The American Conservative, The Hurt Locker. By Jack Hunter

Why “The Hurt Locker” Hurts, By Jack Hunter March 12, 2010

The Oscar for Best Picture this year went to Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” and rightfully so. It was a great movie with a powerful message. But what message? Some critics said it was pro-war, while others declared it antiwar. Regardless of its political slant, one thing remains clear: “The Hurt Locker” is about war-and war is awful.

The Hurt Locker follows a unit of Army specialists whose daily, often deadly mission is to defuse and dispose of “IED” bombs (Improvised Explosive Devices), placed intentionally by insurgents along roads, in cars, inside the bodies of murdered children, strapped to crying adult men and pretty much anywhere else imaginable. Led by Staff Sergeant William James (actor Jeremy Renner, also nominated for best actor), James somewhat reckless, cowboy attitude is unnerving to his fellow soldiers, whose main concern is simply surviving each mission. Without getting into too many of the gory details (and scenes that will disturb and stay with the viewer), “The Hurt Locker” is a story of American soldiers, who in dealing with inhumanity every day, become satisfied with just making it through another day.

The characters in this film do not talk about “victory,” or “winning” or the politics of the situation in which they find themselves. Indeed, given the everyday situations these soldiers experience, notions of victory seem almost laughable. The closest thing to political commentary is when an Iraqi taxi driver is manhandled by American soldiers, Renner’s character remarks “If he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure the hell is now.” Former CIA terrorism expert Michael Scheuer recently criticized “Obama’s brass” for “continuing to reassuringly chant the Bush-Clinton-Bush lie to Americans that Islamists attack us because of our way of life not because of our interventionism.” Though still hard for some Americans to comprehend, Scheuer’s observation that US foreign military intervention breeds Islamic terrorists would not be considered controversial, but fairly obvious, to the soldiers in this film.

The film’s intention is to make us think about the Iraq war in realistic terms, and it accomplishes this, or as much as any Hollywood production possibly could. Writing for the Japan Times online, film critic Giovanni Fazio explains the hopelessness of “The Hurt Locker”: “The whole question of ‘why we should/shouldn’t be in Iraq’ is practically a moot point. American soldiers walk down devastated streets… count the days until their tour is up, and view every Iraqi they see as a potential threat. Iraqis, glimpsed in windows and doorways, are just as wary of the Americans, viewing them with fear, curiosity or hostile intent. The gulf between them is immense. All that neocon talk about ‘flowers in the streets’ and ‘an Iraqi Marshall Plan’ now seems like so much la-la faerie-land head-tripping. The only goal left seems to be – survive.”

Indeed. It is not the soldier’s job to ask questions. Soldiers simply do their duty, and hopefully, survive. Asking questions is our job. When leaving the theater after seeing this movie in July, my first, obvious question was “was Iraq worth all that?”

Virtually everything we were told about our reasons for invading Iraq — Saddam Hussein being behind 9/11, possessing weapons of mass destruction or threatening the U.S. — turned out to be untrue. Though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Bush administration had been less than forthright from the beginning, let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war had been a succession of honest mistakes. Why do so many continue to still say the Iraq war was “worth it?” If this is true, then any war our government can possibly conceive of could be considered “worth it.”

Americans too often tend to justify war for its own sake. As citizens we neglect our important role of questioning our government, and that neglect has translated into too many de facto endorsements of the reckless use of our military. It seems we would rather eternally send more soldiers into even more “hurt lockers” than ever confront and deal with gross government incompetence on foreign policy. As with Vietnam, if Iraq wasn’t a mistake, it’s hard to imagine Americans admitting any war was a mistake.

Typically couched in a vague context of yellow ribbons, waving flags and political rhetoric, questions of war become questions of patriotism in the most wrong-headed ways imaginable. If our government pushes for national healthcare or stimulus spending — there is no end to the questioning. But if our government decides to go to war-too many Americans assume that it is their patriotic “duty” to support those wars without question. This is obscene, as the only thing standing between a soldier and a bad government decision is the American public. With the invasion of Iraq, Americans did not “support the troops”-we needlessly abused them. “The Hurt Locker” is a movie about that abuse.