Critical Contexts Vinay Patel MA WS&BM The Hurt Locker or: How Kathryn Bigelow Gets Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb “There is that saying, “There is no politics in the trenches,” and I think it was important to look at the heroism of these men.” (Bigelow in Giroux, 2009: Paragraph 6) Though not an initial box office success, Kathryn’ Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, a film about the dangerous, but thrilling lives of bomb disposal (EOD) technicians serving in Iraq, gathered critical acclaim like no other movie of recent years. Garnering rave reviews, from both the left and the right of the political spectrum, it went on to win six of the nine categories it was nominated for at the 2009 Oscars (including an historic ‘Best Director’ Oscar for Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first woman to win the award), as well as sweeping various regional and national critics’ awards. 1 While this can be said to be an impressive accomplishment for any film, it is made all the more spectacular by the fact it was a war film, a historically polarizing genre. A clue to the film’s success can be found in Bigelow’s quotation above. She unequivocally sets her film out as apolitical, that is, one that takes no stance on the war of Iraq, but also references the bravery of those fighting in it. This is in stark contrast to the slew of American made Iraq movies that were released before it, none of which made an impact at either the box office or on the awards circuit, despite the presence of big names such as Brian De Palma (Redacted) or Robert Redford and Tom Cruise (Lions For Lambs). Some of these films were condemned for their apparent disloyalty to the US military. Most “have been labeled the work of anti-war Hollywood liberals who have no idea what they’re talking about.” (Rose, 2009: paragraph 5). Bigelow seeks to escape this judgment by repeatedly declaring her film’s desire for veracity. It is an attempt to dismiss any notion that she has a political agenda, and confirm that she is simply interested in the story of her relatively affable soldier protagonist. This claim to apoliticism and thus, it is inferred, impartiality bears investigation, especially in the face of overwhelming critical praise and later mainstream popularity (Smith, 2010). If The Hurt Locker is now and in the future deemed to be a seminal film about the occupation of Iraq, it has the potential to colour the cultural 1 On review aggregating site, “Rotten Tomatoes”, The Hurt Locker claims an astonishing 202 positive reviews out of 206, making it the site’s 2nd best reviewed American film made in 2008. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hurt_locker/ Critical Contexts Vinay Patel MA WS&BM memory of the event far more strongly than any history textbook: just as the remembrance of World War I is evoked through its poetry, and Vietnam is immortalised in counter culture music (as well as its own canon of cinema). With this in mind, it is worth considering the methods the film employs in its seduction of an audience. In the course of this essay, I explore, through one reading of the movie, the steps Bigelow has taken to avoid the fate of other Iraq war films. I begin by examining how the film establishes a strong sense of depiction over fiction via its utilisation of first hand accounts in the formation of its script and a compelling adoption of vérité as its visual system. Next, through a semiotic analysis of the protagonist and the distinct cameos, I will scrutinise how the film builds a character that earns our sympathy as well as our admiration. Thirdly, I demonstrate how the previous two elements combine to make us complicit in the protagonist’s obsession and enjoyment of his work in such a way that we can support it and take pleasure in the thrill it provides. Better Than A Documentary I wanted to keep it very reportorial. It began as deep reporting [by co-writer Mark Boal] and the script was designed in such a way as to give you a boots-on-the-ground, you-are-there, fly-on-the-wall look at that conflict. I wanted the filmmaking to have the same feel, to put the audience right there in the Humvee, on the road, in the heat and the sand, and the dust and the sun. (Bigelow in Rocchi, 2009: paragraph 2) Bigelow goes through great pains to explain how accurate the film is, her quest for reality is fervent to the extent of bordering on a Baudrillardian nightmare. 2 The starting point in this attempt to establish the film’s pedigree of accurate depiction is Boal’s experiences as an embedded reporter3, 2 “The great bonus that I did not anticipate was the refugees. There were hundreds of thousands…all of my background extras and some of the speaking Iraqis…are all Iraqi. It's as close to the war zone as you can get.” (Bigelow in Anderson, 2009: Paragraph 8) One hopes this is simply an unfortunate choice of words, as opposed to genuine joy gained from the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians or the bizarre concept of refugees playing the citizens they recently were in a simulacrum of a war that is still being fought. Critical Contexts Vinay Patel MA WS&BM and how the months he spent with an EOD unit inform most of the script. These are claims made in press releases, articles and interviews, are an attempt to influence the spectator’s reading of the film before they even sit down in the cinema. However, the audience member’s priming will not necessarily necessarily affect the film’s potency for them. In fact, even the revelation that there are huge dramatic liberties taken with The Hurt Locker’s script (Kamber 2010) is largely irrelevant, mainly because conceptions of reality are often less to do with what exists, and more to do with our preconceived notions of how we believe reality to operate. In his essay, Television Culture, John Fiske states, “what passes for reality in any culture is the product of that culture’s codes, so ‘reality’ is always already encoded, it is never raw’. (Fiske in pg:1089). In order for Bigelow’s impression of reality to function, it has to rely on pre-existing codes. The visual system she employs can be traced back to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers. That film borrowed its aesthetic from documentary camera work, and numerous war and action films have since made use of this style for the same effect, cementing its codification as system of verity, and allowing it to “short circuit the unreality of the image in order to present us the truth of the object.” (J. Baudrillard, 1995: Pg. 48) As such, though vérité has its roots in documentary film, it has the capacity to be more precisely utilized, since it generates the same feeling of truthfulness while gifting the director total control of the mise en scène. In the hands of an experienced action filmmaker such as Bigelow, it can be supremely convincing. Bigelow’s images of “the heat, the sand, the dust, and the sun” are certainly evocative and create a strong sense of place and immediacy, but their power is both borrowed from its visual 3 Despite the presence of a thorough, first hand, source there can be doubts raised over the objectivity of the film’s ‘reportorial’ style: “An important distinction between embedded journalists and independent journalists is that when you choose to embed, you’re giving the military the full power to control where you go, how you get there, what you see and when you see it, and in a lot of instances how you’re going to report that.” (Jamail in Pilger, 2010: 0:18:34) Critical Contexts Vinay Patel MA WS&BM precursors and generated from the minds of a fairly tele-cine literate audience. 4 The vast quantity of reviews praising the film’s realism suggests that it succeeds on this level, with CNN’s Paul Chambers going so far as to describe the film as "better than any documentary I've seen on the Iraq war. It's so real it's scary" (Chambers in Pilger [B], 2010: paragraph 4). Whether or not the narrative facts are accurate, as long as a film can “pass for reality”, that is enough to allow for a suspension of disbelief. From this situation, Bigelow has a platform from which to be able claim she is simply depicting the truth of a particular situation, rather than promoting any sort of agenda. The next step is to establish a plausible yet likeable soldier hero, all the while avoiding claims of propaganda. The Bad Good Guys: Bigelow’s Worthy Hero-victims The American action cinema is defined by the spectacular visual display that it offers to its audiences, a display within which the body of the hero […] functions as a central term. (Tasker, 2003: pg. 153) The Hurt Locker’s protagonist, Staff Sergeant William James is, seemingly a fairly archaic, if not cliché, heroic archetype. He is hot- headed, makes wisecracks and does not play by the rules and yet is preternaturally gifted at his job. He could be lifted from any generic Western or police procedural. Even the other two members of his team conform to familiar tropes; one is a fresh recruit choosing between two ideologies, the other is strictly by the book.