I’M HERE, MAN, I’M HERE: Detonating the death drive in “The Hurt Locker”

Qt3 Movie Podcast: 3x3: grocery store scenes - #20 by Kelly_Wand - Movies -  Quarter To Three Forums

War — it isn’t like it used to be, huh? Such is the sentiment of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” a thoroughly modern film about a thoroughly modern combat zone. Even in a canon no stranger to unconventional war films (say, “Apocalypse Now”), “The Hurt Locker,” with a chopped-up, faux-verité editing style that induces a panoramic litany of discontinuous perspectives, stands alone.

Very alone, because — like its main character, Will James — never before has a war film felt quite so divorced from heroism, purpose, even its fellow soldiers or the wife back home. At war in “Apocalypse Now,” Martin Sheen’s Willard might have been family-less and fantasy-less, but he was never purpose-less, his route upriver charted by one goal: to find and kill Kurtz. Of course, perhaps it is misleading to deny James a purpose, for it is true that he is the new team leader of an EOD unit. His job is deceptively simple: locate and defuse IEDs across Iraq. Like Willard, he is a pawn in a hazily-justified game of neocolonialist chess. But never mind all that — “The Hurt Locker” is not a film about Iraq. This much should be clear from mise-en-scene alone, Jordan standing in for the besieged nation. Iraqi characters (barring the character of Beckham, his name a jarring signifier of Western pop cultural spectacle; the very English David Beckham a faint reminder of the British colonialist ordeal that kicked off this whole mess in the first place) appear to the EOD team as faceless and interchangeable; James mistaking the desecrated corpse of an unknown Iraqi child for the one kid he bothered to learn the name of. But while Bigelow’s cinematic approach may communicate some core truth of the Iraq War — invasion is to alienation as technology is to paranoia — does the rendering of this specific story, with camo-clad renegade Will James at the Humvee wheel, as an IMAX-worthy spectacle, as something approaching “verité,” not underwrite the very exploitative practices it might otherwise critique?

Les 5 millors pel·lícules de Kathryn Bigelow

This film is indubitably polysemic (just look at my reaction versus that of Jordan Claman!) “Hurt Locker,” however portrays an event that mass-media war coverage (still, at that time, relatively new) had a heavy hand in massaging. There were never any weapons of mass destruction, or even evidence thereof. Saddam Hussein was not a global puppet master of sleeper-cell terrorist networks — in short, this war had no narrative, beyond what could be trumpeted at White House press conferences, fabricated between the margins of a newspaper editorial, constituted within a camera frame. Bigelow’s film, in its total rejection of narrative arc as we traditionally understand it, begins to interrogate this fact. But, then, what to make of James?

The Hurt Locker - Rotten Tomatoes

If Bigelow’s film works to de-narrativize the invasion, the Hollywood publicity machine seems to have worked overtime to do the opposite. The poster, above, features each member of the three-person OED team, but it is only Jeremy Renner’s face we see uninhibited by helmet or goggles, rifle held aloft and brows knitted in a gritty, greenish caricature of masculine grotesquerie. This image could be entirely interchangeable with a first-person shooter video game of the same era. I’ve watched my two cousins sink hours of their lives into these kinds of games — in the past year, the younger of the two, a middle-schooler, has started to play them on his Oculus headset. In the contrived space of virtual reality, striking out at invisible enemies from the comfort of his living room, he can “be there.” Will James-styled characters serve as avatar for him to live out these pubescent fantasies, “toy soldiers” for the Oculus age. “I’m not here,” yells Chef, spooked by a tiger in “Apocalypse Now.” But what if “here” is the only place you want to be?

The Hurt Locker (2008) - IMDb

That is the dilemma for Will James, the explanation for his failed marriage, his lackluster parenting style, his errant spells of grocery store disassociation. He wants to “be here.” Not through a screen — in his very first IED-defusion mission, he very notably refuses to the assistance of the roving bomb-collecting robot we are introduced to at the film’s outset — but here. “Here,” for James, might be better summed up by an alternative poster for the film, as seen above. Alone, against powdery-gray nothingness and cocooned in his OED suit, James might as well be on the moon. Place is not important — only this tangle of thread-like red wiring, connecting James to seven IEDs like veins to an artery. Death in his hands, and with it … jouissance?

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