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Screening the Politics Out of the Iraq War
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The Hurt Locker, the widely praised movie about American soldiers on a bomb squad in Iraq, has arrived in theaters with enough rave reviews to fill two dozen quote ads. While the film is excellent in some respects, its politics are worrisome – not because they’re wrong, but because there are no politics in a film about the most politically fraught conflict in recent memory. And the eagerness of critics to overlook or excuse this bothers me just as much.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow from a screenplay by Mark Boal, the movie focuses on a three-man bomb-disposal unit that plies its trade with a savvy balance of skill, nerve, and machismo. Careening from one crisis to another, the story is a nonstop succession of suspense episodes, made extra harrowing by the actions of the main character, a danger addict who defuses deadly bombs as enthusiastically as other people play video games, putting missions and lives in needless jeopardy. As the rave reviews have rightly noted, The Hurt Locker is ingeniously acted, edited with razor-sharp timing, and shot with great attention to naturalistic detail. It also has a highly authentic atmosphere, since Boal based the script on his experience as an embedded journalist with an Iraq unit like this. His earlier work includes the Playboy article “Death and Dishonor,” about the murder of an Iraq war veteran near Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2003, which inspired Paul Haggis’s film In the Valley of Elah – the first of two 2007 pictures (the other was Brian De Palma’s postmodern Redacted) that brought forceful antiwar messages into multiplexes everywhere.
How times have changed. The Hurt Locker beats those movies for hair-raising action, but it comes up extremely short in the politics department. In a New Yorker interview, Boal said he didn’t want the characters “standing up and giving speeches” because “you’re probably not thinking about the geopolitics of oil when you’re standing over a bomb.” Does that mean audiences shouldn’t think about geopolitics either? Boal has also compared the picture to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, telling a Writers Guild of America website that both movies have an episodic format that’s true to the existential realities of war. Maybe so, but Coppola’s film packs an enormous number of ideas (some insightful, some not) into its ambitious storyline. By contrast, each episode of The Hurt Locker is a marvelously wrought specimen of suspense-movie technique, and that’s all it is, apart from a few isolated scenes.
From all appearances, Boal and Bigelow are operating from the same premise that motivated Steven Soderbergh when he made Che – that war movies are built on physicality and violence, and thinking only slows down the action. (It’s a good thing Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick didn’t feel that way; we wouldn’t have the rich complexity of Full Metal Jacket or The Thin Red Line.) This is an oddly self-limiting position, given the huge supply of important issues at stake. What groups and individuals are planting those explosives all over Baghdad and beyond? Don’t they put life and limb at risk as audaciously as the bomb-squad soldiers do? What motivations – political, nationalistic, religious, philosophical – shape their strategies and shore up their morale? And why, in this equality-conscious Hollywood era, does the film push Iraqis into the margins, using them as only as momentary foils for the American guys, and two-dimensional foils at that? Questions, questions, none of which Boal and Bigelow take on.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Nor have they been raised by most critics, who’ve been so thrilled by the picture that immediate, visceral responses have outgunned reflective, cerebral ones. Dana Stevens of Slate wraps up a rave by saying The Hurt Locker is “without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made” about the Iraq war, as if excitement sans ideology – any ideology – were the formula for top-grade cinema. Numerous reviewers find the film’s vagueness about geopolitics, and even geography, a plus rather than a minus. “It so happens that The Hurt Locker takes place in Iraq,” writes Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. “But geography is almost beside the point.” Kenneth Turan says in the Los Angeles Times that “it’s unfair to burden The Hurt Locker with the Iraq label” since there’s “no sense of winning or losing a war here, no notion of making a difference or achieving lofty geopolitical aims,” echoing Boal’s dubious distinction between movies that actually think and movies that just move. Politics don’t even occur to Roger Ebert, who calls The Hurt Locker “a great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they’re doing and why.” Has the bar for great, intelligent films slipped so low that a movie qualifies by being comprehensible?
And so it goes. David Edelstein recognizes the political shallowness of The Hurt Locker near the end of his New York review, then promptly endorses it. “Last but maybe foremost are the politics—or lack of them,” he writes, commendably bringing up the problem. “The question of what the hell these good men are doing,” he continues, “in a culture they don’t understand with a language they don’t speak surrounded by people they can’t read hangs in the air but is never actually called.” So far, so good, until he asks the rhetorical question, “Or is that why this movie rises above its preachy counterparts?” This raises two non-rhetorical questions in my mind: What qualities make those counterparts preachy, as opposed to informative or provocative? And what counterparts are we talking about, anyway? The critic gives no clue. Over at the Village Voice, meanwhile, Scott Foundas rightly notes that some film-festival viewers tagged The Hurt Locker “apolitical,” and then he executes the same maneuver as Edelstein, saying those comments only show that the film “is mercifully free of ham-fisted polemics” and is content to “immerse us in an environment.” I’m as anti-ham-fist as the next moviegoer, but there would have been plenty of room in that environment for some progressive polemics.
In another mostly perceptive article, New York Times critic A.O. Scott calls Bigelow “one of the few directors for whom action-movie-making and the cinema of ideas are synonymous,” saying you may “emerge from The Hurt Locker shaken, exhilarated and drained, but you will also be thinking.” Thinking about what, however? “Not necessarily about the causes and consequences of the Iraq war,” Scott hastens to add. Scott’s conclusion is a let-down, but at least he explicitly faults the movie’s political limitations, saying that the filmmakers’ concentration on moment-to-moment experience is “a little evasive.” Take out the “little” and the point would be better made.
David Denby’s review in The New Yorker is also both insightful and problematic. The Hurt Locker is not political, he writes, “except by implication—a mutual distrust between American occupiers and Iraqi citizens is there in every scene.” Again the film’s political shortfall – its politics are only implicit, and they encompass nothing more profound or sweeping than distrust – is nothing to fret about. “The specialized nature of the subject is part of what makes [the film] so powerful,” Denby continues, “and perhaps American audiences worn out by the mixed emotions of frustration and repugnance inspired by the war can enjoy this film without ambivalence or guilt.” I’m not sure “enjoy” is exactly what Denby meant to say in this context, but I am sure that movie-movie pleasure is not the best contribution a war-themed film can make to a culture that’s politically challenged to begin with.
The reviewers I’ve quoted are among the best in the business, writing about movies and moviemaking with flair, intelligence, and expertise. Which is why their responses to The Hurt Locker – and there are plenty more that would illustrate my case – need thinking about by anyone concerned with today’s cultural politics. Academic critics have been analyzing films along political lines for decades, sometimes astutely but rarely in the popular venues (or plain-speaking language) that reach and affect widespread audiences. Precisely because its action-movie suspense and high-octane visuals make The Hurt Locker a credible competitor in the summer-blockbuster sweepstakes, its political void represents a sorely missed opportunity for its makers, who could have used this platform to deepen public discourse on the continuing Iraq misadventure and the Afghanistan quagmire that grows muddier by the day. Journalistic reviewers could have done the same, not by overlooking its excellence as a suspense movie but by spotlighting the political absence that keeps its excellence strictly on the surface. Nobody benefits when critics are as apolitical as the films they criticize.
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July 27th, 2009 at 10:08 am
UNO/PREMERO (1ST)
firsty Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 10:13 am
DAMN YOU
Vade Lynch Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 10:53 am
We are at the point where EVERYONE who knows what’s really going on need concern themselves with nothing more than giving out copies of DVD’s, copies of the Jane Bürgermeister lawsuit article by Kurt Nimmo, wearing infowar t-shirts in order to get conversations started, and most of all, educating yourselves so that you may speak to the subjects intelligently and calmly. Stand up straight without looking down your nose. Present yourself so that you and your information will be received well.
There is no conspiracy, but there is an agenda. We were warned about “infiltration” long ago. Now we must practice infiltration to subvert the system that the enemy has clandestinely replaced our beloved republic with.
Please. Stop wasting time with idle hands and loose lips. Educate yourself and educate others. Help people discover the truth on their own.
Good Luck.
http://www.myspace.com/vademusic
sniff the breeze Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Hey, Pedro, its PRIMERO (1st)
Patriot Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
SO mature. You guys really have no life.
Most likely just zionist moles though. So lame.
many names Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
fuck off pedro
theLEFThand Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
pedro, let me be the ”1st” to say that you & your ”1st” buddies should piss off if you have’nt got anything of note to contribute to the infowars/ prison planet sites…. IT’S assholes like PEE DRO (sic) that make me worry 4 the future…. probably still sucks his thumb …. As 4 the HURT LOCKER ,,, get used to hollywood avoiding the REAL IRAQ questions … It’s main function is to make money while brainwashing people like PEE-DRO the dim-wit & others to join the army cause you get to shoot people for america,s freedom!!! I live in NORTHERN IRELAND … over here , we have ”ARMY” television commericals that could be adverts 4 CALL OF DUTY 4,… it’s TRAGIC viewing… P E A C E!!!!!!!
July 27th, 2009 at 10:11 am
first, but on something no one cares about!
natty hates propaganda Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Hollywood has long marched in LOCK STEP with the MIC and Illuminatus…
Why do you think I watch so many foreign films? Because I like freedom.
How many of you wanted to join the NAVY after Top Gun?
July 27th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Would all of you stop this 1st crap, nobody cares. You are the first saying something stupid, congrats.
Malone Ducklo Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 10:34 am
this movie is a glorification of compartmentalization and hive mentality. see how engaging it can be when you are cut off from your humanity and higher consciousness, reduced to insect focus and applied to somebody else’s task.
EU-Lex Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
WOW now I’m illuminated, I joined the New Age religion called Oneness or Collective Consciousness. Oh wait I didn’t…
July 27th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I am really first #1 and the best! You are just holding the door for me …
fabeskins62 Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 10:45 am
sorry for encouraging these non-sense posts but that was funny, i laughed out loud.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:30 am
This guy is one of the elite lovers of the world,he probably has his head up David Rockefellers ass so far that he could tell ya what the worthless bastard had to eat yesterday!
The Government is nothing but lies! Has been always will be! Obama wasnt born in the US,thats why he signed a order to not let his birth certificate be released to the public. He is nothing more than a puppet to the elite. CNN & other news websites today are telling people how great the economy is, housing markets are soaring,blah,blah,blah, its all bullshit! People, wake up and see reality as it is! The government doesnt give a flying fuck about the people,ok? We are all just a thorn in the elites side.They want us gone,out of there picture so they can live there fuckin aristocratic lifestyles. Right now as we speak our loving friends at FEMA are underway with there NLE09 Exercise in the Southwestern states. I wonder what those folks are thinking about our caring, loving government right now? ITS ALL A BIG LIE PEOPLE, JUST WAKE THE HELL UP AND EXCEPT IT !
http://www.dlc3marketing.com/nle09
July 27th, 2009 at 10:30 am
I think everyone that rushes to a story to post “First” and contribute nothing of substance should have their post deleted! You are waste of space, you breath my air, you contaminate the population.
I am hesitant to see this movie being a Combat Engineer and seeing the death and destruction of explosives. Seeing the the fear and stress that these troops have to go thru to disarm these devices might chase me out of the theater. I have already seen too much, I don’t know if I can handle any more, even if it is on the silver screen.
snatchum Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 11:46 am
“I think everyone that rushes to a story to post “First” and contribute nothing of substance should have their post deleted! You are waste of space, you breath my air, you contaminate the population.” And your dumbass comments on it? What does that make you?
July 27th, 2009 at 10:33 am
people barely talk about the afghanistan or iraq or any other war in the mainstream media
, its more of casey emily healthcare, and where is our money going? I love how people get up and arms about money but when it comes to human life.. its somthing that is second rate
July 27th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Politics have nothing to do with it.
Conscription is involuntary servitude, and we were all in some way involved, whether or not we wanted to be.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:49 am
http://www.watch-movies-links......rt_locker/ This is the Movie
July 27th, 2009 at 11:04 am
now if we’d spent the $11 million it cost to produce that shitty movie and used it to clean up all the landmines and UXOs we left behind i would say we’re evolving as a species, but alas … one step forward 2 steps back
July 27th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Gee how bizarre—a film without an AGENDA—for anything!!!! This is bullshit…I know a guy who spent a year in Iraq in the same sphere as the film characters. He saw the movie and told me it was so real it scared him…..what’s wrong with JUST SHOWING US WHAT THESE FINE YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN REALLY DID OVER THERE??? Minus some idiot preaching and blaming? Those among us who like to USE OUR OWN BRAIN might just appreciate not being told what to think, for a change, or who to blame.
Unconquered Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
I agree cynicaltotheend. I am looking forward to seeing this and it will be refreshing to have the politics stripped away and see it as it was. How refreshing to not get beat over the head with bias, ideology and blame. Go in with an open mind and make my own value judgements. As to Rage for Order’s comment, yeah, if you lived this, you probably may want to rethink this. But for the rest of us who have no idea what its really like over there and will never know, whether you’re pro, anti or undecided on the war, this might give us a sliver of the realities and horrors that our brave soldiers deal with every day.
Gregory Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
I saw it yesterday and it was great. It benefited from being apolitical because its about that moment of danger to disfuse a bomb which can kill people including the bomb disfuser. Over preaching makes it unrealistic because the soldiers don’t go into the job thinking about all of that.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
they hid behind politics for the oil
4w578i Reply:
July 27th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
While capping productive, domestic wells and repressing information about new ones.
There are actually laws against patenting the wrong sorts of alternative energy devices, whether or not they are demonstrable.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Quite honestly I think it is rather refreshing to see a film that tries to only portray the experiences of people without muddying it up with politics for once. It gets really old and annoying when every Hollywood war movie recycles the same liberal agenda in some attempt to be edgy or provocative when it really just comes off condescending like Hollywood is somehow morally superior to the rest of the world. I applaud the director/writers/actors of this film for making probably one of the first unbiased Iraq war movies. As for the rest of Hollwood, get off your high horse already and shut the f*** up for once. That goes for you too David Sterritt, stop whining that you didn’t get to see a movie that instigated another round of heavy winded, Hollywood politic debate.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Thanks brother.
Tim Reply:
July 28th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
****ATTENTION****
Please clear your schedule for this Saturday, Aug 1st at 1:00 P.M. EST where Lyndon LaRouche will host an International Webcast. Among the topics of the webcast is the immediate action required to halt a planetary dollar based collapse. Lyndon LaRouche, a many time presidential candidate, is also a leading economist, historian and an American statesman.
Summary
July 28, 2009 (LPAC) Political economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche today called for the immediate bankruptcy reorganization of the entire Federal Reserve System, before the dollar based global financial system crashes. LaRouche warned last week that, by no later than the end of the current fiscal year, or weeks earlier, even as early as sometimes during August, the system will crash, probably weeks before the year end data is released. In fact, the present world economy is already hopelessly bankrupt for as long as the U.S.A. and world systems remain dominated by monetarist systems… http://www.larouchepac.com/node/11173
July 27th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
HERE: Stream and Download ALL the best interviews and rants from the Alex Jones Show Archives:
http://alex-jones-archives.politicsfiles.info/
TODAY:
- Alex Jones Tv {Sunday Edition}:Flu Pandemic-Mass Graves and Martial Law
- Dahr Jamail:What Really Happened In Iraq!!
- Bob Chapman:What’s in Your Vaccine?
- Luke Rudkowski & Stewart Howe (WeAreChange):Get Active-Get Involved!!
Backup your favorite episodes, don’t miss any!