After a mind-numbing two and a half  hours of Zero Dark Thirty last night, I came away with a single piece of information:  Jessica Chastain has amazing hair.

That red mane stays toss-worthily silky even in the deserts of Afghanistan.  The dust clouds raised by helicopters landing right in front of her can’t dull her plastic glossiness.  Nor can the sight and sounds of torture alter the uncanny blandness of her expression.

The movie’s much-talked-about scenes of torture are peculiarly sanitized:  shown, but not shown.  There is no real sense of agony or degradation.  The chief torturer’s lines are a bunch of clichés straight out of the Hollywood B-movie playbook.  And the effect of torture on both victim and perpetrator?  So far as this movie is concerned, non-existent.

And this is what’s being touted as some kind of breakthrough for women?  It’s hardly news that there are women CIA analysts, or women movie directors.  And after seeing the infamous photos of Private Lynddie England at Abu Ghraib in 2004, do you really want to join the chorus of “Wow, look, a woman torturer!”

Zero Dark Thirty is a movie with zero point of view.  It has no engagement with any of the political and ethical issues it indicates but never explores.  Despite its subject matter, it is, in the end, a movie as bland as its star.  Its “reality-TV” lens on the slow accretion of intelligence work is merely confusing.  And I suspect director Kathryn Bigelow knew this, interspersing moments of ham-fisted emoting to keep her audience from nodding off.

All of which raises the question of why this movie was made at all.  A question whose answer apparently lies in the swell of orchestral music toward the end, signaling American triumphalism.

But my reaction was more of a shrug.

“We” killed bin-Laden, true.  And…?

Last month, Town Hall Seattle ran a program called ‘Three Lives,’  originally touted as eulogies of three public figures — Christopher Hitchens, Kim Jong-Il, and Vaclav Havel — linked by the sole fact that they’d happened to die within four days of each other in December.  I was asked to speak about Hitchens.  “No way,” I said.  “Not unless you’re ready for an anti-eulogy.”

They were.

Here’s the video, in which I start at about the 4.45 time mark, running to 23.10.

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But if you want to see a really great presentation, go back to the video and start at the 57.35 mark, where ACT Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie and actors Bob Wright and Tom Carrato deliver a stunning tribute to Vaclav Havel, inspiring me to go out and buy a copy of ‘Disturbing the Peace’ the next day, when I also read this moving assessment by his long-time translator, Paul Wilson.  I’m only sorry Havel had to die for me to pay closer attention.  But then that’s kind of Wilson’s point.

Just five hours before President Obama announced Sunday night that Bin Laden was dead, instantly capturing the collective mind of the world, there was something else on American television that I wish would capture the world mind just as effectively.   CBS reporter Lara Logan spoke out on the news program ’60 Minutes’ about her extended mass rape in Tahrir Square in the middle of the celebrations on February 11, the night of Mubarak’s resignation.

I’m running the clip here partly in shame, because I was among those whose first reaction was to say “Oh, she’s exaggerating, she was just badly groped.”  That is, I didn’t want to know — not then, not there.  I didn’t want the jubilation of that evening spoiled by such ugly reality.  I was in denial.

Yes, this was rape.  Multiple rape.  Rape aimed at pulling her apart, inside and out.  So first, take 13 minutes and watch this video of her account:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/_g0S6UQem1k]

And if you still question the title of this post, consider these extracts from a New York Times story two days later on Iraqi victims of torture (by the Iraqi army, American forces, Saddam’s thugs, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and various militias):

He described… daily horrors like the suicide of a young prisoner who electrocuted himself with wires from a hot plate after being raped by soldiers.

An 11-year-old girl and her family revealed that she was raped by a group of men who then shaved her head and threw her on a trash heap.

A woman whose husband was an interpreter for the Americans had water and salt thrown on her and was then tied to electrified metal bars.  Then: “They raped her more than once in front of us,” R. said, looking down as he spoke. “She died two or three days later.  There were four guys who raped us….  I was destroyed.  It feels as if something is missing.  I don’t mingle at all with people.”

As Susan Brownmiller made crystal clear in Against Our Will (published in 1975 and, sadly, as essential reading today as it was then), rape has nothing to do with sexual attraction.  It’s brutalization:   the forced domination of another person through their genitalia, whether female or male, 5 years old or 90 years old, close relative or total stranger.  The means of this can be a hand or a penis, a gun or a knife or a broken bottle, a baton or a broomstick or a bathroom plunger (remember Abner Louima?).  Whatever the weapon, the aim is to violently, deliberately, and painfully invade and break another person’s physical and psychological autonomy, will, integrity, humanity.  That is:  torture.

Rape was recognized as a war crime in 1949 (the Fourth Geneva Conventions) and as a crime against humanity in 2001.  Amnesty International has consistently reported on rape as torture: “In every armed conflict investigated by Amnesty International… the torture of women was reported, most often in the form of sexual violence.”  But when rape happens in a dorm room or at a party — even one as large as Tahrir Square on February 11 — we seem less able to recognize it for what it is.  Which is why Amnesty International also reports that in peacetime Europe as elsewhere, victims of rape are consistently denied justice.

This is what we need to get straight in our minds, once and for all:

Whenever rape happens, wherever it happens, and whatever form it takes, it is a crime against humanity.

A crime, that is, against every one of us.