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This chapter discusses Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012), drawing from its critical reception and existing scholarship on torture, pain and its representational challenges, such as Elaine Scarry, Jennifer Ballengee, and Page DuBois. Detailed textual analysis demonstrates how the film is strategically laced with ambivalences, which helps us understand why its position on torture has been subject to so much controversy. Further analytical emphasis is given to the alliance of documentary and fictional aesthetic and the kind of cinematic experience generated through the film’s protagonist as affective proxy for the audience.

This chapter develops a democratic approach to justice by, first, more deeply exploring the figure of “the belated public” and the kind of democratic politics it opens up. Second, Maxwell shows how the politics of lost causes offers an alternative perspective on a contemporary public trials moment: the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the trials (or lack thereof) for other alleged terrorists. Maxwell suggests that the agonistic perspective cultivated by lost cause narratives helps reveal the insufficiency of the dominant “law versus exigency” framing to capture the problem of justice in Mohammed’s trial, especially the injustice of the American use of torture. Reading Zero Dark Thirty as a lost cause narrative of the Mohammed trial (and other detainee trials), Maxwell argues for considering alternative possibilities for democratic responsiveness to the failures of justice in the Mohammed trial—for example, calling for a truth commission.

This chapter examines the role of torture and biometrics, biopower, and terrorism in Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the Bourne films (2002–2012), and Homeland (2011–present). Zero Dark Thirty covers the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks. It begins with the premise that biometrics and torture are ways to discover truth. Meanwhile, the Bourne films take up an ambiguous relationship to the ideology of biopower. The hero of the Bourne films struggles against the forces of biopower, and in the end, biopower is unable to control him fully. Lastly, the thrust of Homeland is akin to 24 (2001–2010) in that the CIA is working to stop attacks by Islamic extremists on American soil. The series is about patriotism, but also about America's extreme anxiety over its changing role in the world, and its understanding of how to approach terrorism.

In Chapter Two "Responding to realities or telling the same old story? Mixing real-world and mythic resonances in The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012)" Geoff King also explores the specificity of post-9/11 American film by situating his two case studies in a rich cultural and historical landscape. As he argued in his seminal Spectacular Visions: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (2000), King maintains than many American films can be read as simultaneously of their time and as a part of the American mythological tradition. While the Western genre is long gone as a cultural force, traces of its DNA remains embodied in many contemporary American films, and both The Kingdom and Zero Dark Thirty demonstrate the efficacy of the cinematic medium to embody cultural understandings of the 'War on Terror' era at the same time as they evoke the tropes of the American frontier narrative, despite being set very firmly in the contemporary Middle East. Like American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty proved to be one of the most culturally resonant films of the period, but King largely sidesteps the well-travelled debate about whether the film endorses torture or not in favour of a detailed reading of how Bigelow's affectual drama (and also Peter Berg's The Kingdom) imposes fictional or mythic-ideological frameworks onto their real-world narratives (see Westwell, McSweeney, Chaudhuri).

This chapter elaborates the book’s argument about morality and ethics by discussing documentaries and fictional dramas about torture and the ‘War on Terror’, including Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008). It argues that Zero Dark Thirty adheres to a moral script about 9/11 and its aftermath, justifying the self-appointed forces of good going over to ‘the dark side’. By constructing such a moral universe, the film helps to normalise torture and other illicit practices, making them acceptable. Taxi to the Dark Side creates another kind of moral universe, inspiring pity for the dark side’s victims and outrage towards the policy’s architects. However, Standard Operating Procedure, though criticised for its lack of moral perspective, stands out as the most ‘ethical’ of these films, as it engages us at multiple, sensory levels and explores how moral norms are reconstructed in the ‘atrocity-producing situation’.

This chapter considers the question of why Osama bin Laden's death did not seem to have the impact that was expected from the largest and most expensive manhunt in history. It looks at the debate about Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the film that chronicled the hunt and killing of bin Laden. The film's perspective is unmistakably American and Western, with assumptions that audiences would already know the back-story about who bin Laden is, why the U.S. government invested so much in finding him, and why his death should be an event for celebration. What is remarkable about the debates, the reviews, and the discussions about Zero Dark Thirty, however, is that they mimic cultural discourses that arose in the decade since 9/11 in an elusive dance with Osama bin Laden.

This chapter studies the place of 9/11 in history. The account of World War II found in the film The Good German (2006) demonstrates the desire to seek out complex and critical counter-histories through which to reframe the experience of 9/11. The complex geopolitical allegiances and ethically charged scenarios shown in The Good German serve to model the historical intricacies of self-interested US involvement in the Middle East. Zero Dark Thirty, which recounts the hunt for, and killing of, Osama bin Laden, appears to offer a definitive summation of a complex and contested history in bringing together a range of locations, including torture chambers at “black sites” around the world, well-appointed CIA briefing rooms in Washington, DC, embattled US military bases in Afghanistan, and dangerous Pakistani cities.

This chapter examines an episode from the popular British television show Spooks/MI-5 entitled “Who Guards the Guards?” (2004) and the films Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. It reveals the importance of the history of racial slavery and incarceration to current imaginings of Islamists in cultural production in the UK and the US. The imagined power of Islamists functions to disappear the historical violence of Empire, as the continuity of practices that date to racial slavery and to the eradication of the Native Americans is erased. Practices fundamental to the making of colonial modernity are redeemed, their history effaced, by making them seem only products of the War on Terror.

This chapter details how sound effects are used by combat filmmakers to tell coherent battlefield stories. The narrative potential of individual weapons’ sounds—such as grenades and RPGs—and the use of sound effects to direct the audience to particular plot, character, or thematic ends is described in extended analyses of battle sequences from The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Zero Dark Thirty, and Platoon. Sound effects prove important to directing viewer engagement during combat scenes along a spectrum between immersion in the immediate danger of battle and reflection on the experience of war for the individual soldier. Episodes of subjective sound prove important, as does the use of explosions to punctuate combat narratives and effect sonic transitions. In all these ways, sound effects work towards the making of meaning in serious Hollywood war films. Select battle scenes using music are also discussed.