Jackson Races the Cheetah Yet Again

We're pretty sure he's getting closer to winning this race. Another year or two of training, and he'll have it.

Save The Good Earth!

Got an e-mail this morning from the Good Earth, with a link to an online petition opposing a new development in Broad Ripple that would plunk a Whole Foods (or something like it - big and corporate and chain) down along the canal, not too far from the Good Earth itself. This is a bad idea in every respect. In the first place, the Broad Ripple area already has a Fresh Market, at 54th and College. Technically, that's not the same as a Whole Foods, but in real terms, they're pretty much identical. The village proper also already has the Good Earth, which is a great local business that would be threatened by the opening of a Whole Foods in the area.

Second, the project would be paid for with tax-increment financing that is supposed to be used for infrastructure and other improvements - not new development. I could be reading that wrong - legalese is not my strong suit; but even if I'm reading it wrong, and the letter of the law (if certainly not the spirit) supports new development, I'm not sure that any of that is needed more in Broad Ripple Village than it is in places like, say, the Meadows. Of course, it's way sexier to build shiny new things in rich white neighborhoods than it is to fix the broken and crumbling things in poor black neighborhoods. That's how politicians get elected and the people they "represent" get fucked. But whatever. Here's the link to the online petition again. Stop corporate welfare!

The New York City Bookstore Walk

This is the first of what could wind up being two or three posts about our trip to New York at the end of March—so when I say that “Monday was cold and rainy,” that’s referring to March 25th. I didn’t get as many pictures as I thought I would (and none at all on the cold and rainy day described below), but there is a batch from Central Park that I will get around to posting at some point.

Monday was cold and rainy. Jackson had thrown up the night before, after we got in, and was running a fever. Our plan had been to hit the museum with my uncle (who used to work there and remains “connected,” if you know what I mean) and then maybe spend part of the rest of the day looking for coffee shops and bookstores; but Jackson wasn’t going anywhere. You might think that would derail all of our plans for the day, but you would be wrong. We did have to cancel the museum (which was unfortunate, because my uncle had to catch the train home later that afternoon, and so would not be able to join us when we did make it to the museum, the following morning), but Mom was willing to look after Jackson while Amy and I went out.

I underestimated the walk, or we could probably have hit a few more places. If you plug the address of our hotel and the address of the bookstore I most wanted to see into Google Maps and then bang the tab for walking directions, you get a blue line that basically goes straight down Broadway for almost four miles, and the omniscient computer brainoids at Google think it’s going to take you an hour and sixteen minutes to get there on foot. In the Monday morning rain and grey. Fortified by crappy coffee. (I’ll mention the names of the coffee shops we hit during the trip at the end of this, but I won’t go into any details, because there aren’t any details worth going into. I did a better job of finding a good coffee shop in Covington, Kentucky, than I did on this trip to New York.)

I did not plug the two addresses into Google Maps until after we got back; by then we were curious about just how far we had walked, given that my pedometer had gone over 20,000. I knew roughly where St. Mark’s Bookshop was before we headed out, and that was it. A walk is a walk, though, and even if it was cold and rainy, it was still New York City. I might have passed on a walk here at home in weather like that, but here at home we don’t have Times Square. We don’t have the Empire State Building, and none of our libraries, to my knowledge, are watched over by lions on the steps. That’s what you run into when you slice through New York City down Broadway. Amy mentioned something about the U.N., too, but by the time that came up we were no longer in the mood to look for anything new.

The literary karma gods are going to lay the smackdown on me if I say that St. Mark’s was disappointing, so I definitely will not say that; but I was shopping for literary magazines, and despite having the most extensive selection of literary magazines I’ve ever encountered, many of the issues on the shelves were out of date—sometimes by a couple of years. I avoided looking at actual books because I’m still trying to get rid of more books each year than I bring in (and literary magazines still do not count), and so spent most of my time in an odd little zone there in the literary magazine section, trying to decide how much money I wanted to drop on how many magazines. I thought vaguely about how I would transport the literary booty back home, but guessed that that would take care of itself somehow.

(Interesting aside on train travel. None of our bags was ever inspected once, at any point on our journey. Between the three of us, we had eight bags on the trip out and nine bags on the trip back—because all the books and literary magazines I bought had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was an extra canvas grocery bag I picked up along the way. All three of us had a suitcase and a backpack, and the other two bags were my mom’s carry-on and my laptop bag. The ninth bag going back was the canvas Zabar’s bag I bought, which was filled to the brim with books and literary magazines. All of those bags went into our two roommettes on the train and into adjacent seats on the commuter train. The closest we came to checking anything was when they put the suitcases in the baggage hold of the bus on the Indianapolis-Chicago legs of the trip.)

I wound up spending almost fifty bucks on four magazines: Fence, which came to my attention by way of a response by its editor to a Boston Review symposium on binaries in poetry; Analemma, which I had heard of from a post on Vouched Books that offered a free subscription to that journal as a prize for posting a comment on its blog; Hobart, which I had never heard of, but which contained a short story called “Sex in the Afternoon”; and Fourteen Hills, which it turns out I may not have had any good reason at all for picking up. I could easily have spent another half an hour and another almost-fifty-bucks and taken home four more random issues.

Alas, though, it was getting late in the afternoon, and we were both starting to think we should get back and check on Jackson (even though Amy had already called to check in and heard from Mom that Jackson seemed to be fine). I had every intention of going directly back to the hotel, and so decided to take the most direct route, straight up Broadway. However...about two blocks away from St. Mark’s, straight up Broadway, is the Strand, which we had missed on the way down because we had drifted over to 2nd Avenue. I had wanted to see that bookstore too, along with St. Mark’s, but thought I had run out of time. Since it was there, though, and Mom had said that Jackson was fine, it seemed sort of silly not to go in. So we did.

Oh...man. The best bookstore I have ever been to is the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. #2 is up for grabs, though; and if it’s not Book Corner down in Bloomington, then it might well, after only one quick visit, be the Strand. In fact, during that one quick visit, I saw only one of the four levels. I’m not sure there’s any way to determine how many of the purported 18 miles of books I looked at, but it can’t have been much. I wound up buying a tiny hardcover copy of Fox in Socks to read with Jackson, and a paperback copy of Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, by Greil Marcus, the first—but not last—books that I would buy on the trip.

And then we really did walk back to the hotel, back up Broadway with a slide up 7th Avenue to take a gander at the Carnegie Deli. I was going to mention briefly the coffee shops we visited while we were in the city, but as I started to write about them, I realized that I might actually have enough for a whole post on just coffee shops. I wasn’t sure that was going to be possible, and so hadn’t originally planned on it; but now I think it can be done. Of course, it took me a month to crank out this first post about the trip, so who knows how long the subsequent posts are going to take?

Photos from the New York/New Jersey Trip

I posted the first small batch of photos from our recent trip to New York and New Jersey. They are of Jackson meeting his second cousin Nicholas at Aunt Gloria and Uncle Tom's house in Jackson, New Jersey.

Deep Thoughts #97

Rush is finally getting into the so-called Rock and Roll “Hall of Fame,” and the genii at Rolling Stone get the Foo Fighters to induct them?

Deep Thoughts #96 - Special Topical Top Ten Edition

I just found out that Amy and I have tickets to attend a taping of the Late Show with David Letterman next Tuesday while we are in New York!

Grantland: The Most Hated College Basketball Players of the Last 30 Years

I wasn’t actually aware that there was anything better than filling out tournament brackets in March, but it turns out that filling out bonus brackets in March before the real brackets come out is pretty good, too. At least, the idea of it is pretty good. I came across this story while perusing CollegeBasketballTalk at the old juke joint the other night. I’ve written on more than one occasion about not buying into that rivalry crap about hating your rival’s school just because they’re your rival, and about not disliking a player for no other reason than that he plays for a school that competes in a rivalry with your own school (or with whichever you school you happen to root for).

It’s funny what the NCAAs can do to you, though. It’s difficult to explain, but the bad feeling I get when Indiana loses in the NCAA tournament is always much stronger than the good feeling I get when they win. This is due in part to a couple of tough breaks in the 1990s, when Indiana lost to Duke in the Final Four in 1992 and to Kansas in the Elite Eight in 1993. If not for that infamous Christian Laettner shot, Indiana would have played Kentucky in the Final Four, and not Duke. I think Indiana would have beaten that Kentucky team, but that’s just me. In 1993, Alan Henderson’s knee exploded toward the end of the Big Ten season, and that might well have been the difference between losing to Kansas in the regional final and hanging a sixth national championship banner in the Assembly Hall. (For what it’s worth, that 1993 team only lost four games all season—to Kentucky and and Kansas in the pre-league, and then at Ohio State, deep in the Big Ten season. And yes, that does mean that 50% of Indiana’s losses that year came at the hands of Kansas.)

I never really got over disliking either Duke or Kansas, and for no other reason than that they beat Indiana in a couple of key games twenty years ago. It should have been enough to get me over when Indiana beat #1-seeded Duke in the Sweet Sixteen in 2002, but apparently not. I still smile a little on the inside whenever Duke loses a game. It doesn’t help matters that Duke is as consistently good as they are. (Which is not remotely mitigated by the fact that current Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski made his bones as an assistant to one Bob Knight, at Army, way back in the day.) I never cared about Kansas as much as I cared about Duke back then, and I no longer care if Kansas wins or loses. I was even rooting for them last year, because I picked them to win the national championship, and I was the only one in the ESPN Tournament Challenge group I participated in who had Kansas as the champion. I was way down in the standings by the time the Final Four rolled around, because three out of my four Final Four were gone—but the way the points worked out, I would have finished with the highest score in our group if Kansas had beaten Kentucky. Sometimes that’s all it comes down to—which horse you have in the race, so to speak.

And so while I don’t really hate any college basketball program or player, there are certain programs and players that I...like less than others, I guess. It’s the middle of March, so it’s almost time for the NCAA tournament, which means college basketball is on my mind a lot—and because Indiana has been very good at times this year, I have been worried about the minor swoon they took during their last four games in the Big Ten regular season. That’s what made finding the Grantland bracket of most hated college basketball players of the last 30 years so amusing—it’s a good way to ease some of that pressure, and to remind myself that it’s just a game. It would have been amusing regardless of how the brackets had been structured, but what makes it extra fun is that one region—fully one fourth of the bracket—is devoted entirely to players from Duke. The author of the post goes on to explain why the Dukies had to be relegated to their own region, and he also gives a pretty concise explanation for why people seem to dislike Duke so much—and what that boils down to is the fact that they win as much as they do.

At the end of the day, sports should be about sportsmanship and teamwork and having fun; and it’s important to remember that these are just games. I’m definitely going to keep that in mind as I fill out my Most Hated College Basketball Player of the Last 30 Years bracket at the same time that I’m filling out my real bracket for this year’s tournament. (And watch—Duke is going to win the tournament this year, because of the reverse karma that comes down on the head of the guy who came up with this idea. Of course, because I blogged about it, Duke is going to beat Indiana on their way to that national championship.)

The Victors

"You Back That Queen Again, You Son of a Bitch, and I'll Blow You Right Up That Wildcat's Ass!"

So I was at Jockamo this past Sunday for lunch, with Amy and Jackson and some of the youth group peeps from her church, and somebody mentioned college basketball. Then Amy joked that maybe she should separate me from the dude who was sitting across from me, since he was a Kentucky fan and I’m an Indiana fan. Apparently those two don’t get along, or some shit. I gave the empty chuckle I reserve for a somewhat polite response to an attempt at humor that doesn’t even come close, which is the only way I have found that I am any longer able to react to people who think they are going to get my blood up with some kind of college basketball rivalry nonsense. I used to get hot and bothered about that shit when I was a kid; but when I was a kid, I was an idiot. I’m not sure exactly when I gave up on rivalry as something that could get under my skin, but the catalyst for it had to be the Indiana-Purdue game in Bloomington during the Spring 1994 semester. I didn’t have a ticket for that game in the six-pack I got when I turned in my claim card. One of my friends—that’s how long ago it was...I actually had some friends!—gave me her ticket. Glenn Robinson dropped 39 points on Indiana, but the Hoosiers won anyway. Then all of us who went to the game stayed behind in our seats, just hanging out and talking, while the Assembly Hall emptied out—and then the pep band drummer ripped into what I remember being a kickass drum solo. That was a pretty sweet end to a pretty sweet game—and it was a pleasure to watch Glenn Robinson play that night. You don’t often see a big guy who can shoot as well as the Large Pooch. He may be one of the best pure shooters ever to play the 4 in college.

Nowadays, I don’t care about the rivalries like that anymore. I love Indiana, and I hope that they win. When I root against other schools, it’s only because a loss for that school would help Indiana. It doesn’t matter which school we’re talking about; and most of the time, I don’t care anyway. I just want Indiana to win. The only niggling bit of rivalry that still bothers me has to do with Duke, because of The Shot. That’s the turnaround fadeaway that Christian Laettner hit from near the top of the key to beat Kentucky in the regional finals of the 1992 NCAA tournament. The winner of that game would go on to play Indiana in the Final Four, and I was hoping that Indiana would get Kentucky in that game, because I seem to recall thinking that Indiana would have a better chance of beating Kentucky than of beating Duke; but Duke won that game, because of the Christian Laettner shot (which has gone on to achieve something on the order of cult status, as one of the most replayed college basketball highlights of all time), and then beat Indiana in the Final Four, en route to their second consecutive national championship. If Indiana had played Kentucky in the Final Four, and beaten them, I think Indiana also would have beaten Michigan in the title game. So while there is no way to know for sure, of course, I still sometimes wonder if that one shot was the only thing standing between Indiana and their sixth national title; and I still smile a little anytime I see a college basketball scoreboard that shows a Duke loss. On the other hand, that does not mean that I do not respect their program, or their players, or their head coach, Mike Krzyzewski.

I didn’t explain all this to the dude Amy thought she should separate me from, but I did say that I don’t dislike Kentucky. He said that that was “refreshing,” which probably means that he gets shit from pretty much every other Indiana fan whenever the topic comes up. I went on to say, however, that I do dislike John Calipari. His daughter piped up with something to the effect of, “Everybody says that!” Then I proceeded with my reasoning, but failed to make a good argument, because I had forgotten most of the details of the two NCAA rules incidents at Calipari’s former schools, apart from the result of each investigation, which was that the first two Final Four runs by John Calipari-coached teams were vacated by the NCAA. The dude I was sitting across from said, reluctantly, that that was a “true statement,” but that those vacated Final Four runs were not due to anything that John Calipari had done.

I didn’t have an answer for that, and pretty much wilted under the confidence of his response. Later that day, I went back and re-read some of the material on the two NCAA incidents at Calipari’s former schools (Massachusetts in 1996, and Memphis in 2008). It’s true that Calipari did not overtly have anything to do with Marcus Camby accepting improper benefits from an agent, or with Derrick Rose’s SAT being invalidated by ETS (for which Memphis ultimately had its entire 2007-08 season vacated, not just the Final Four run, which ended with Memphis losing to Kansas in the title game). Calipari left each school for greener pastures, before the NCAA had a chance to come calling. But he failed somewhere along the line at Massachusetts, by not ensuring that Marcus Camby knew to stay well away from agents, even if he was thinking about going pro. Calipari did not commit the violation himself, but if he had had good control over the program, the violation probably would not have happened.

Same thing goes for Derrick Rose at Memphis, except that this one is way more shady than what went down at Massachusetts. Rose was never eligible to play at Memphis, and the NCAA report (PDF) implies that the school knew he wasn’t eligible, but let him play anyway. Rose would also have been ruled ineligible, even if his SAT had passed muster, because someone at Memphis allowed Rose's brother to travel with the team and to stay at the team hotel—benefits that are not against the rules by themselves, but which become violations when they are paid for by the school, which was the case on several occasions that Rose’s brother traveled and lodged with the team. Calipari was subsequently summoned by the NCAA to provide discovery on this matter, although the letter summoning him (PDF) made it clear that he was not “at risk,” with respect to the Rose issue. That letter reached him at the University of Kentucky, and was dated April 27, 2009—approximately one month after multiple sources reported that he was leaving Memphis for Kentucky.

It stretches the limits of credulity to claim that Calipari was unaware of Rose’s eligibility issues. Calipari’s experience at Massachusetts establishes a pattern that these kinds of things take place on his watch. He may very well not have done anything overt in either situation; but it’s patently clear, especially with respect to Rose and Memphis, that he could have done much more to make sure that no rules were broken. They’re sins of omission rather than commission; and if it happens once, you can almost call it a fluke. It’s happened to Calipari twice, though—and he didn’t hang around to defend himself either time. He hit the free agent market, with his gaudy “record” of recruiting superstars and turning formerly lifeless programs (a bit of an exaggeration with Memphis, though if you cancel out all of the NCAA tournament success brought about by rules violations, you basically have a lifeless program) into national title contenders, and landed on his feet at Kentucky, where he has already won a national championship—which has yet to be vacated by the NCAA!

And on top of all that, he runs NBA factories, recruiting kids he knows are only going to stay one or two years before making the jump to the NBA. I don’t know how much that hurts your recruiting, since you’re winning instantly and reloading the very next year; but it sends a terrible message to the kids who are watching all of this on television, and following it on the Facebooks and the Twitters: College is no longer seen as important, or even valid, when you are perceived to have the talent necessary to go right to the NBA after high school. But what happens to the kids who absorb that message, and then bet everything on their jump shot, only to be overlooked by the college scouts or the NBA? What do they have to fall back on if they shoot the moon on the Coach Cal Game Plan and it turns out they don’t have the skeelz? What does John Calipari teach the rest of us when he skips town at the first sign of trouble? Maybe that’s just the way they roll in Graceland, I don’t know. Nobody cared about UMass before John Calipari, and nobody cares about them now. But Kentucky is one of the great programs in college basketball.

As any Indiana fan will tell you, it’s horrible when someone sails into town with the NCAA at his back, and then starts breaking all the same rules in a new place. Part of the problem at Indiana was the legacy of Myles Brand, who abused his position of power as president of Indiana University to unfairly fire head basketball coach Bob Knight, which allowed Brand to shoehorn himself into the presidency of the NCAA; and part of the problem was another former university president, Brand’s successor, Adam Herbert, who, as a minority, probably felt like he had to replace a fired minority coach (Mike Davis) with another minority coach (Kelvin Sampson); but Sampson was running from the NCAA when he departed Oklahoma, and he finished the job Brand had started when he brought down the basketball program at Indiana. It would be terrible for college basketball, to say nothing of the fans and supporters of the University of Kentukcy, if Calipari were given free rein to manage to do in Lexington what Sampson managed to do in Bloomington. Sampson was brought in at Indiana because he had a proven track record of winning—which we later learned was due at least in part to flagrantly breaking NCAA rules. Calipari, with a history of very cleverly avoiding personal direct sanction by the NCAA, was brought to Lexington because he had a proven track record of winning. Indiana came to regret the hiring of Sampson. Hopefully, the same thing will not happen to Kentucky, despite the fact that everything about Calipari’s history suggests otherwise.

Zero Dark Thirty

Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney wrote a very fine article for Salon that strongly criticizes director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal for the way they depicted torture in Zero Dark Thirty. His argument is extremely persuasive, and now that I have seen it, I am hard pressed to contend that the film does not present a causal link between torture and the success of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. (I’ve tried to write this several different times since I started this piece, and I’m still not sure it’s right.) Gibney goes on to criticize Bigelow and Boal for presenting the film as quasi-journalistic without making any mention of the overall failure of the use of torture in the so-called “war on terror.” His conclusion is that the film irresponsibly and falsely depicts torture as an effective means of getting information.

And yet he also concedes that “dramatists compressing a complex history into a cinematic narrative...must be granted a degree of artistic license.” He also stipulates, by proxy, that torture played “an incidental role in the discovery of UBL.” His sentence is a little bit awkward, so I want to quote it in full: “But as we know from the Senate and former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who wrote McCain in May 2011, that EITs did not play any more than an incidental role in the discovery of UBL.” Gibney has clearly done his homework, having won a documentary feature Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, which looked at the very same practice of torture that Bigelow and Boal address in Zero Dark Thirty; and for that reason, I’m hesitant to say that he’s missing the point here. But I sort of feel like he’s missing the point here.

And the reason I think that is because I also think that Zero Dark Thirty very effecitvely conveys just how “incidental” a role the use of torture played in the long process of hunting down Osama bin Laden. Bigelow and Boal probably spend too much of their time on torture—the only real quibble I had with the film was the running time, and that was so minor a quibble as to be completely inconsequential in the end; but if you think about what Maya (Jessica Chastain) and Dan (Jason Clarke) ultimatley glean from the torture inflicted on one particular detainee (the name of a person believed to be a courier for bin Laden) and then consider that one piece of information in the context of how much more work it takes to get from the name of the courier to the compound in Abbottabad, you just about have to acknowledge that even if torture worked—which it patently did not—there was so much more involved in finding bin Laden that any conceivable causal link between the two absolutely evaporates.

Gibney is also not entirely correct when he says that Zero Dark Thirty never acknowledges the failure of torture. It doesn’t spend much time acknowledging that torture failed, and it only does so obliquely, in a scene where a CIA blowhard—effectively standing in for the impotent buffoonery of the entire Bush administration—dresses down his team over the fact that all the time and money spent on stamping out al Qaeda had yielded, to that point, the elimination of only four senior members of the group. Could Bigelow and Boal have spent a little more time on that point, and a little less time on the sometimes graphic depiction of torture? Yes, they probably could have done. The Bush administration could also have spent a little more time acknowledging its many massive mistakes and a little less time pursuing an illegal course of action, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I think that’s an important parallel that has been overlooked in the outpouring of criticism of this film.

There was probably no way to make this film without rubbing someone the wrong way. It’s probably difficult to make any film without rubbing a few people the wrong way, never mind one that deals so directly with a subject that continues to provoke such a visceral reaction in so much of its intended audience. Opening the film (immediately after fading in to the sounds of the recorded telephone calls of 9/11 victims and responders over the brief opening titles) with a scene of torture, perpetrated by just the kind of American you’d think would perpetrate it, if you were given half the chance to describe a stereotype for a police sketch artist, pretty quickly draws the line between what happened to the United States that day and what has happened to the United States since.

Bigelow addresses the depiction of torture in an article for the Los Angeles Times: “Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore. War, obviously, isn’t pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.” With those sentiments in mind, I can barely conceive of the fortitude it must have taken to get up each morning and press on the with the making of this film. Bigelow and Boal did not just press on with the making of any old film, though. They patiently and meticulously crafted a thought-provoking study of the horrors of a war without borders. They also managed to make one of the most exciting action films of all time, and to coax a difficult and brilliant performance out of Jessica Chastain, who might be the finest actress of her generation.

Chastain plays Maya, a covert CIA agent, recruited right out of high school, who has spent the entirety of her adult life hunting Osama bin Laden. She is present during that opening scene of torture, which has Dan attempting to get information from a detainee called Ammar (Reda Kateb). She does not participate in the torture, but she also does not ask Dan to stop the torture. It’s clear by her situation in the scene and the expressions on her face that she is bothered by what she has to witness, but that discomfort does not stop her from questioning Ammar when the time comes. As she stockpiles information over the course of the story, she responds to those who question the fact that she has yet to prove anything by explaining the manner in which patterns of information over long periods of time reveal shades that indicate where someone or something should be. This is how she tracks bin Laden’s personal courier. The discovery of the courier ultimately leads to bin Laden himself.

Chastain delivers this performance with fierce confidence, and with a species of macho bravura that both affirms and subverts the Alpha Male perception that I imagine a lot of people have concerning CIA operatives. Maya kowtows to no one, including the director of the CIA (James Gandolfini, whose character is never named, but bears an eerie resemblance to a badly bloated version of Leon Panetta). Her relationship with fellows operatives Dan and Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) evolves by slow turns as the film progresses. When you realize that Maya and Jessica have become close friends, you start to ask yourself when that happened—and then it occurs to you that their conversations have gotten progressively less tense as their work has dovetailed over the years. The same can be said for Maya’s relationship with Dan. What feels almost like sibling rivarly in the opening torture scene evolves into a situation where the big brother wants to look out for the little sister as much as he can—except that Maya can take care of herself perfectly well, thanks.

Bigelow and Boal move through events in the film with the same slow evolution they use to develop their characters. The pacing is methodical, but the film is so smart that you don’t feel the suspense as it builds. Everyone knows what happens at the end, so the payoff for this film can’t be the reveal. Instead, we get the information on how we got to that reveal—we get the procedural. The trick to extracting suspense from a story with a known ending is to do the very best you can to make the audience understand how close the known ending came to not happening. You take as many steps back as necessary to illustrate just how complex was the web of paths from point A—9/11—to point B—the death of Osama bin Laden. I think that Kathryn Bigelow and her cast and crew have done that. Did they adhere strictly to the truth? Of course not. They never pretended that they were going to, they never claimed that they did, and they could not have done even if they had promised to. This is a narrative film, with actors and a script and an editor. It is a work of fiction, regardless of how much of it was based on actual events. It is a remarkable work of fiction that confronts emotions, asks hard questions, and provokes—yes, provokes—serious thought.

Zero Dark Thirty is a masterpiece.