In a 1992 interview with Edward Said, Gillo Pontecorvo described The Battle of Algiers, his masterful film about the Algerian War of Independence, as imposing a “dictatorship of truth.” In coining that phrase, Pontecorvo meant to capture the implications of his film’s membership in the seemingly paradoxical genre of the fictional documentary. The aim of films in this genre, many of which were made in the 1960s by left-leaning directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pontecorvo himself, is to produce works of fiction that can in some sense masquerade as works of fact in the service of political ends.

There has been a widespread failure on the part of critics and audiences to interpret Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty as a film belonging to this genre. This failure has dictated the terms of the debate about the film, generating the questions we have posed about it and supplying predictable answers to those questions. Questions about whether or not the film endorses torture, in particular, have become central in critical discussion of the film, and form the locus of both its accolades and its recriminations.

But whether or not the film endorses torture is emphatically not the right question. Focusing on that question obscures the true role of torture in the film and ultimately masks many of the film’s more subtle — and more sinister — implications. Like The Battle of Algiers, Zero Dark Thirty employs the trappings of documentary-style objectivity in order to persuade at a sub-rational level. In understanding Zero as a fictional documentary, we can both refocus the critical conversation and uncover the film’s underlying point of view.