“The Hurt Locker,” winner of six academy awards, follows a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the Iraq War. William James, Owen Eldridge and J.T. Sanborn are members of a U.S. Army “Bravo” EOD unit. They contend not only with defusing bombs but the insurgency of the “enemy.” Advertised as a suspenseful picture, which is “near perfect,” audiences know in advance that Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have killed many U.S. soldiers and thousands more Iraqis. Bigelow sets us up in a “perfect” omission of the reason for the U.S. Army being there in the first place. Soldiers are portrayed as life-saving heroes.
A quote that begins the film is from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by war correspondent Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” The final scene, where James begins his new turn of hundreds of days, to leave his son and wife, speaks to irrational reenlistment. But the implied reasons for his returning to this war are much more compelling: the Iraqis are portrayed as the real fanatics and James as a complex character.
James is no stereotypical junkie-addict to violence. He forms a bond of affection with an Iraqi boy. He has a “good marriage” and a child of his own. He comes within inches of sacrificing his own life to save that of an Iraqi man who is unwillingly locked into a suicide bomb jacket. His only Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome seems to be that of compulsively wanting to return to the thrill of performing a useful, highly-skilled humanitarian mission. His motivation could as well come from the exhilarating feeling of being extremely productive, emphasizing a human element that begs for some meaning or purpose in life.
The film obliterates the real history of imperialist war. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers murdered by the Clinton “sanctions” of the 1990s and the U.S. decade-long war of aggression are nowhere to be found. The imperialist drive to control oil resources is not an Oscar-winning subject.
Two scenes in particular highlight the insidious message of the film. Iraqis, in the very beginning, are shown to be as unpredictable an enemy as the IED’s. They watch, portrayed as a potentially dangerously vigil in the wreckage of Baghdad, surrounding the Bravo Unit as it attempts to “secure a safe street.” Iraqis become ominous, dismissing the reality that it is that country the soldiers are occupying.
A second more powerful episode occurs when a pitiful, unwilling “suicide bomber” pleads for his life so that he can return to his family. He is literally padlocked into his jacket filled with explosives so that he cannot escape. In one frozen moment, he is the symbol for many suicide bombers who are victims of a terrorist minority (or a sick Iraqi society) rather than motivated people intent on driving the U.S. invaders out. While terrorism as a political modus operandi serves only to murder the innocent, the terrorist acts of U.S. army officers, pilots of bombers and robot plane technicians upon civilian Iraqi’s, Afghanistan and Pakistan people never enter the lens of the director’s camera.
The message the media industry wishes to convey is that Oscars make a film worth seeing, and that enlisting in a cause worth fighting for can be satisfying as well as addictive enough for re-upping that enlistment. Hollywood is not interested in the communist motivation that empowered millions in the red armies of the USSR and China to smash fascism during World War II.
The history of working classes with communist leadership who have challenged capitalist wars of profit are left out entirely. Instead, we are encouraged to identify with the individualist acts of one soldier who appears to resolve the problems of war by dismantling one explosive device at a time. Hollywood can only offer mind-numbing defenses of U.S. wars of aggression from Rambo and The Deer Hunter (a racist Oscar-winning movie that portrayed Vietnamese workers as crazy gambling killers of U.S. “innocent” soldiers) to Blackhawk Down and now “The Hurt Locker.”