film, eyeballs, brain

It’s only August, so it’s probably a little early to pull out words from my box of hyperbole, but a second viewing of Kathryn Bigelow’s new film The Hurt Locker propels it up onto my year-end list of favorites.

The Hurt Locker is a minimalist action movie, filmed with consummate craftsmanship — not minimalist in the same sense of, say, Melville’s Le Samourai, but in the sense that the entire film essentially consists only of six or seven scenes. There’s really not much of a plot — the reckless Staff Sergeant William James, played excellently by Jeremy Renner, walks again, and again, towards what might or might not be a bomb — but this plotlessness is something truer, perhaps, to tours of duty and a soldier’s marking of the passage of time. Or, for the men of the bomb disposal unit around which the film centers, mission by mission, step by step.

Time, on the other hand, is stretched in scenes of unbearable tension. Even the sequences back at the barracks are fraught with this unease, as if the knife-edge atmosphere of their bomb disposal operations can never be shaken off completely. (That James’ Sergeant, played by Anthony Mackie, is African American adds a fillip of racial tension to the proceedings.) There’s little nostalgic backstory here about families waiting at home, a convention of war films; The Hurt Locker‘s soldiers are confined to the mission at hand, but at the same time, perhaps more importantly, are shown to be unencumbered.

The film conjures up a Vietnam War-era paranoia — not that every bush may harbor the enemy, but that every small mound of garbage or debris might portend death. And death, for its part, isn’t fetishized in images of dismemberment or fiery explosions — though both are present — like other ostensibly anti-war films. What I remember most are slow-motion shots of gravel and dirt and flakes of rust spattering sensuously into the air, the earth itself heaving at the destruction.

Bigelow is a terrific action director — see, for instance, the delirious suburban backyard chase in her 1991 film Point Break — and I’m not even talking about all the surfing and skydiving. The Hurt Locker isn’t that kind of film, with its precise choreography and swooping camera; it creates its internal agitation from an alternating series of close-ups and zooms and overhead shots, as if — like the supposed bad guys — the cameras are also everywhere.

The cameras are employed to great effect halfway through the movie in a quick, jarring scene, when the camera suddenly assumes the viewpoint of Iraqi snipers. (It’s in contrast to earlier shots of the detonation team, with the camera lurking nervously from apartment windows or store fronts.) This time we see the American soldiers through Iraqi scopes, a trigger-pull away from death. But what’s unexpected is that the Americans’ blurred figures, as seen from afar, are as indistinct and fuzzy as the Iraqi snipers seen through American gun sights.

It’s a rough visual equivalence, but is it a moral equivalence as well? The Hurt Locker has been called “an apolitical war film” — that’s a crazy 55,300 results on Google as of this writing — and the description seems erroneous to me, if not simply lazy. Surely the very making of the film is a political gesture in and of itself. In any case, the description is lazy because “apolitical” is clearly just shorthand for saying that the film doesn’t exactly take sides on the matter of the Iraq War, because it sure as hell does — it’s on the American side.

One might, as a consequence, might be disturbed by the usual faceless Iraqis — they’re not exactly granted the same screen time and eloquence as in, say, David O. Russell’s underrated Three Kings, from 1999. Except for a soccer-playing, pirated DVD-peddling boy named Beckham, the Iraqis aren’t even given the courtesy of a disembodied “Fuck you, G.I.!” in the hot night.

What we get, in fact, is babble, and I hasten to add that Arabic obviously isn’t, but that it’s presented as such in the film, both as background and foreground noise: people are constantly yelling orders, or trying to explain something, and this total lack of comprehension on the soldiers’ part (and the American movie audience’s) is surely mirrored by the Iraqi civilians’ own lack of understanding of English. (This lack of Arabic translators for the U.S. Army in Iraq is not a conceit of the screenplay, as I imagine readers already know.) It’s only towards the end that we come closest to understanding what someone is saying, though it’s the words of a doomed man.

But if my rhetorical question about taking sides was in reference to whether Bigelow or the film was for or against the War on Iraq — well, that’s a slightly different story, actually. Viewers wanting to mine The Hurt Locker for political ideology will come away with something they want to see; James is either “a rowdy boy”, or he’s “reckless”. If there’s any position about the Iraq War that the movie takes, people for or against it will pull something out to support their inclinations. (The one obvious point in the film, really, is that no one seems to actually want the Americans around.) This ambiguity — or clarity, as the case may be — of The Hurt Locker‘s politics is its strength; it’s matter-of-factness, not apoliticism, that characterizes the movie.

As in other war movies of more recent vintage, the soldier isn’t necessarily motivated by ideology. It’s a twist on the old war-movie maxim — that a soldier’s loyalties, in the frenzy of battle, are to the members of one’s unit — but in The Hurt Locker, there’s something aggressively self-centered about James’s destructive foolhardiness. It’s only when he’s closest to death that he feels most alive. Again, this observation isn’t anything new, but it posits a direct line from The Hurt Locker to the stoner/adrenalin-junkie philosophies of Point Break, and it’s perhaps the radical statement that Bigelow’s film makes: it’s war as extreme sports.

The Hurt Locker isn’t perfect: it messes with the rigor of the scenario when Mark Boal, the screenwriter, introduces the subplot of a personal vendetta. It illuminates James’ character, certainly, but it’s more narratively artificial than the preceding, supposedly ordinary, scenes. The last five minutes are also unnecessary — the film could have ended prior to a superfluous, suddenly reflective speech that James delivers. (In fact, one of the best scenes in the movie — maybe even the best scene — is when James, asked how he can continue to do what he does, demonstrates precisely how inarticulate he is.) But once we get to the conclusion, there’s something almost Shakespearean in its inevitability; whether it’s tragedy or comedy or a brilliant mixture of both is, again, up to you.

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