The entirety of the plot of Prisoners is discussed below. So, you know, spoilers.
I realize that some of my theories are controversial. How could Star Trek Into Darkness be pro-drone strike? How could Elysium be an anti-Obamacare parable? People want shallow readings of the media. They want the surface to reflect the truth. I get it. I think these people will be quite happy with Prisoners, which is a relatively obvious leftwing critique of American society after 9/11.*
Prisoners begins with a Thanksgiving dinner shared by the Dover and Birch families. The Dovers are white, conservative (we see father and son hunting a deer before the dinner), and a little down on their luck financially, while the Birches are black and urbane, slightly better off. The families both have young daughters as well as a pair of older teens. After dinner, Birch plays a warbly rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner," a song we are told Dover sings to himself in the shower.
The kidnapping of their two young girls sets into motion the plot. Their disappearance of the two girls is akin to the destruction of the Twin Towers: a life-altering event that changes everything and shifts the moral calculus of right and wrong. The main suspect in the case is a man named Alex Jones (played by Paul Dano), who you may notice shares a name with a leading 9/11 conspiracy theorist.** After the police are forced to let Jones go—there's no proof he was involved with the kidnapping—one of the fathers, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) renditions him to a black site (an abandoned apartment complex) where he and his friend Franklin Birch (Terence Howard) torture him for information on their daughters' whereabouts.
I want to focus briefly on a couple of paragraphs from my review:
Birch is troubled by the turn he and his friend has taken. Dover is less so. "We hurt him until he talks or they’re going to die—that’s the choice," Dover tells his friend. "He’s not a person anymore. He stopped being a person when he took our daughters."
As fists prove unpersuasive, Dover steps up his game: stress positions, scalding hot and freezing cold water, and confined, dark spaces become his tools. Dover’s behavior, and Birch’s allowance of it to continue, degrades them as much as Jones.
Dover's rhetoric matches much of the post-9/11 rhetoric. And the methods undertaken by Dover and Birch are clear, though obviously far more extreme, parallels to some of the harsh interrogation techniques used at Gitmo and elsewhere.
It seems fairly clear to me that Dover is a stand-in for George W. Bush (the conservative roots, the fact that he has given up drinking). His rhetoric is most forceful, his anger more righteous. Birch, meanwhile, strikes me as a clear stand-in for Obama: He is at first extremely uncomfortable with the techniques being used on their detainee. But he acquiesces to continue Dover's war when it becomes clear that there are no other options and public opinion (in this case, Birch's wife) supports taking out the kidnapper.
It turns out that Jones is a patsy, kind of.*** While Jones did take the girls, his mother is the one who decided to keep them prisoner and plans to kill them. She is a fundamentalist, of a sort—she says she is waging a war on god for having taken her own son away. Her goal is to make believers give up their faith one disappeared child at a time. She's kind of like an inverse bin Laden, an anti-religious zealot who nevertheless wants to cause her enemies to lose faith in their righteousness. She ends up being killed after armed forces storm her compound and put a bullet in her head.
The moral of the story, of course, is good and leftwing: French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve wants to tell us that you risk becoming the monster you chase when you adopt immoral tactics.
I'm not saying I agree with this critique, naturally. I'm just laying it out for you. Do with it what you will.
*Part of the problem, of course, is that STID and Elysium were simply horribly written. They wanted to serve as a critique of drone strikes and as a boost for Obamacare, respectively. But they were sloppily plotted and ham-handed, so much so that the esoteric reading of the works became the only logical one.
**I'm connecting dots here, man!
***At the film's close we learn that Jones was kidnapped by his "mother" years before and that he has been reunited with his birth family. This strikes me as a relatively unlikely conclusion, given the fact that he did in fact kidnap two little girls who almost get murdered and was complicit in the deaths of god-only-knows how many other children.