"The Hurt Locker' and the endless war

Hollywood began its Oscar bash this year by noting that the number of nominees per award category had doubled from five to ten, for the first time since 1943. The winner for best picture that year was Casablanca, and certainly there was nothing nearly as good on offer this time around— indeed, nothing as good as half a dozen pictures on that long-ago list.

The choice this year boiled down to two front-runners: James Cameron's Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. I haven't seen Avatar; but then, I left 3-D movies behind in childhood and have no particular interest in the Photoshop update. I did see The Hurt Locker, a film I thought effective in a bludgeoning way, and truthful enough on its narrow terrain.

I was naggingly disturbed by it, too— an aftertaste I couldn't shake for a while. The disturbance was clarified for me by the groundswell of popularity and acclaim that built under the film and culminated in its sweep of six Oscars.

We are approaching the seventh anniversary of the Iraq war, a war that seems to have no end, although we are periodically promised one. A number of films have been made about the war, but none before The Hurt Locker engaged the general public or attracted much Oscar attention. To the contrary, films about the war, whether well made or not, seemed guaranteed to fail at the box office.

War without a cause

This wasn't surprising, considering that the subject is a war of lies built on lies. All the usual flag-waving and warmongering could not conceal the fact that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and that the evidence for them had been manufactured. Abu Ghraib didn't make the picture any prettier. America seemed to have lost its way in Iraq, a polite way of saying it had committed aggression against a nonbelligerent state and unleashed the hounds of hell on a fractured nation. No wonder nobody wanted to see the movie.

As a film, The Hurt Locker isn't much different from Jarhead, an earlier look at the impact of the war on those fighting it. Nevertheless, The Hurt Locker became everyone's darling. Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, had found a way to look very closely at the war without seeing anything at all.

Like a surgeon, with a difference

The film depicts an explosives demolition unit; the central character, First Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), is the point man who defuses roadside bombs. The road must be cleared of all civilians and personnel before defusing can proceed. The operation is as delicate as surgery, the difference being that the patient must die for the doctor to live. Sergeant James must step into a bomb suit, much like a surgeon donning his scrubs. The surgeon, however, frees his limbs, while the demolition man encases himself from head to toe, and breathes filtered oxygen. He looks like a spaceman, and the terrain around him, cleared of all life, is an alien planet.

All of this is exactly according to code; it is also a perfect metaphor for the American footprint in Iraq, and the hubris of George W. Bush's attempt to impose the neocon fantasy of a "democracy"—read "docile client state"— on the world's oldest continuous culture. A director could have fun with this idea. But Bigelow's focus remains almost entirely limited to the paranoia-flecked experience of the bomb squad.

Iraqis themselves are virtually out of sight; the one exception is a young boy whom Sergeant James christens "Beckham" and adopts as a mascot. Beckham mimics his masters, becomes a hustler, and may or may not perish in what is or is not a terrorist setup.

The moral of that story is that nothing can be gained by any human contact with the native population: The only safe place is one's bomb suit.

Matador's challenge

On the other hand, Sergeant James is a cowboy, reckless not only with his own life but with that of his unit. He has become a war lover, both numbed and intoxicated by his daily encounter with death. Like a matador, he plays with it, manages it and dispatches it. For Sergeant James, there is no war, no enemy— just a daily challenge that's always the same and each time lethally different.

Sergeant James's colleagues don't share his death wish, but we're drawn inexorably into his experience until it becomes normative for us— in film parlance, the point of view. At the same time, because our own experience is vicarious, we can stand outside it and see it in a dimension inaccessible to Sergeant James himself. In short, we can see him as he cannot possibly see himself: as a hero.

His very recklessness is the vertiginous price Sergeant James pays for standing on the ramparts of freedom. He's keeping the bombs out of the way for us, on a road stretching all the way back to Lower Broadway.

"'You need me'

Bigelow isn't so crass as to suggest this directly. In the film's most affecting scene, we see Sergeant James back home, cradling his infant son and explaining to him that the instinctive faith and trust he shows in the world will gradually curdle as it reveals the death and disillusionment at its core. Having tasted that reality at its most extreme, he is drawn to live in its truth, the sole reality it has for him.

We understand that Sergeant James is addicted and in a certain sense damned; but we're also left to feel that it is he and his kind who most defend us. It's exactly the message that Jack Nicholson's self-intoxicated Colonel Nathan R. Jessep leaves us with in A Few Good Men: "You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall."

In A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessep crosses the line and is responsible for the death of a hapless soldier under his command. In The Hurt Locker, Sergeant James exposes his unit members to danger, but himself most of all. He doesn't in fact cause harm, and he "kills" no one but the bomb in front of him. We sense that in the end he will sacrifice only himself. We think: I don't much like this man and I certainly don't wish to emulate him. But I'm glad he's defending me.

War in five countries

This is the larger lie wrapped around the small truths of The Hurt Locker. Sergeant James and his like are not defending us. They're doggedly attempting the conquest of a country that we attacked without cause. That war has now bled in popular consciousness into the war in Afghanistan as well as our wider military actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

We are now effectively at war with or within five separate countries, and covertly present in scores more. Our shadowy enemy is nowhere and everywhere. Sergeant James is the soldier who fights for us, who finds the next bomb wherever it is buried. He fights a war both very private and very public, but one that he hopes will never end. Our leaders plan to oblige him.

This is the imperial ethos that Hollywood has validated in embracing The Hurt Locker. Kathryn Bigelow herself, in accepting her awards, expressed her gratitude toward our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for all the servicemen and women on duty anywhere in the world.

The sentiment was applauded. Hail, Caesar. Hollywood liberals, too, salute you.♦


To read responses, click here.