Omid Arabian

Awards season is in full swing, and the most lauded film of 2009 appears to be Kathryn Bigelow's actioner The Hurt Locker. It has appeared on almost everyone's best-of-the-year list, and even made it to some best-of-the-decades (Roger Ebert, Time Magazine, etc.) The film follows a trio of U.S. Army officers assigned to bomb-diffusion duty (official euphemism: Explosive Ordnance Disposal) in the heyday of the Iraqi resistance, and there is no denying that it's a top-notch piece of craftsmanship. Eschewing the usual big battle scenes, cartoonish CGI, and deafening sound design, and shooting mostly hand-held, Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd take us in with the soldiers as they perform their hair-trigger job in perilously unfamiliar and often hostile surroundings, always an inch away from being blown to bits. The tension level starts already cranked up to 11, and rarely relents.

"The Hurt Locker" on DVDIt's clear Bigelow has set out to make a taut, visceral film that focuses on the skin-of-your-teeth daily grind of being a special-ops soldier—and she's succeeded. But to what end, and at what cost? The Hurt Locker completely foregoes 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, a means for them to grow from boys into men and from men into heroes. Despite all the ink spilled over how deep Hurt Locker gets inside the soldiers' heads, there is nowhere between the characters (or anywhere else in the film) any discussion or mention of how we got here, what we are fighting for, and why-as though the soldiers had just switched on a video game and dropped in, battle-ready and intellect-free.

a scene from "The Hurt Locker"The film's main character, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), is the kind of swaggering, bravado-oozing maverick that American films have rarely seen since John Wayne. He's the kind of guy who can't wait to put on "the suit" (the high-tech bomb-diffusion outfit) and go out there to strut his stuff, the diehard zealot for whom diffusing a bomb is an orgasmic act (complete with the requisite celebratory cigarette). He is gushed over by his superiors, and even his harshest critic—fellow soldier Sanborn—comes to idolize him by the end ("Do you think I'll ever be good enough to wear ‘the suit'?" wonders Sanborn.) James epitomizes a brand of conservative American pseudo-ethics that the film obviously holds in highest regard: keep your head down, think of your family, serve your country, and love it. The only soldier who dares to slightly question this mindless devotion, and express any doubt over risking his life, is painted (without any irony) as a whiny coward in need of psychiatric observation.

Astoundingly, there is in fact not a trace of irony anywhere in The Hurt Locker—not even when it tells us that the name of the army base has been changed from Camp Freedom to Camp Victory because "it sounds better". It seems to genuinely believe, as one character mentions, that "going to war is the experience of a lifetime...and it could be fun!" As such, the film (released in 2009 but made in 2008), is at once the ultimate Bush-era war movie and a throwback to the straightforward, self-righteous, star-spangled, hero-led war films of the '40s —turning back the clock as though Vietnam never happened, as though Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket and Letters from Iwo Jima were never made.

Even more disconcerting is the fact that all through the film the Iraqi people (the soldiers pejoratively call them "Hajis" and refer to the act of sniffing out insurgents as "Haji-Hunting") exist mostly on the tangents, and fall into one of four broad categories:

a) vaguely menacing onlookers appearing like Hitchcock's birds on balconies and minarets or peering ominously through windows and doorways;
b) soulless snipers/kidnappers;
c) desperate, needy victims of other Iraqis; or
d) smarmy opportunists eager to kiss up to and profit from the Americans.

And that's just the men—the women fare even worse, all of them just variations on the stereotypical abaya-clad, wailing-banshee character who can turn a tray of tea into a lethal weapon.  In the world of Hurt Locker, all Iraqis are potentially dangerous, even the dead ones: in one episode, Sgt. James encounters the corpse of a young boy in an abandoned building and quickly surmises that it's a "body bomb"—and with a gut-wrenching expression on his face proceeds to dig the explosives out of the boy's belly. The scene is all but subtitled Look at us, fighting and protecting the kinds of savages who would turn a child into an explosive device.

Indeed, Sgt. James' only "fault" is that he is too eager, too willing to risk his life to save these people. In a year of films about Great White Saviors (cf. The Blind Side, Avatar) William James is the end-all-rushing in when all others are running the other way, to rid an Iraqi man from a time-bomb that has been padlocked to his body by his own people. Again, the movie echoes a right-wing war slogan: "we are here to clean up their mess (and we're doing a damn fine job)."

By the time Sgt. James steps out of the transport chopper for his second tour of duty in the desert, every swaggering, camouflage-clad step droolingly fetishized in slo-mo as heavy-metal blasts on the soundtrack, the film has shed all vestigial pretensions to being anything more than a feature-length Army recruitment ad. To be fair, it's not the only such film to be made in recent years. But what does it say about this moment in our cultural Zeitgeist when such a blatant piece of war propaganda has become not only the highest-grossing Iraq-invasion movie ever but one of the most celebrated and critically-acclaimed films of this century?

Omid Arabian is a writer in Los Angeles, where he serves as the Levantine Review's Film Editor.

* [Editor's Note: For instance, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz supports Israeli settlements in the West Bank.]

Radio TabbouliListen to an in-depth interview conducted with Omid Arabian by Malihe Razazan at KPFA  discussing the issues raised in this review.