SICARIO, TORTURE AND 'THE DILAWAR TEST'
It’s a good film, Sicario. It’s tense, and well acted and shot, and unpredictable, and Benicio del Toro’s hair really is on freaking point. Sadly the movie does lose some credit for failing the Dilawar test. Wait, you don’t know about the Dilawar test? I suppose that’s understandable. I did just make it up five minutes ago.
The DIlawar test is like the Bechdel test, but instead of gauging gender inequality, it looks at an ongoing American love affair with sanctioned torture.
It asks this question (that I just came up with):
Does your film, TV show or video game either abstain from torture altogether, or show that torture is ineffectual, undeniably immoral or unsanctioned by any authoritative figure?
You need a yes for a pass, but with the three qualifying ‘or’s’ in the question, it should be hard to get a no. Sicario manages a no though, along with some movies and TV shows, and seemingly every second action video game (Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Last of Us, Mass Effect 2, Grand Theft Auto 5, to name a very few).
Why should you care whether a film fails my test that I just made up? Well, for a start such depictions of torture are lazy storytelling, but more than that, such scenes of torture don’t reflect the world we live in, but unfortunately do affect it.
In 2006 an American not-for-profit called Human Rights First found that before September 11, 2001, there were fewer than four fictional depictions of torture on American television a year, but after 9/11 there were more than two a week, with the worst offender being the Fox drama “24”, which had sixty-seven scenes of torture in the first five seasons.
All were, of course, justified by the narrative, which was a tumbling procession of ticking time bombs (sometimes nuclear), which could only be defused by the application of very regrettable but undoubtedly necessary illegal force.
“Although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do,” US Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan told the New Yorker in 2007.
Why was a highly ranking American general speaking to the New Yorker about a pretty silly TV show? Because General Finnegan, who was the dean of the American military academy West Point in 2007, had flown to LA to ask the creators of “24” to tone down the torture, because he found West Point students deploying into in the Middle East area of operations were mimicking scenes from the show, and he felt that torture was negatively affecting outcomes in the region.
Finnegan noted in the article that torture was not only immoral, but also “particularly pointless.”
But wait, what about all that effective torture in Zero Dark Thirty? Well, no. Yes that torture did actually happen, but no it didn’t help capture Osama Bin Laden. Why does the film suggest otherwise? Well, in the most basic terms, the CIA (who were helping create the film) wanted the justifiable torture in the film as a cinematic ablution, and the filmmakers wanted it because they know that the public just love some, sanctioned, necessary Dilawar-test-failing torture.
Nearly fifteen years after 9/11 we know there is no such thing as justifiable and effective torture. The American military and the CIA have concluded that almost no actionable intelligence was ever gleaned by way of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan or in the hunt for Al-Qaeda, instead only managing to radicalize huge populations of bereaved or outraged young men.
The decade and a half long love affair with torture has also been regrettable for the victims too, like Dilawar of Yakubi, a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver who was snatched in Afghanistan by the US military after they had confused him for another man, and was then tortured to death by soldiers who had received no training in interrogation but what they’d seen on screen.
