Introduction: Cognitive, Educational, and Developmental Value: Cognitive, Educational, and Developmental Value

This chapter considers post-9/11 depictions of US torture offered in dramatic film. It shows how recent films instruct the public, including potential practitioners of interrogation, on the nature of torture and in the beliefs that seem to provide torture with a justification. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which dramatizes the pursuit and assassination of Osama Bin Laden, staged CIA interrogations and, in particular, its use of waterboarding. Both the torture archetype and the ticking time bomb scenario lead the public, as well as the media and politicians who invoke it, to misrecognize torture. Despite its initial ambivalence, Zero Dark Thirty redeems torture and its torturers, placing the act within a narrative that justifies torture and effaces its harms. But even ostensibly anti-torture films can affirm the torture archetype. Camp X-Ray illuminates the gradual processes through which “normal” people become socialized into the institutional reality of torture.