the details of how the torture works in these secret CIA prisons are not out of 24. It&amp;#039;s not clean and modern and in service of a higher purpose; it&amp;#039;s out of medieval Europe and it&amp;#039;s dirty and corrupt. You will not ask yourself whether waterboarding is torture, or whether stress positions should be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions after watching this film. Nonetheless, the people committing the brutalities are the heroes. This has led some critics to suggest that Bigelow is pro-torture, which is a gross oversimplification. Real people in real situations are complex, a mix of good and evil. The juxtaposition can be horrible and mystifying, but it is good for us to reckon with the horror and the mystery of real people. That&amp;#039;s the joy of great magazine writing \u2014 the surprise of real life. Real life is endlessly new.  What is amazing is how the portion of real life captured in Zero Dark Thirty, while totally modern and new, fits perfectly into one of the oldest traditions of storytelling. The movie is really a revenge tragedy, like Hamlet or like the great gangster movies. It just happens to be true. In revenge tragedies, both classical and modern, the revenger usually ends up dying. The achievement of revenge is a disaster for everybody. Hamlet must die as much as King Claudius. This same problem runs through Zero Dark Thirty, though surreptitiously. As the film grinds on toward the assassination, the question grows more pressing: Was killing OBL worth it? The symbolic weight put on his head has been vast. As several characters point out in the movie, his strategic value when he died was negligible; he was in hiding for four years before he was killed. The dangers involved in the actual business of his assassination were enormous. The recreation of the mission itself is incredibly detailed, and shows just how fraught with risk it was. Certainly, the assassination is what the American people wanted. Not the war in Iraq nor the war in Afghanistan. They wanted OBL dead. Maya, who, according to her superiors, is &amp;quot;a killer,&amp;quot; believes that she has survived a whole barrage of terrorist attacks so that she could kill the sheikh. She is crazed by her mission. As such, she stands in for the American public. During the recent election, the fact that Obama had been involved in bin Laden&amp;#039;s assassination essentially ended all questions about his foreign policy strengths. Romney was unable to dent him on that issue, despite drone killings, the failure to shut down Guantanamo Bay, the mass deaths in Syria, and turmoil in the Middle East. None of it could touch him because he helped kill Osama.  The film&amp;#039;s ending is particularly poignant. They kill Osama and show Maya the body, and she starts weeping. As she boards a military plane to return home, the pilot asks her, &amp;quot;So where do you want to go?&amp;quot; and she starts crying again. She has no idea.  It&amp;#039;s a good question. Outside of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Obama&amp;#039;s foreign policy has been oddly chaotic, a bizarre fusion of moralism and good intentions with the almost casual violation of national sovereignty, international law, and respect for American civil rights. Maya&amp;#039;s question is a question that Obama has not managed to come up with an answer for yet. Osama bin Laden&amp;#039;s dead. Fine. Where do you want to go now? Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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