the hurt locker Directed by kathryn bigelow
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The movie was written by Mark Boal, an embedded journalist in Iraq whose nonfiction story in Playboy inspired Paul Haggis’s wrenching antiwar drama In the Valley of Elah (2007). That movie, in which a father confronts the brutal truth about his late son’s combat experience, stood head and shoulders above any other dramatic feature about Iraq when it was released. But contrasted with The Hurt Locker, it seems firmly rooted in the stateside politics surrounding the U.S. invasion, just as The Deer Hunter and Coming Home (both from 1978) sprang more from domestic feelings about Vietnam than from anything soldiers really experienced. In The Hurt Locker there are no liberals or conservatives, no doves or hawks, no bromides about freedom on the march or trading blood for oil. The soldiers here fall into two groups: those who count the days until they can go home and those who, returned home, count the days until they can go back.
Among the latter is Staff Sergeant William James, a cocky explosives specialist who’s defused more than 800 IEDs in Afghanistan when he arrives in Baghdad to finish out the last six weeks of Bravo Company’s deployment. Played by Jeremy Renner (a fine young actor best known as the title character in the 2002 biopic Dahmer), Sergeant James recalls that line Martin Sheen used in Apocalypse Now to describe Robert Duvall’s crazed cavalry officer: “You just knew he wasn’t gonna get so much as a scratch here.” When James pops open the trunk of a car to find it jam-packed with explosives, his response is to pull off his 80-pound, steel-plated bomb suit and set to work in his T-shirt. “There’s enough bang in there to blow us all to Jesus,” he tells a fellow soldier. “If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die comfortable.”
Bigelow opens the movie with a quotation from the war correspondent Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a lethal and potent addiction, for war is a drug.” That observation tells us all we need to know about William James, whose two comrades may not appreciate the drug’s potency but are forced to share in its potential lethality. It also goes a fair way toward explaining the invasion of Iraq, whose political rationales crumbled one after another, leaving nothing but the suspicion that many Americans love war as long as we’re winning. Those who hate it can complain all they want, but if history is any indication, they almost always get dragged along for the ride.
