Bigelow: Zero Dark Thirty (2013)

In some ways, the capture and execution of Osama bin Laden was the most overdetermined event in recent American history, so it’s quite striking that Kathryn Bigelow’s account of the ten-year manhunt is shorn of any direct commentary or interpretation. Instead, everything is subsumed into procedure – although the film’s nominally a character study of Maya Lambert (Jessica Chastain), the CIA operative who (in this version at least) single-handedly took down bin Laden, Maya doesn’t have much of an existence outside the procedures she follows, just as the impressive ensemble cast only really exists as a kind of elongation of the endless, impenetrable flow of data that she pursues. Far from being a heroic ideologue, Maya’s mantra is that “procedures only work if you follow them every time” – and the only time that the film approaches anything like an affective crisis is when she doesn’t follow procedure, leading to the infamous Camp Chapman attack. By the same token, Maya’s strategy involves following chains of communication, supposedly minor or merely connective nodes in information networks, rather than resorting to bribery, or torture – which is not to say that she doesn’t engage in torture, but that, once again, it’s treated procedurally. That makes complaints about whether the film endorses torture a little beside the point – it feels more like a critique of a system in which torture has been proceduralised, in which the very ideological tools for critiquing torture have been co-opted in the name of bureaucratic protocol, collapsing ethics into expediency. In that sense, the horror of the film is that there is no horror, or that horror has been disavowed and distributed evenly across the entire procedurescape, as Maya combs each "disappeared one” for a catharsis that’s never going to come. That makes for a stunning vision of the informational fronts and fringes of the US empire, the new datasphere of millennial warfare. And that, in turn, is perfectly attuned to the way Bigelow’s camera becomes a collector of data almost despite itself, imperceptibly converging with all the devices that Maya uses to attain her target, from shaky aerial photographs to the lurid green of night goggles, fluorescent and grainy at the same time. Bigelow’s films often work best when the camera is immersed in its own informational, forensic excess in just this way – and that’s a perfect fit with the manifold black sites and stealthscapes evoked here, by a director acting and astounding at the very height of her powers.