Review: The Hurt Locker
Addiction is the central concern of The Hurt Locker, the latest thrill ride from Kathryn Bigelow, auteur of such muscular action films as Point Break, Strange Days and Blue Steel. The quote from Christopher Hedges that opens the film is “War is a drug,” and as expected, the narrative that follows illustrates this truism. Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner) arrives in Iraq to replace the leader of an elite bomb squad unit. His brash, reckless personality puts him at odds with his team members and his actions in the course of duty suggest a perverse enjoyment of the adrenaline rush that war provides.
Yet what elevates this war movie is the way Bigelow makes us aware that, in our own way, moviegoers are addicts too. Early in The Hurt Locker, a bomb explodes. The lead-up to the explosion is a master class in modern suspense, all jerky camera movements and restless editing, effortlessly laying out the geography of the scene and the avenues of danger as they arise. Then the bomb goes off and, simultaneously, a stylistic switch goes off. In slow motion we see the fluid ripples of energy from the blast run through the ground like the greatest narcotic hit. It’s a sublime moment of terror and great beauty and for the rest of the film I found myself like a junkie, hungry for my next hit.
Is this perverse? Of course it is. But does it glorify war as some have suggested? Damon Smith from Reverse Shot criticised The Hurt Locker for prioritising the aesthetic thrill of war at the expense of making a larger statement about the consequences of American foreign policy. I would disagree with this sentiment. What The Hurt Locker expresses is how war is never just a function of justification/utility. War, as a drug, is a force that creates its own logic. It becomes self-justifying. And the film is more than alive to the dangers of such a phenomenon.
The cinematic junkie may remember the scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho where Norman Bates sinks a car in a swamp to hide the evidence of a murder he has just committed. As he watches the car sink, the car stops half-submerged. This famous scene is a classic hit of suspense from the master of suspense but is also subversive in how it illustrates how in the pursuit of cinematic pleasure, we the audience may even identify with and root for a serial killer. The rules of suspense have upended conventional moral logic and become self-justifying.
The Hurt Locker illustrates something similar in the context of a soldier’s experience. Sergeant James befriends a young Iraqi boy who ends up a casualty of war. This prompts James to go off mission to track down the people responsible for his death. Immediately, we are in the realm of the vengeance narrative. We want to see James as the hero, to feel the pleasure of Dirty Harry getting his man against the odds and against the rules. Yet at the end of the episode when James breaks into an unwitting couple’s home, it seems like James might just be a little insane. What this illustrates is that even the idea of heroism can be a perverse addiction; that James’ attachment to the role of avenger can, at its extreme, lead to death and destruction (similar to the protagonist of Mother’s attachment to her role as protector).
The success of The Hurt Locker, at least for me, is how Bigelow confronts the complexities of addiction while also respecting the pleasure such addiction engenders and without placing a value judgement on it. The possibility the film poses is that in times of war, we may need to rely on addicts such as Sergeant James.
The Hurt Locker was one of Screen Machine’s top 20 of 2009.
Paul Martin
22/03/10 - 9:32 PM
I don’t think it’s too hard to argue one way or the other about the glorification of war. That’s called interpretation. My interpretation is that the film is about the effect (and a corrupting and dangerous one at that) that war has on individuals. And there’s an awful lot of individuals over there involved in war activities. I’d also suggest that Sheridan’s Brother, though depicting the current conflict, also is really about the damage that governments inflict on soldiers deployed to these conflicts. So ultimately, they’re both anti-war, even though the depictions are stylised in a manner that makes them aesthetically pleasing (and attracting claims of “glorifying war”).