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Gender + Sexuality

'The Hurt Locker'

Director Kathryn Bigelow's war makes men choose pain over nothing.

Dorothy Woodend 24 Jul 2009TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film for The Tyee.

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At the heart of bomb patrol terror, a void.

There is one very good scene in Kathryn Bigelow's new film The Hurt Locker. Staff Sgt. William James, newly returned from a tour in Iraq wherein he came perilously close to explosive death, stands in the cereal aisle at a massive supermarket chain, flummoxed. It isn't hard to make the connection. On the other side of the globe, people are dying so that we can choose between Captain Crunch or Count Chocula.

Despite this one instant, The Hurt Locker is not a political film. It presents its story with dialogue that is spare and decidedly plain, and fills up the rest of the space with episodically arranged action sequences. Bigelow is one of the few women working in the action (Strange Days) and horror (Near Dark) genres and for this reason alone, I would go and see her film. But if you come to The Hurt Locker expecting any greater analysis of the war in Iraq, or really any deeper thought about the forces that move men and munitions around the planet, you will be sadly disappointed.

This is a combat film, and as such it places its focus squarely on its fighting men. The film follows Delta Company in the last few weeks of its rotation. Delta Company, whose job it is to stop bombs before they go boom, comprises three very different men, including the aforementioned Sgt. James, as well the straight arrow Sgt. J. T Sanborn, and a quaking youngster named Owen Eldridge. When their former leader gets blown into assorted bits and pieces, James joins Sanborn and Eldridge on bomb patrol, and proceeds to shred everyone's nerves, apparently because he has none of his own.

On their first day out, defusing roadside IED's (which stands for Improvised Explosive Device), Delta Company gets a call that another group of soldiers have discovered wires half-buried in the roadside trash. With admirable good sense, they cower behind a wall, and call in reinforcements. In rides James, who in the grand cowboy tradition, strides into the smoke and heat, with seemingly no fear of death. This one scene establishes everything you need to know about the protagonists and their plight. James is an adrenalin junkie, and, sooner or later, he will get someone killed. This basic premise is repeated over and over again, like variations on a musical theme. As a war movie the film breaks no new ground. It is content to ply the old standbys, such as the men in the trenches who understand the reality of the war, the effete desk-bound commanders who offer useless advice, and the civilians who exist merely as cannon fodder.

Love in the trenches

The Hurt Locker is also something of a male love story. There is no sex, of course, but the intimacy between the men is more profound than any physical manifestation. In the film's most lengthy scene, Delta Company stops by the side of the road to help out a band of British mercenaries. The Brits have a flat tire, two Iraqi hostages (worth a considerable amount of money), and good old Ralph Fiennes (a Bigelow alumni from Strange Days) who seems curiously out of place here, like he wandered in off the set of The English Patient and got lost. Soon enough the American and British troops are pinned down by enemy fire, and the soldiers must turn from sappers to snipers.

As James and Sanborn work collectively to pick off insurgents, James tenderly offers his fellow soldier a juice box. It's a curiously intimate moment, and one that is almost immediately followed by a scene where both men proceed to beat the living tar out of each other. This almost ridiculously homoerotic display of power and strength is all good, manly fun, and despite the sweaty wrestling match, or maybe because of it, the essential bonds between the boys are reaffirmed. Despite the fact that the film was made by a female director, or maybe because of it, the gamy rankness of testosterone practically boils off the screen. The film has only two token females, one Iraqi and one American, and both are consigned to the domestic sphere, and given absolutely nothing to do.

The Hurt Locker is well made, and even terrifically exciting in places, but for all its style and heat there is something missing. Where its heart should be, there is only an odd blankness. Whether this was purposeful, meant to function as a statement about the vacuity of violence, like the aftermath of detonation, that sucks away all life and breath and leaves only an eerie stillness, I don't know. People die, things blow up, and everywhere the imminent threat of death, like a faceless and invisible adversary, moves through the crowd. Because there is no one villain, everyone is suspect, and it is this uneasy edge that animates the narrative.

War without origins

The film does not spare the horrors of war. There are bombs sewn into the body of a dead child, and lots of people get blown into smithereens. But one quickly gets inured to horrors piled on top of each other. The inundation of real images of war (in newspapers, TV news and documentary film) has left me with little space, or patience, for pretend images. Maybe it's that war movies can really only be made after the fact. Witness the plethora of WWII films, not to mention the groaning weight of Vietnam epics, still coming down the pipe.

To paraphrase William Faulkner, "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." In the case of Iraq, this is painfully true. The Hurt Locker takes place in 2004, but it could be yesterday or tomorrow. In this current age of ongoing and perhaps ceaseless conflict, maybe the long view that comes with time and perspective isn't even a possibility any more. The inability to gain any kind of overview is made explicit in a film like The Hurt Locker, which steadfastly refuses to look at the reasons behind the conflict.

Certainly, the film is a portrait of the men who fight wars. But in this, it also has some peculiarities. To steal another quote from poor old Faulkner (leave that man alone, Dorothy), the story comes down to a choice between the nullity of ordinary life in the cereal aisle and the extremity of war. In Faulkneresque terms: "Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain."  The only choice that Sgt. James is capable of making is the latter.

As he explains to his infant son, you start out loving everything, your stuffed animals, your parents, etc., and end up loving only one or two things -- or in James's case, just one. Given a choice between wandering the desert of the grocery stores, with its flat white light and cloying music, or stinking of blood, sweat and munitions in the real desert, which to embrace? Death is life, and life is death. The knife-edged no-man's land between life and death is the only place where James can live out the truism of Faulkner's line. It is both his tragedy and his redemption.  [Tyee]

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