Before I went to see it, I had heard from more than one source
that The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, was
the best movie about Iraq yet made. This is true, though only
because the competition is so pathetically feeble. It begins with
an epigraph by Chris Hedges, ending with the assertion that “War
is a drug.” So it’s a film à thèse then? Boy, is it
ever! Its principal character, Sgt. William James (Jeremy
Renner), is an adrenalin-junkie of a bomb-disposal specialist
whose crazy bravery is an expression only of his personal
authenticity and no more social or philosophical cause, such as
honor or idealism about bringing democracy to Iraq. I wondered if
his name were not some arcane joke about the psychologist who
wrote of “the moral equivalent of war,” but here war has no moral
or moral equivalent. It is just the most fun you can have with
your bomb-proof suit on.
Well, it’s a point of view. Naturally, James’s crazy bravery does
not endear the Sergeant to his fellow team-members whose fate is
bound up with his. He is the point man, the one who takes the big
risks, but the risks to the others, Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and
Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are not inconsiderable either, and they
are two guys who just want to do their job and get home in one
piece. Their respect for James’s bravery is leavened by something
close to hatred for the risks he causes them to run. At one
point, Sanborn hints that he might kill him before he gets
him killed. “Are you serious about killing him?” asks
Eldridge. Sanborn himself isn’t sure if he is serious or not.
When Eldridge is shot in the leg and breaks his femur in nine
places, he rails at James as he is being medevaced out: “This is
what happens when you shoot someone! We don’t have to go out
looking for trouble so you can get your f****** adrenalin fix,
you f***!”
No, but the adrenalin fix makes Sgt. James an indisputably cool
guy. Mr. Renner has the look of a star about him — as others
besides me have noticed — since he does so well at portraying
that mixture of courage and cool and calm independence from the
rest of the military world whose uniform he wears that Hollywood
has come to treasure far above mere patriotism or love or loyalty
or any of the more social virtues. He is quietly contemptuous
towards the brass as also towards any rationale for what the army
might be doing in Iraq. He’s a maverick who comes off way better
for it than the rest of the American forces there, and this also
gives him credibility with the Hollywood left. After a solitary
face-off with a taxi driver who may or may not be a suicide
bomber, he observes that “if he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure as
hell is now” — a version of the liberal commonplace that our
enemies wouldn’t be enemies if we weren’t fighting them.
The “name” actors in the picture are mere cameos and are either
fools or are killed within a few minutes of being introduced to
us — which is another way to emphasize Mr. Renner’s star
qualities as well as to play the po mo game of teasing us with
artifice. It ought to be a reminder that the movie’s celebrated
hallmarks of military authenticity — like having to clean a
dead-man’s blood off his ammunition before our heroes can use it
or the fine line between camaraderie and murderous resentment in
their horseplay — are equally calculated. Forty years ago, Mr.
Renner’s part would have been played by Steve McQueen and no
questions asked. It’s a movie, you see. It’s true that
The Hurt Locker is respectful to our soldiers and does
not regard them as either dupes or victims, but it is still
enmeshed in the Hollywood culture, and it has (albeit only
implicitly) the other Iraq movies’ assumption that their mission
is pointless and self-defeating.
For all its authenticity, then, the movie is in this sense
unreal, since it recognizes no reason for the things that its
characters do except for the thrill of doing them. I know that
this emphasis on the absurdity and the horror of war has a long
and venerable history in the movies. Probably it is also true
that a lot of real-life soldiers have learned from the movies not
to be such a sap as to talk about what Frank Capra, in a
different movie universe, used to call “Why We Fight.” But to
insist upon their existential authenticity to the exclusion of
any sense of why the war is being fought in the first place is a
distortion of reality in an entirely predictable direction. It’s
not just the senior officers here who are fools or knaves but,
presumably, the whole command structure and the politicians back
in Washington who have decided to send these men into action for
no apparent reason. Now where have we heard of something like
that before?
