Nearly every Muslim woman in the movie wears some sort of head covering. They function as background props and wives of extremists, and are used to establish a foreign, “other” setting. The few Muslim women that we do see serve to prop up Western constructs of Muslimahs. This brief dialogue serves only to back up the movie’s central belief that all the millions of Muslim women are one thing, and that one thing is oppressed by Islam. The screenplay’s only acknowledgment of Muslim women’s existence is a CIA officer noting that “Observing Muslim females live with their families or with their husbands,” to explain why a third female in OBL’s compound is alarming. In 150 minutes spent exploring Lahore, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Abottabad, Northern Pakistan, and Kuwait, Muslim women are visible in 13 scenes, several of which take place at Osama Bin Laden’s compound as his wives protect him and are shot. Gayatri Spivak’s famous quote “white men saving brown women from brown men” is the framework this movie operates on, but it does not seem to realize that these white men are doing brown women more harm than good.įor a movie set in an Islamic republic, Zero Dark Thirty boasts a worryingly small number of Muslim women. However, their brutal treatment of Muslim men threatens the families and economic situations of many of those little girls by destroying their communities. The American military and government are eager to wage a war on terrorism in the name of women’s rights and show kindness to little girls whose fathers are suspects. The devastating effect the torture, capture, and murder of Muslim men has on their wives is overlooked by the movie and by the larger American foreign policy it emulates. But what most mainstream outlets and Westerners in general have ignored is the effect this torture has on Muslim women. Much has been said on the graphic torture of Muslim men the movie glorifies. Maya and her colleagues go through many leads, breezily torturing each suspect until he breaks. In this rendering the seal team is led to OBL by Maya, portrayed by Jessica Chastain. The central narrative of Zero Dark Thirty surrounds the 2011 capture of Osama Bin Laden by a Navy Seal team.
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