Some Thoughts on The Hurt Locker
JA
March 04
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker is, in the words of Marlon Brando, well and truly a contender. Having won best picture and best director at the BAFTAs, as well as top prizes at the Director’s Guild and Producer’s Guild Awards, the film is a hot favourite to take out top gongs at the upcoming Oscars (it has nine nominations). Critics and audiences have also given their heartfelt praise – Richard Corliss of TIME called it ‘a near-perfect war film’ and Simon Foster of SBS dubbed it ‘one of the best war movies yet made’.
I went to go see The Hurt Locker last week and yes, like many have said, it is a solid, cleverly wrought drama. Bigelow’s entire theme can be distilled from the four simple words that open the film, which in turn were borrowed from a book by New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges: ‘war is a drug’. In seeking to show this, The Hurt Locker tracks the movements of three men on a US Explosive Ordinance Disposal team during their last few weeks in Iraq. There is the new leader and adrenalin junkie Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), the more cautious, by-the-book Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and the young rookie, Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). The whole film is comprised of a series of carefully orchestrated vignettes as the team dispose of bomb after bomb. The hand held camera work and carefully shown detail – explosions in slow-motion, an empty shell falling onto the red desert dust – do make for tense viewing, although to be honest I didn’t find this as nail-biting as some had said it would be. Perhaps this was also because, at the back of my mind, I couldn’t help questioning the very particular route the film had chosen to take with regards to the politics of the war.
Many have billed The Hurt Locker distinctly apolitical, and this in part was why I was so curious to see it – how could one deal with a mammoth, spiralling narrative such as the Iraq war yet remain neutral? This, for example, from the Age’s Jim Schembri in A2 on the weekend:
Kathryn Bigelow's nail-biting, tense Iraq war drama easily qualifies as one of the best films yet about soldiers and the addictive nature of war. Honest, taut and non-partisan, The Hurt Locker distinguishes itself from other films about Iraq by refusing to push a political agenda.
Yet it seems to me that Bigelow did have an agenda here, if a finely concealed one. The film can hardly be said to glorify war – it is a bloody and repetitive and almost utterly pointless – and the soldiers, like their commanders, are imperfect and psychologically flawed. But look deeper and something more soon becomes apparent. The fact the film is so blinkered in its scope and refuses to make a comment on the wider political climate in itself speaks volumes. The audience is led to think that they are watching something non-partisan, when in fact all over there are small emotional cues which indicate otherwise. For example, the Iraqi people are all but mute here. While many pains are taken to determine the complex psyche of the American troops, we feel little or nothing in response to the varied ways in which the war has impacted on the local people. Mostly, we are only aware that everyone is a potential suicide bomber, and the only clear innocent we have is the young boy that James befriends outside the army compound. Lynden Barber echoes this on the SBS website:
The Iraqi people are treated almost contemptibly by the filmmakers. With the sole exception of a young boy befriended by one of the soldiers, they don’t exist as rounded human beings with their own thoughts, desires and fears. They’re simply the “other”.
There is also one key scene where the team, returning from mission, is shot at by men in a far off hut. James and Sanborn are forced to work together to try and make the very difficult long-distance counter shot. Bigelow makes the scene work excruciatingly, such that, as Paul Byrnes writes in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘we want them to get right. We want them to kill the bad guys, in other words – which is not quite a neutral position’.
Likewise, even if they are far from the cliché, all of the three main characters are portrayed in some way as a variation on the American hero, and very little is said about any brutality on the US side of things. Again from Byrnes:
… we are following soldiers who rarely have to fire their weapons, so we don't have to judge them for killing people. They are saving lives, not taking them – which lends them a certain innocence.
I wonder if this careful line-treading has in some way contributed to The Hurt Locker’s huge critical success – in avoiding any strong political statement, Bigelow is able to steer clear of alienating audiences that might feel strongly either way. The fact that the film is so expertly dramatised also makes it difficult to find open fault with. As Lynden Barber also pointed out – The Hurt Locker is not a bad film, but it is problematic.
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Comments
11 Mar 10 at 13:36
With a language barrier and no main Iraqi character, there
certainly would have been potential for a less-skilled filmmaker to
dehumanise and make the Iraqi people the 'other' in Hurt Locker.
But there are numerous scenes where these factors are borne out, or
investigated, are handled seriously and grounded in realism. Where
US forces rudely shout and swear at Iraqi civilians we are
certainly never made to jeer along or share the frustration.
Instead, the tension is ratcheted up by the possibility of one of
the soldiers being trigger-happy as much as by a bomb unleashing
death with the touch of a mobile phone. I agree that the
point-of-view remains locked on the US side throughout the film but
it’s too simple read this as an endorsement of their actions. The
allied forces alienation and incompetence in a foreign war zone is
highlighted as well. Ralph Fiennes’s mercenary is a cold-hearted
opportunist who, after shooting his two Baath Party prize catches,
jokes that he forgot they could be handed in dead or alive. Sure
enough, he is gunned down along with his underlings before Sergeant
James and his team, who we have an emotional investment in, are
left to duke it out. Interestingly, it’s the second time in the
film where a big name actor’s character is killed shortly after
appearing (after Guy Pearce). James also sneaks in to a home and
interrogates a courteous man at gunpoint. The man’s wife is
outraged and disgusted by the invasion. It’s unsettling to watch
and possibly the greatest wrong he commits in the film. But as
tight and expertly shot as The Hurt Locker is, it doesn’t quite
hang together. James is an adrenaline junkie and goes back to Iraq
for more. We can sympathise ,or at least buy it to a degree,
because we’ve just had the adrenalin rush as well. But if Bigelow
has attempted to incorporate a deeper thread or theme I can’t see
it. Is war addictive for institutions and countries as well? Great
war films seem to have that subtle and grander theme woven in
carefully in a way that resonates throughout the film. In the end
it’s never just about extreme heroism, horror or boredom with the
odd ‘look, here’s the symbolism’ scene chucked in. Can anyone
remember what the other indie hits Three Kings and Jarhead were
about again? Alternatively throughout the films, Kubrick’s
brilliant Full Metal Jacket depicts the nice everyman protagonist
slowly turning in to cold-blooded killer, and Terrance Mallick’s
The Thin Red Line paints war as violation of nature. The hype and
over-praise The Hurt Locker has received are more to do with its
realism and disjointed accidental structure. It comes across as a
breath of fresh air next to the scripted-by-committee material of
its Oscar nominated contemporaries.
11 Mar 10 at 14:07
Cheers for the feedback - you certainly raise some interesting points and I agree that the film is clearly not overtly favourable to the US side of things either. Of course, it's a tall order to ask for any film to capture the nuances of conflict, and their varied viewpoints, but I still feel that the Hurt Locker has a distinct political motive. This was brought home for me with Katherine Bigelow's acceptance speech for best director and best picture. Kudos to her for being the first female to break through here, yet her main point was to dedicate the win (both times) to all the servicemen and women in Iraq and elsewhere - surely a clear indication of where her emphasis lies.
...29 Mar 10 at 9:44
Jess, I've finally got around to seeing this and I too found it problematic for the reasons you say. It was extremely well made and the performances are great but . . . It was also a bit depressing that a woman would finally win a director for best oscar only when she deals with such masculine themes (no disrespect to Bigelow,so much as frustration for other deserving women directors, though, shockingly, women have only been nominated for best director three times before Bigelow).
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