Zero Dark Thirty depicts the story of " history's greatest manhunt for the world's most dangerous man." The movie portrays the covert CIA mission to find Osama Bin Laden post 9/11 attacks. Although the film is critically acclaimed for dramatizing the success of the United States to find and kill Bin Laden, it glorifies the act of torture and reinforces the acceptance of violence towards Muslims. Throughout the entirety of the film, scenes of brutal torture techniques cultivate the notion that the torture of Muslim men is acceptable. The depiction of Muslim characters as a mass of enemies that are dawned with beards and burqas objectifies them as servants of Osama Bin Laden. This creates the notion that Muslims are expendable resources that have to be tortured for information. The misrepresentation of the acceptance of torture from both the American and Muslim perspectives sparked a flurry of racist epithets over social media channels such as twitter. As seen in the chart below, 65% of the tweets concerning Zero Dark Thirty concerned torture. Tweets such as "...Arab guys on the bus making me nervous, should I water board him?" are indicative of the desensitization of torture that Zero Dark Thirty imparts on its viewers. In addition to the nonchalant reference to extreme torture technique, many of which that are considered war crimes, the film has established a sense of Otherization in regards to Muslim women. Throughout the film Muslim women are misrepresented as either dangerous and mysterious or aimless and vulnerable. For instance, one scene depicts four women dressed in burkas at a cafe. When a group of men sit down nearby, the four women in burkas are revealed to be male military agents who used the disguise to infiltrate the bazaar. Many have claimed that this has created a false pretense that women in burkas are vehicles of covert violence. Furthermore, Muslim wives are depicted servants of men who need to be saved me the western world. In addition to the rules for women dictated by the Islamic faith, the western world implies that Muslim women do not have freedom. One scene shows that the navy seal teams treat young children and women with amnesty and care. Gayatri Spivak’s famous quote “white men saving brown women from brown men” is an accurate summary of Zero Dark Thirty's depiction of the western world saving Muslim women.
Twitter images found on this site were sourced from http://mondoweiss.net/2013/01/reviews-thirty-muslims