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Zero Dark Thirty, while a masterpiece, is an oddity to me.

It should be a chest thumping, beer-bashing moment of American pride. I mean, we got revenge on Usama Bin Laden, the guy who killed 3,000 people in cold blood.

Instead the movie ends with Maya crying in an airplane, not able to tell the pilot where she wants to go.

It also shows in brutal detail the tactics used to glean information from detainees. Things like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, dog collars, and little wooden boxes.

What is this movie trying to say?

Is it an anti-war film? Is it an anti-USA film? Is it for or against the tactics we used to glean important information about Usama Bin Laden?

I think like many truly great films, it lets the audience decide.

The point of the movie, though, is deeper than that.

Zero Dark Thirty is about Maya, and her obsession with finding Bin Laden.

On a superficial level, Zero Dark Thirty is about how fighting an enemy this evil strips away your humanity.

On a deeper level, this film is about the cost of seeking revenge.

On the deepest level, though, Zero Dark Thirty is about obsession. What do you give up when you let a singular task consume you, and can there be a meaningful life afterwards?

The film communicates all these messages with a couple subtle images and scenes.

Let’s talk about them.

Before we do, if you want the video version of this article, watch it here.

At the 36 minute mark, we’re presented with a seemingly meaningless scene that actually has mountains of implications.

Dan stands outside a cage of monkeys eating an ice cream cone. He gives the monkeys a little bit of it, letting them take it with their bare hands.

Then, when he’s not paying attention, one of the monkeys steals the entire cone.

Dan laughs at first, then walks off, disappointed.

So this is a masterpiece of a movie. Why are we spending thirty seconds of the runtime showing Dan feeding monkeys?

Because the film’s trying to say something here.

For me, the ice cream cone represents Dan’s humanity.

The monkeys and the cage represent his work—which is breaking the detainees in his care.

Ice cream, in general, represents happiness. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a little kid or Joe Biden, everybody loves it. It’s essence is pureness and goodness.

Ice cream is a great visual metaphor for humanity here.

Dan, when he took this job, probably had a lot of his humanity in tact. But it’s obvious how torturing people stole that humanity from him little by little until his work reached out from the darkness and stole it all in one fell snatch.

There is no happy ending in this line of work. 

Dan is a wildly fascinating character. He does horrible things, but you never get the sense he’s enjoying any of this. He wants the detainees to break as quickly as possible. He commends their strength, is happy when they tell the truth, and tries to convince himself he’s still a good person by giving them the odd drink and solid meal.

But despite Dan’s best intentions, he’s left as a shell of himself. Like the monkeys stealing his ice cream, he underestimated how sinister his work really was. 

It took everything from him.

Just eight minutes later, at the 44 minute mark, he confesses to Maya that he’s getting out and going to Washington.

“I’ve seen too many guys naked,” he says.

Then Dan says something that’s the key to all of this.

“They killed my monkeys. Some bullshit about escaping, can you believe that?”

This whole time, even Dan thought that the USA would eventually treat these detainees with respect and care after they broke. When he finds out they coldly killed his monkeys—a representation of the detainees—he’s disillusioned by how ruthless the USA really is, questions his work, and gets out immediately.

What makes it even worse is that later, in exchange for $400,000 to bribe a contact in Kuwait, Dan agrees to take the fall for the detainee program. His country hired him for a job, that job stole his humanity, and then they threw him under the bus.

Let’s put one more nail in the coffin of this message.

Maya calls Dan to talk about Abu Achmed at the 68 minute mark, and in a fleeting moment, he looks at his reflection in the glass.

We see a man in a suit, with slicked-back hair, who’s reflection is split in two. A guy who being asked to return to his old life for a moment to get Maya the phone number she needs.

The reflection split shows the ghost of his past work is following him around, no matter how much he tries to put on a new suit and just move on.

These images prove my point that Zero Dark Thirty is in part about how fighting an enemy this evil inevitably strips away your humanity.

Zero Dark Thirty shows an unbelievable amount of people smoking cigarettes. 

Dan smokes. Jessica smokes. Ammar smokes. The detainees smoke. Even the guy who straps a bomb to a dude’s leg smokes. 

Why so many cigarettes?

Because they’re the perfect metaphor for showcasing how corruptive this work can be.

And what is this work, exactly? 

It’s revenge. Plain and simple. Can you blame us?

Zero Dark Thirty starts off in the pitch black with a montage of call recordings from 9/11. In one call we hear a lady panicking telling the operator she knows she’s going to die.

The only thing the United States wanted in the aftermath of this atrocity was revenge. We wanted to kill the people responsible.

Thousands of families lost someone they can never get back that day.

We wanted revenge. 

I don’t think the creators of Zero Dark Thirty thought we were wrong to seek it. I do think, though, that they were honest about the price we had to pay as a nation to get it, from both a financial and manpower perspective.

Financially we spent god knows how much money.
And the mental wellbeing of folks like Dan and Maya were forever changed as they tortured detainee after detainee.

As we fought this evil, the evil reached its hand out of the darkness and brought us with it, corrupting us.

Like abusing cigarettes can do.

Cigarettes create two things—fire and smoke. Smoke is interesting. Remember when the Marriott hotel gets bombed, and Maya and Jessica need to escape out the back?

They could barely see five feet in front of them because of the smoke. Smoke lends itself well to this movie that’s all about deception, tradecraft, and finding the needle in a haystack.

It was a dark task. Many people died because they couldn’t see through the haze of false leads and lies, making smoke a clever visual representation of that idea.

And what started all of this in the first place? The image of the twin towers in flames, smoke bellowing out of the holes the planes left. 

After the successful raid of Usama Bin Laden’s compound, SEAL Team 6 blows up the downed helicopter, and Zero Dark Thirty spends one full minute showing the craft burning from a variety of different angles.

Why?

Why not move on? 

Because fire means something in this movie. 

It ties directly into our final message—obsession. Fire represents obsession in this film, and Maya is the human embodiment of that obsession.

It’s no secret that Maya is a red head. I think that was a very intentional choice by the filmmakers. And as Maya descends deeper and deeper into her obsession, she becomes visibly more angry, intense, and forceful.

Her red hair is not just red hair anymore. It’s almost as if she is literally on fire to accomplish her mission.

On one hand, it’s awesome seeing Maya single-handedly moving heaving and earth to find Bin Laden. 

On the other hand, the movie ends with her in tears not knowing where to go.

When you set something on fire, it reaches extreme temperatures.

Yes, the sight is something to behold, but it also gets so hot that the physical makeup of whatever you burn changes until all that’s left is ashes.

Maya catches fire until, in the end, she’s left with nothing. Like cigarettes, this work rotted her away to her core. Only by becoming obsessed, and catching fire, was she able to find Bin Laden. But the price she paid for her obsession was a steep one.

This morif of fire is also accentuated by the color red, which we see, for example, when Maya uses a red marker to writes the number of days since they discovered Bin Laden’s house on her boss’ window. 

Add to that the numerous explosions we see in this film, and you got a bonafide visual motif of fire.

So, what’s the big message of this film?

For me it’s simple..

Revenge is a zero-sum game.

Al-Qaeda spends countless resources to attack us, we spend countless resources to attack them, and in the end each side’s left with dead bodies and good people forever changed for the worst.

Were we justified? Sure. We were justified. Bin Laden murdered 3,000 people in cold blood. And who knows how many attacks we prevented with this assassination.

But at the end of the day, nobody who died on 9/11 can come back. Those families are forever changed. And the people who worked to find and kill Bin Laden found the darkness reached out from the abyss and dragged them down with it.

One moment I like in Zero Dark Thirty is the shot of Chris Pratt’s eye looking down on the bodies of two people he murdered. The green light from the night-vision goggles illuminating his eye socket.

Or the moment when Hakim walks into the compound, taking in all the dead bodies, and seeing the children rounded up with tears streaming down their faces.

When two sides fight, the collateral damage on innocent people might be as high as the damage that conflict may have prevented.

In other words, sure, we might’ve prevented further attacks on innocent people by killing Bin Laden, but what price did we pay in that pursuit of that? And what price did we pay afterwards as Al-Qaeda sought their own revenge? 

Zero Dark Thirty, I think, isn’t trying to tell us that we need to sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya together. But I do think it’s honest about the price we paid for our revenge, and it’s a price so perfectly manifested in the flesh-and-blood story of our main character Maya as she goes from interested to obsessed to lost.

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