Suppressing Zero Dark Thirty

From Mark Tapson, at FrontPage Magazine:

For anyone still skeptical of just how influential Hollywood’s movie messages are in the cultural and political realms, one need look no further than the political football called Zero Dark Thirty.

After appearing in limited release late last year, the film Zero Dark Thirty goes wide in theaters this month. Created by screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow, the filmmakers behind the 2010 Oscar-winner The Hurt Locker about a bomb-defusing adrenaline junkie in the Iraq war, ZD30 dramatizes an even more controversial subject – the real-life takedown of elusive terrorist icon Osama bin Laden.

Once word got out earlier last year that the Obama administration had granted the filmmakers access to classified information about the military operation, and that the film would be released just prior to the presidential election, conservatives cried foul and worried that the movie would exaggerate Obama’s role and serve essentially as an extended campaign ad for him. This concern was understandable considering that Hollywood was already doing everything in its power, onscreen and off, to reelect their Messiah. The left in turn dismissed these complaints as Republican paranoia.

But it didn’t quite turn out that way. First, the filmmakers avoided any seeming political impropriety by releasing the film after the election. Then, once the movie hit theaters and began garnering reviews, the left was aghast to discover that it opened with a graphic and extended scene depicting the waterboarding of a terrorist suspect, a scene that seemed to affirm what many conservatives had been insisting all along – that the hotly debated enhanced interrogation under President George W. Bush produced results that contributed to the intelligence which ultimately led us to bin Laden.

Suddenly, left-leaning reviewers were falling all over themselves to denounce the film. The Huffington Post dismissed it as “torture hagiography” and declared that the movie’s message “corrodes our culture.” Meanwhile, reviewers on the right were embracing it...

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