C'mon really? Did you really need to go that far? You're a smart guy but you can get a bit ridiculous man lol.
Isn't this the case though? Where does responsibility cease? If you're trying to attribute it somewhere with regards to a film, where do you stop? It might seem obvious that janitors aren't responsible... but I'm trying to suggest the ambiguity of where we draw the line.
I think you are comparing apples and oranges, particularly in this case.
Equating Lincoln and Zerodarkthirty on the level of a farcical recollection of people and events, yes it is more complicated than one person intentionally making a statement that is patently false when consumed whole.
In both cases, we can trace the "Statement" back to the authority from which it mostly comes. In the case of Lincoln, we have Doris Goodwin. In the case of Zerodarkthirty, we have the Pentagon, State Department, and Administration consulting staffers and other retired former employees who provide similar consulting services.
No, this is exactly what I said some posts ago - regarding textual representation - that you're now choosing to ignore.
The "sources" you're identifying are nothing more than previous texts that are themselves interpretations of purported "history." They aren't essences of originary truth that the film is either trying to expose or conceal. There's nothing intentionally misleading about a film that appropriates material from these texts for a new representation. We can say that it deviates, and we can say that it ignores certain details; but we cannot give it the label of a "lie." To call it a lie means that it knows the supposed "truth" of what it says. You're misapplying terms and doing so in a damaging way.
Let us say I find a note written about you that says you like spinach. This is convenient because I work for a spinach company. I then find the writings of other people who either love spinach or work for other spinach companies, who have seen this note and they also have written extensively about your love for spinach. I write my own book comparing you to a real life Popeye and embellish further into assertions about your obvious prodigious strength from consumption of the Spinach you so love. I am not necessarily aware of the original lie, but I stretch the mistruth even further on my own accord. So I stack a lie on top of the lie I didn't know I was carrying forward.
There's a problem. There are plenty of documented times where you stated that you hate spinach and wish it were gone, and that the note was actually an attempt to pickup a girl you knew who loved spinach. But all this gets ignored to produce a fan favorite and convenient spinach lover narrative of Patrick's Love for Spinach.
You didn't love spinach. Your love for spinach is a lie.
I'm happy that you think you see things so clearly, but there are so many avenues to this that you're simply disregarding.
This is a bad example because tastes change. I hated spinach when I was young, but I like it now. Tastes can change at a whim. If I wrote a note when I was five that said I didn't like spinach, and then someone came to me now and said: "I heard you hate spinach," and I responded that I actually like it, no lie has taken place.
Let's take a different, more
potentially verifiable scenario. I tell you there are butterflies at the North Pole. I tell you this because I heard it somewhere else. I don't know for sure that there are butterflies there; I haven't bothered to do any of my own research, and since I've never been to the North Pole physically, I can't verify it empirically (although I could). So theoretically, I don't
know that there are butterflies in the North Pole; however, I also don't know that there aren't. I've come into a state of mind where, for some reason or other, I genuinely believe there are butterflies at the North Pole. Nothing I've told you is a lie, despite the fact that it might be misinformation. There is certainly a situation that transpired, and it certainly had specific and potentially verifiable circumstances and details; but no one can lie about it unless they actually had knowledge of those original details, and this is where your accusation of "lying" comes under scrutiny.
In order for there to be a lie about butterflies at the North Pole, or my love of spinach, someone had to originally know a specific fact and then state otherwise. A lie is intentionally misleading; it is deceptive. I've no doubt that people do lie; but I have a serious doubt that
Zero Dark Thirty is someone's "lie." It did not come from an original source, it is a derivative representation of some purportedly real action that will likely never be reduced back to its source simply because many of your so-called "liars" did not even know what they were saying. It is almost impossible that a single, or small group of people who know the truth in some obscure corner of the military had a direct hand in facilitating the movie that was
Zero Dark Thirty. The officers and personnel who let them read the partially classified documents likely had no idea what lay behind the blacked-out sections.
Your desire to call it a lie suggests that we can identify a far more malicious and intentionally deceptive group of people at its center than is actually there.
