in which i finally write something about the hurt locker

A few weeks ago I posted something about The Hurt Locker. Then I deleted it because after reading review after review, I still wasn't completely sure what I thought of the film. But now it's won Best Picture and Kathryn Bigelow has become the first woman in history to win Best Director, so I have to say something about it.

I saw the film when it first came out--twice, in fact. The first time, I got there late and had to sit in the very front row. I didn't realize you could actually feel the riveted attention of an entire audience behind you as a physical sensation, but you can.

Artistically, The Hurt Locker is just about perfect. The script (by a former embedded reporter), the casting, the acting, the physical production--flawless. The dialogue is minimal but at the end you realize you understand an extraordinary amount about these characters without them ever having said it. Bigelow spins off virtuoso sequences of suspense that just keep escalating to new levels of craziness like some insane circus act. And the brief monologue that Jeremy Renner's character delivers to a baby near the end of the film is one of the saddest, most existentially lonely moments I've seen in recent film.

My gut reaction to The Hurt Locker was to really like it. I like war movies. I like action, suspense and violence. Like Bigelow, I am fascinated with people who choose to put themselves in danger, who enjoy cheating death. If those kind of themes and stories don't interest you, The Hurt Locker is probably not your film. If they do, you'll probably walk out of the theater the way I did, which was thinking "Daaaaaaaaamn."

In fact, I liked the movie so much, it actually took me several months to admit to myself that its politics were crap.

This doesn't usually happen to me, you see. It's extremely rare for my gut emotional reaction to be at odds with my intellectual, political reaction to a film. If the latter is off, it usually short-circuits the former (see: Avatar). After two years of trying to teach myself how to create good political films, I've become extremely sensitive to things like perspective and representation and choice of protagonist and how they impact a story. But here, the sheer intensity of the sensory and emotional experience won out. This tells me that The Hurt Locker is a very, very good film. And for a long time, I defended it to filmmaking colleagues with whom I'm usually in agreement on political questions.

The review that finally broke me was this one. While I think Arabian is a bit harsh at times, he accuses The Hurt Locker of one sin I can't ignore: contextlessness. Here he is worth quoting at length:

The Hurt Locker completely forgoes any discussion of the many huge issues surrounding the Iraq invasion, choosing to treat it as simply a neutral fact. For this reason, some critics have called it an apolitical war movie. But that's not only an oxymoron (war is politics, and vice versa), it's also impossible in this age where buying a cup of coffee is a political act. In leaving out any consideration of the big picture of America's Iraq enterprise, and treating the war as just a setting, Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have made a decision that is indeed political, whether or not they and their admirers see it that way. They've presented an ongoing real-life conflict as something that appears to have no history, no subtext, no depth—it's simply there as an arena for the soldiers to do what they do.

This is related to another oft-raised criticism of the film, that of perspective. The Hurt Locker keeps us rigorously, relentlessly and totally in the perspective of the American soldiers on the ground. Artistically, this works brilliantly. And I actually don't think I would have a political criticism to make of that choice either, if, at any point in the film, even one character had raised some question about what it was the Americans were doing there in the first place. Do these guys, who defuse bombs all day, every day, for their entire tour of duty in Iraq, really never stop and think about why it is that Iraqis might be planting bombs all over their own city?

The Hurt Locker is not so much pro-war as it is unquestioning of the war. I do not think the film is a piece of blatant military propaganda as some have claimed. The main character is basically incapable of functioning in normal society, which isn't exactly something you put in a recruitment ad. It certainly does not make war look fun. But it does achieve a clever sleight-of-hand by focusing so narrowly on this particular bomb-disposal unit.

These guys are doing something that appears to be completely selfless--risking their lives to defuse bombs that would otherwise kill civilians. And because we never see the context that might lead people to plant these bombs in the first place--one of the most savage aerial bombardments in history, the daily humiliations of occupation, midnight house raids, torture, collective punishment of whole cities, looting disguised as reconstruction and a total contempt for Iraqi sovereignty--occupying US soldiers become heroes and Iraqis become that favorite Middle Eastern character, the Unmotivated Terrorist.

I'm certainly not suggesting that there is no value in a film told exclusively from US soldiers' perspective. Or that the absurdly dangerous job these men (and they are all men) volunteer for does not require courage. But there is nothing heroic about occupation. It is by definition inglorious, brutal, nasty, racist, and dehumanizing to all involved--not to mention insanely expensive at a time when funding for everything other than war is being slashed to the bone. Those who pay the highest price are the Iraqis. But the damage done to US soldiers asked to participate in the domination of another people is not slight, nor is that inflicted on all but the very richest Americans as our government spends a billion dollars a day on war.

I waited, as Kathryn Bigelow gave her acceptance speech, for her to say one word about the Iraqi people. I waited for her to say "Bring the troops home now." At at time when over 60% of Americans oppose the Iraq War, this would hardly have been a controversial statement. But she did neither, which to me says all you need to know about where the film's politics lie. The Hurt Locker may be a great film, but it is not an antiwar film. Does every film about the Iraq War need to be antiwar? Perhaps not, but I think we must seriously question what the role of a film like The Hurt Locker can be when our government shows no inclination of ending a war that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose, and for which all stated justifications have been proven to be utterly specious. Given the straggering financial and human cost of said war, this is hardly an academic question.