Abstract
This chapter probes the complex interactions between Hollywood cinema, cultural memory, and national history. Although the war film has been a staple of American cinema since its birth, Kathryn Bigelow crafts a very different kind of war film with Zero Dark Thirty (2012). The film plays upon audience expectations to give shape and substance to an event that, though unwitnessed, was writ large in the collective American psyche. I argue that Bigelow’s film served to celebrate American exceptionalism, promote patriotism, and bolster national identity. Moreover, the film functions to heal collective trauma by offering an easily understandable narrative of the protracted, decade-long struggle to find bin Laden and bring him to justice.
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Gauthier, J.L. (2018). Making It “Real”/“Reel”: Truth, Trauma, and American Exceptionalism in Zero Dark Thirty. In: Thornley, D. (eds) True Event Adaptation. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97322-7_6
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