Let’s get one thing straight: I have no idea what war is really like. I’ve seen ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and ‘The Thin Red Line’, and I grew up in a place colonised by a long-running civil conflict, and I’ve been to Jerusalem and Bethlehem and all kinds of other places where people inhabit the false consciousness described by de Niro’s Al Capone in ‘The Untouchables’ as ‘you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word’. But I have no idea what war is really like. And I don’t think it’s too dogmatic to say that unless you’ve actually been in a war, that you are in the same position as I am.
That doesn’t mean you can’t form a substantial and meaningful opinion about war; just that the opinion needs to be tempered by humility.
With that in mind, some thoughts about ‘The Hurt Locker’, Kathryn Bigelow’s deep focus minimalist action film, in which Jeremy Renner’s bomb disposal technician wears a suit that makes him look like an alien, strides up to mortar shells, and hopes he’s cutting the right wire, in Baghdad, in 2004.
It’s easy to respond to the tension created by such scenes by saying that this is one of the most exciting films (in the sense of forcing you into your seat, afraid for what is going to happen to the characters), or one of the most expertly edited and shot (no matter what is happening, you know precisely where you are). It’s true that ‘The Hurt Locker’ sets the bar for thoughtful action cinema very high.
What’s more valuable, however, is that it does three things that such movies rarely achieve.
It’s not an anti-war movie; nor is it jingoistic or flag-waving. It might be true to say that ‘The Hurt Locker’ has no politics. It just attempts to portray what young US American men have been doing, and how Iraqi people have been responding, for the past six years. It doesn’t have to tell us that the decision to go to war was utterly wrong: glimpsing what truth is told about the men in this film makes it obvious.
It manages to almost completely avoid cliche – the young buck doesn’t have a moment of breakdown or redemption; the race-against-time to save someone ends as it probably often does in real life; the characters talk to each other the way real people talk.
And in its attempt at saying something about the war in Iraq (which it does better than any of the previously released similarly-themed movies), it also illuminates questions of masculinity, the responsibilities of adulthood, relationships between men, and the yearning that each of us has to lead a meaningful life. It takes the audience seriously enough not to invite us to a show of cathartic violence; but a relentless portrayal of hell on earth where there is no release until somebody decides to STOP. A hell of our own making; and I think many of us who opposed the war could benefit from seeing a film that aims to take the experience of being a soldier more seriously than some of our rhetoric has done.
The final image of the film, which implies that there are some people for whom combat is an addiction (let’s assume that includes the whole human race) evokes with the sharpest clarity two more challenges: to replace the myth that chaos can be turned into order through violence, someone needs to tell different stories about how change occurs; to offer a choice between brutality and cowardice, someone needs to offer a different vision of masculinity than the false choice between warrior or wimp. Finally, ‘The Hurt Locker’ is an accusation: If all that ‘peaceful’ society offers is a vast choice of breakfast cereal, then it’s no wonder so many of us still want to fight each other just to feel alive.
Thanks for another thoughtful post Gareth. Building on the movie's challenge you brought up so eloquently, how can a peaceful society, even if it offers more than a vast choice of breakfast cereals, cross the immense gap that is created between civilian citizens and those citizens that have been exposed to the psychological trauma of war? For generations we have been expecting almost impossible feats of assimilation from returning soldiers. It leads me to esentially the same quandry as yours, and is so well evoked by Renner's character in The Hurt Locker: If we send a man or woman to war and he/she discovers strengths and talents in the context of violence and chaos, how can we build a peaceful society where those strengths and talents have voice and meaning and the ability to prevent war in the first place?
Truly a wonderful movie, my favorite of the year thus far, I can't wait to get your discussion on it. I was consistently impressed by how the movie would always manage to avoid cliche and go in a completley different direction from what modern-day cinema conditioning would lead you to expect. The subplot with the child in particular, which I know many people have criticized as being extraneous, I find to be just brilliant at how it subverts action-movie expectations and what it says about the real world versus the fictionalized. Combine this with a brilliant attention to detail (I love that in the sniper scene, the distant enemies are blurry and out-of-focus, which they would be at that range), and incredible tension, and you have one hell of a picture.
They did an excellent job of getting into the heads of these soldiers. Some want to be anyplace but there, others wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I know people like this, who are over there right now. A very realistic and respectfully made movie.
Can't wait to see this film since I saw Kathryn Bigelow on the Colbert Report.
“…to replace the myth that chaos can be turned into order through violence, someone needs to tell different stories about how change occurs; to offer a choice between brutality and cowardice, someone needs to offer a different vision of masculinity than the false choice between warrior or wimp.”
Thank you, Gareth, for a really incisive observation. (Maybe this isn't the proper place, but if you'll allow me, It seems to me that a critique of war is impossible without a critique of the 'masculinity' our societies favour. And war films, if I can generalise, are always about masculinity (for me) – whether it's an uncritical acceptance of it, or a glorification of it, or occasionally a more questioning look.)
They did an excellent job of getting into the heads of these soldiers. Some want to be anyplace but there, others wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I know people like this, who are over there right now. A very realistic and respectfully made movie.
Can't wait to see this film since I saw Kathryn Bigelow on the Colbert Report.
“…to replace the myth that chaos can be turned into order through violence, someone needs to tell different stories about how change occurs; to offer a choice between brutality and cowardice, someone needs to offer a different vision of masculinity than the false choice between warrior or wimp.”
Thank you, Gareth, for a really incisive observation. (Maybe this isn't the proper place, but if you'll allow me, It seems to me that a critique of war is impossible without a critique of the 'masculinity' our societies favour. And war films, if I can generalise, are always about masculinity (for me) – whether it's an uncritical acceptance of it, or a glorification of it, or occasionally a more questioning look.)
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