I’m not going to claim that I personally killed Toby Keith, but he did die as I was working on this essay (and was using “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” as a sort of theme song to help calibrate my mood/thinking).

I’ve kind of been unconsciously dismissive of Kathryn Bigelow’s work for as long as I’ve been aware of her, because I associated her with Military Stuff, and I originally half-watched this movie a few years back, which made paying serious attention to it in this way an intriguing prospect. This essay took a while to finish, especially if you consider the initial paragraph I wrote last May.

One problem is that Zero Dark Thirty ended up being more relevant to present day serious stuff than I initially thought. And it also contains plenty of past day(?) serious stuff as well, which meant I spent more time than usual trying to make sure I wouldn’t completely disrespect all that. The subject matter was kind of unpleasant to engage with, but then, also, things kept happening there for a bit that I felt I needed to incorporate into the piece, and work just kept getting busier, and then I got COVID...

All of that has delayed an essay that was meant to be out in February to nearly May, and while I have ultimately “enjoyed” working on it (in one regard or another), I am starting to feel a little Maya-esque, in that my long-term relationship with this particular thing needs to end, for my sake. I went into it imagining a pretty tight, focused piece based heavily on some preconceived ideas about the movie’s artistic or political merits and ended up with something sprawling (again) because of all the complications, which included finding an opportunity for some self-reflection I hadn’t anticipated.

Finally, though, here’s the link. I’ll put a representative paragraph below, after the spoiler/content warning.

This essay contains full spoilers for the film and South Park episode in the title, partial spoilers for the South Park episode “Cripple Fight,” and some discussion of real-world events/morbidity.

As a fantasy of a Strong Woman, Maya (Jessica Chastain) is beautiful, driven, and very smart. In the historical fiction of Zero Dark Thirty, she’s nearly single-handedly responsible for pursuing a lead others are repeatedly dismissive of, and, like I said before, she kind of wills the outcome she wants into being. “We’re all smart,” says the director of the CIA (played by James Gandolfini) wryly at one point, when another man assesses Maya as smart like that’s a distinctive positive quality of hers. But that’s what we’re told—that Maya is just one among many. What we see is just Maya, singularly effective at her job in a classically heroic sort of way. An icon of competence and forward momentum galvanizing a system that had kind of stalled before her arrival. It’s maybe a shock to the (viewer’s) system for her to be out of the way for such a large chunk of the film when focus decidedly shifts to the SEALs as the active players because she feels like the one capable person on earth so much of the time. Critically, Maya is pretty openly dismissive of them when they’re first brought into the fold (regarding the location of Osama bin Laden) during preparations to take some sort of action. Without any sense that she’s joking, she says, “Quite frankly, I didn’t even want to use you guys, with your dip and your Velcro and all your gear bullshit. I wanted to drop a bomb, but people didn’t believe in this lead enough to drop a bomb, so they’re using you guys as canaries. . . .” And isn’t that just my own superior, dismissive attitude reflected back at me?