A way to spend the day.
I finally saw The Hurt Locker, after wanting to see it forever. I don’t remember what about the original reviews or trailers made me think I’d like it, but the absolute orgy of praise it has received in the months since release only built up the interest.
And now, I don’t get it. I think the movie did a good job of showing how being in EOD is viewed as being a job, though a job that could either kill you every day or a job that can drive you bats. The movie handled the mundane and quotidian reasonably well (and then shat on it by having Beckham become a body bomb), much like Generation Kill did. The end, then, silliness with the son notwithstanding, showed the possibility of different kinds of mundanity, not necessarily hierarchically organized. James’s everyday life doesn’t involve choosing from hundreds of types of cereal, it involves bomb disposal.
Still, as the movie dragged along, it got more and more unbelievable, from the totally incomprehensible scene with the professor to the insanely unlikely 3-man chase after the insurgents (which is when the movie lost me). I’ve read that this is the “most real” depiction of the war in Iraq (whatever that means), and it’s not like I have my own anecdotal evidence to go on, but it seems that a “more real” depiction would be even more mundane.
Which leads me to my primary issue with the movie, which seems to be a result of narrative strategies of realism. Nancy Armstrong opens her essay on the fiction of bourgeois morality in the second volume of Moretti’s The Novel by asserting that
Literary history has indeed smiled on fiction that sets a protagonist in opposition to the prevailing field of social possibilities in a relationship that achieves synthesis when two conditions are met: (1) the protagonist acquires a position commensurate with his or her worth, and (2) the entire field of possible human identities changes to provide such a place for that individual.
The payoff Armstrong insists on is missing in the movie (to its benefit), but the setup was all too familiar. The protagonist is bigger than the space he (or she) inhabits. As soon as I saw that Guy Pearce was dead, I knew that his replacement would be a cowboy. Sure enough, James doesn’t follow the rules; he’s idiosyncratic. Sanborn reads this as a testament to James’s being a hillbilly redneck. I saw it as a sign that we’re dealing with a serious protagonist. And then, somehow, I got bored. Something about the police officer/soldier who doesn’t follow the rules but gets results is starting to bore me as a narrative device (and if we believe Armstrong, we believe that there’s no other way to make a lasting narrative about war or the police). We saw this in the fifth season of The Wire: we had loved what a loose cannon McNulty was in the first four seasons, but his antics in season five started to seriously alienate his coworkers and, if I recall correctly, many viewers.
Can you, then, think of examples of narratives of war or police where the main character does always follow protocol? Would that even be watchable? Would it, on the other hand, be/feel more real?
As a side note, how can a movie be considered pro-Army propaganda (as this one is) if the entire fuel of the plot is based on the assumption that Army protocol–in fact, the very idea of protocol–is wrong?
Tags: everyday life, Franco Moretti, individualism, Kathryn Bigelow, Nancy Armstrong, realism, The Hurt Locker, The Wire
February 28th, 2010 at 15:48
What I mean by “the payoff” above is that I’m glad that the movie does not punch above its weight. It is not the case that James uncovers some kind of huge insurgent plot or penetrates the central insurgent command (as if such a thing existed). That grounds the movie more in the everyday and pitches the roles of the characters (in the Army) as more of parts of the everyday.
Another question, regarding the obnoxiously named Dr. Cambridge: was everyone else struck by the warning implicit in his explosion? It’s a one-two punch of “eggheads don’t belong in the field” and “try to treat the Iraqis like humans and you’ll blow up.” The very obvious way in which the US is an occupying force in the movie was interesting (and maybe unusual).
February 28th, 2010 at 16:40
i didn’t actually have a very strong reaction to _hurt locker_. maybe you’re right that the mundanity was the point, but everything felt one-dimensional, and not in an interesting way. my one question: what on earth was ralph fiennes doing as the english mercenary? did his stint in _the english patient_ make him long for more time in the desert and a head scarf?
February 28th, 2010 at 19:30
He wasn’t a mercenary. He was a private military contractor. Mercenaries aren’t on our side, you see.
Narratively, I see what that scene did, in that it brought James and Stanton together while showing how James could be an effective leader in how he handled Eldridge. But other than that, I have no idea.
March 2nd, 2010 at 19:21
I was left rather cold by the movie. Maybe I have had enough Warrior Ethos to last me a lifetime. But you see this?
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/essay-15/
March 2nd, 2010 at 19:58
Oh that post is great. Thanks. Communal action (and hierarchies of command) make the military work (as well as Starfleet, Abrams!). This movie wasn’t about being a soldier; it was about being a COWBOY.