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Women In Zero Dark Thirty

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“A woman with opinions had better develop a thick skin and a loud voice.” – Anya Seton, The Winthrop Woman. With the weight of The Hurt Locker Oscar win hanging under her belt, Kathryn Bigelow set out to tell the (mostly) true events of torturing detainees for information regarding the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. A twofold effort on the front of both the war on women and the war on terror, Zero Dark Thirty tells the story of an undercover CIA operative allegedly responsible for the successful disposal of the infamous terrorist. Maya, the operative in question, is a smart, authoritative, no-nonsense woman the CIA recruited “right out of high school”. Her capable, if obsessive nature is belied by an emotional resonance …show more content…

“Why would I assume a woman wouldn’t be involved in this kind of research? The wonderful thing about working on this film is, historically in movies, lead characters are played by women who are defined by men, whether it’s a love interest, or they’re the victim of a man, and Maya’s not like that.”
This critical element is one of the driving points of the film: the fact that Maya is simply a character, and not “just” a female character (a.k.a. “plot device”) to further a male character’s story, is crucial. Chastain goes on to add, “I don’t know that Kathryn Bigelow would make a movie like that, because…she stands on her own . . . she’s capable and intelligent, and I think she represents this generation of woman, and that was really exciting for me to discover on the page in the script, and to discover about our history.”
One could make the argument that Chastain refers to both American and feminist history. In lieu of feminism’s third wave, media is moving further and further away from the misogynistic overtones of females-as-plot-devices. But while media follows “trends”, reality is less keen to do the

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