Surveillance in Zero Dark Thirty: Terrorism, Space and Identity

Abstract

Frances Pheasant-Kelly’s chapter on the recent film Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow 2012) investigates the link between surveillance and the war on terror. This chapter, through engagement with the works of Thomas Mathiesen (Theoretical Criminology 1(2): 215–234, 1997) and Michel Foucault (Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Penguin, London, 1991), as well as military surveillance theorists, considers the multiple scopic regimes evident in Bigelow’s film, and the tensions between them in respect to theory. Pheasant-Kelly pays particular attention to the relationship between surveillance and terrorism and the spaces of post 9/11 America. She examines strategies for surveillance in Zero Dark Thirty and considers the ways in which these reflect changes in real-world monitoring of both public and terrorist activities since 9/11. The film is particularly relevant to a consideration of surveillance and space because it charts the ten-year search for Osama bin Laden across various locations, a mission that is accomplished through a combination of strategic physical and technological modes of observation. Indeed, its visual style and narrative trajectory are dictated by surveillance, the film thereby epitomising the prevalence of surveillance in contemporary visual culture since 9/11. Forms of surveillance exercised within the film embody a combination of the models articulated by Foucault and Mathiesen, which consider how the few view the many and how the many watch the few. The film’s expression of surveillance is accordingly concerned with the physical space between the observed and the observer, although often in terms of geographically greater, or more technologically controlled distances than articulated by Foucault and Mathiesen. As the film is based on real events, its analysis offers opportunities to consider the implementation of real-world surveillance, the multiple forms that this can take, and its potential inadequacies, as well as its increasing significance, in combatting terrorism.