Another point of contention people have for Zero Dark Thirty as an “infomercial for torture” is that no one stands up and gives an Aaron Sorkin-style speech about how wrong torture is. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a strength, not a weakness. And it’s not because I don’t believe this is a statement to be made at all; in fact, the movie makes this exact statement in ways apparently too subtle for a lot of viewers to detect. One of the ways is through the character of Dan, who is the lead interrogator on the Ammar file, and carries out a lot of the torture we witness in the movie.
Dan is introduced to us as this brutal guy who tortures his prisoners physically and psychologically. He messes with their heads while hurting their bodies. He strips them down and ridicules them for their hygiene. He beats them and insists to them that it’s their fault and not his. But we see more complicated aspects of him as the movie goes on, and this doesn’t get acknowledged nearly enough. By the end of the film, Dan has left the interrogation program. We see in a scene where he’s talking to Maya, Jessica Chastain’s character, he says he’s lost interest in torturing people. He says it’s because he’s seen too many dudes naked, but this is just a macho cover-up of an undoubtedly more complicated reason. He’s lost a taste for it. Maybe it’s too inhumane.
This is, after all, a guy with a heart soft enough to take care of animals and be outraged when they’re taken away from him. Not only that, but he’s lost all faith in the reliability of information gained from torture. He betrays Maya in the room with the CIA Director at the end, saying he’s the least certain about Bin Laden’s whereabouts, and says it’s because of his experience as an interrogator. He’s saying this information can’t be trusted based on his experience. That’s a big point. That’s a character who is standing up and saying, as clearly as a person can in a work environment like that, torture doesn’t work you guys.
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