The worst review I could find of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker comes from Variety. Nevertheless, it is better than the best review of The Blind Side (I am still incredulous that The Blind Side has been nominated in any category). The Variety review, by Derek Elley, came in Sept/08 before critics had started to notice it at the 2009 TIFF and so Elley didn’t have anybody to do any thinking for him. Like Elley, when I first viewed the film, I thought it was a solid war flick, a three-man Explosive Ordinance Disposal team on a tour in Iraq, episodic, no significant narrative, gritty hand-held camera shots, quasi-documentary feel. But I didn’t expect it to garner all the accolades that have since come its way, including AP’s list of the decade’s top ten films.
I approached The Hurt Locker with a healthy dose of skepticism. I said to myself: “Not another American film that tells the story of working-class grunts while ignoring the stories of those whose lands they occupy. I’m getting tired of American military propaganda.” I had just finished reading Leilah Nadir‘s The Orange Trees of Baghdad, Canadian journalist Nadir’s memoir of life for her family under American occupation. One of the things which struck me about Nadir’s account was the lack of engagement by American troops in the daily life of ordinary Iraqis. For obvious security reasons, Americans remained cloistered in the Green Zone. This meant that American troops could remain relatively unaffected by the consequences of their presence there, could avoid empathy for the people they were “helping,” and could maintain unchallenged the stereotypes of a radicalized Islamic population.
As much as I might wish for a different kind of film, The Hurt Locker is what it is, and it is good enough that it deserves to be encountered on its own terms. Although it opens by orienting itself in the anti-war camp (by quoting Christ Hedges’ book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning: “The rush of battle is a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug”), nevertheless, it is extraordinarily non-judgmental. No analytical psychologizing like we find in Apocalypse Now. No sanctimonious moralizing like we find in Platoon. Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) has arrived to replace his recently blown up predecessor. Another member of his team, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), has him pegged for a redneck cowboy who’s going to get them all killed. In a sense, Sanborn is right; James is a redneck. James swigs whiskey and listens to his metal-head music. Somewhere in his past he got a girlfriend pregnant and now there’s an infant son, but he barely acknowledges their existence. His only possession is a box of bomb components … and a wedding ring on a chain – all the things that have nearly got him killed.
However, as Sanborn discovers, there’s more depth to him than his redneck image would first suggest. James develops a friendship with an Iraqis boy who sells DVD’s and calls himself Beckham (Christopher Sayegh). When he discovers that the remains of a boy (whom he mistakenly believes is Beckham) have been used for a “body bomb,” he ignores the ordinary protocol of blowing up the body with C4 and risks his life by defusing the bomb so the boy’s remains can be buried with dignity. He promises the other member of his team, Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), that he will “get him out of this.” He makes good on his promise, although, in what can only be construed as a parable for the war in Iraq, he creates the very situation from which he rescues Eldridge and, in the process of rescuing him, shatters his femur in nine places. Not exactly the kind of hero that makes viewers feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Despite what appears to be an existential disengagement, James does have a backhanded empathy for the Iraqis he encounter. That is because the Iraqis he encounters most intimately are those who have planted and armed the bombs he has to diffuse. He carries on a “conversation” with them as he tears apart a car, searching for the triggering mechanism. And in the penultimate episode, as he surveys the crater left by an exploded oil truck, he tries to get inside the heads of the men who set off the explosion. Was it a suicide attack? Or did they watch in the shadows and detonate the bomb remotely? To perform his role, he has to think like them. When the tour of duty is over, we see James in a supermarket standing before a shelf with a hundred different brands of breakfast cereal. We wonder, perhaps with James, what kind of a mind lies behind the product displays in a giant box store. Is it driven by an internal logic which we can somehow diffuse if we think long enough about it?
After dissociative images of cleaning leaves from a rain gutter and playing with his son, we see James back on Iraqi soil for another tour of duty. Although there is the suggestion (thanks to the Hedges’ quote) that James is either addicted to or in love with war, there is also the suggestion that war is the only way James knows to quell his dissociative tendencies. He knows himself only when he is at war. If war is an addiction, it is only an addiction because it feeds a craving for purpose and identity. A disaffected working-class American has only two options to satisfy this craving, and Hedges has documented both of them — religion and war.
Without being preachy, Bigelow presents to us an average American soldier who has no more insight regarding the forces that shape his life (and perhaps oppress it) than the average Iraqi insurgent. The Hurt Locker concludes indeterminately, a fresh tour, the next iteration of a cycle that could go on forever. In that sense, the film is true to the story of the American military.