SPOILER ALERT: I DISCUSS IMPORTANT PARTS OF THE MOVIE INCLUDING THE END.
I saw Zero Dark Thirty over the weekend, and it changed my thinking about the United States of America, henceforth, the "US". The movie centers around a female character, Maya. She is a young CIA agent, and she has been obsessively tracking Usama Bin Laden since 9/11/2001. More specifically, she is obsessively following her lead, her theory, in the effort to find Bin Laden. She plays the role with limited emotion, extreme focus, and timely outbursts of rage aimed at her superiors that help her get her way and continue to fund her efforts to capture "UBL". We all know how the story ends. Turns out her theory was right, and she finds Bin Laden, which leads to the team of Navy Seals and their helicopter journey into Pakistan to assassinate Bin Laden.
Maya's character is alone. She has no close friends. No family is shown in the movie. She spends 11 years desperately tracking a man that many thought was dead or gone or simply impossible to find. But in the end, the real deal Usama motherfucking Bin Laden is shot and killed by the best of the best of our US soldiers. What could be a happier ending. Except at the end of the movie, Maya boards a jumbo military plane. She is the only passenger. She sits alone in the pit of the whale, and the friendly pilot comes out to pay her a visit. He says, "you're the only passenger. you must be important." then he asks, "where do you want to go?" She cannot speak. Her face is distressed. She has just accomplished this amazing personal achievement. But the movie ends with a shot of her blank face. She cannot answer the question where she wants to go. In my head, I was thinking she would say "home" or "Washington" or "Hawaii" or somewhere completely disconnected with her life like "Zimbabwe". But the movie ends without her saying anything, looking desperate, lost and alone.
Maya has traveled to so many "countries" (almost always to a US military base or secret outpost of some kind). She has no home. Maya, metaphorically, represents the United States of America. Maya, or the US, has no home because she/it is so spread-out. She's seen so much violence, so much pain. It dawned on me, and forgive me if I'm just slow and it's taken me a while to realize this, but all of these military bases, consulates, secret locations where the US detains and interrogates and tortures captured "enemies", are part of the US. We typically think of the US as the 50 states, the 48 contiguous states, Hawaii and Alaska. But in reality, the US extends to all corners of the globe, including Guantanamo Bay, which is "in" CUBA. We have a military base "in" CUBA. US Citizens can't even travel to Cuba legally. How do you make sense of that? So you say fine, we have a base in Cuba, and in Germany, and in Korea and in Japan. So what? They're just military bases. But what the movie shows is that the US sets up shop wherever it wants: Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Somalia, and all the secret locations in countries around the world. For me, this was an epiphany. The US is not that geographic map we see on google earth. The US is in pockets and spaces across the globe, bringing guns, violence, aid, food, medical care, intelligence officers, tortures/Ph.D.'s, doctors, business men, and apple pie to the globe.
I believe the US Navy's slogan is, "A Global Force for Good". I'm thinking that the United States of America is a global entity. It is no longer just the corn fields in Iowa and the big buildings in Manhattan. It hasn't been for a long time. The US occupies space around the world, and directly shapes the space in and around the areas it occupies. This power, this influence has a fancy name: geopolitical hegemony. Noam Chomsky has been writing about this for decades. I'm sure this is not news to Pentagon Officials, Intellectuals, CIA Agents, the FBI and probably you. But it sure was an epiphany to me. What are the repercussions of this concept of the US? What are our responsibilities? What are the moral questions this situation poses? These are questions for another blog post.
With great heaps of geopolitical love,
Anthony
