Matt's Film Theory Blog

At a particularly suspenseful moment in Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant First Class William James confronts an Iraqi man in a car at gunpoint. The Iraqi has crossed an American-guarded road block and driven into an area James’ EOD team has blocked off to investigate a possible bomb. The Iraqi’s motives are unclear, and as James stares him down amid cries of his comrades just to shoot, the film refuses to offer any easy explanation for the confrontation or any exit strategy. The game of chicken ends with the Iraqi man flinching first, rewarding James’ machismo and restraint. The moment seemingly vindicates the Rumsfeldian neo-con policy of intervention: to win the War on Terrorism, America needs to do little more than get in the face of the Muslim world and America’s firepower, resolve and sheer testicular fortitude will send the cowardly Islamo-fascist into retreat. The scene ends in a Bush-ian resolution: the Muslim, innocent or not, is led off in cuffs to destinations unknown, guilty, perhaps, of nothing more than being on the wrong side of language and cultural barriers.

But Bigelow’s film reuses such an easy view of the Iraq War, and in a later (again impossibly tense) scene, James tries to extract a helpless Iraqi man from a steel cage before a bomb attached to him explodes. The self-sacrificing American Sergeant ignores the danger he could face to himself and calls for lock cutters to break through the Iraqi Gordian Knot as he tries to save the Iraqi. For the first time, James fails, and he apologizes to the desperate, doomed man before he abandons him for his own safety. James’ agency and calm demeanor deteriorate into impotence and panic. As American hubris confronts an impossibly complex problem, victory becomes temporary at best, impossible at worst.

The Hurt Locker stands as the first Hollywood film that offers a credible approach towards telling the story of the Iraq war. In my paper, I’ll look to explore how Bigelow has played with conventions of the war genre, particularly themes of masculinity, coming-of-age and the divisions between both the enemy and the ally and the home front and the battle field to create a text that has allowed Hollywood, a mere six years into the conflict, its first lesson in how to speak Iraq.

Okay, so, for my paper I think I want to look at The Hurt Locker from a film genre perspective.  I need to do more reading on the whole concept of genre, natch (and I have to watch the film again, double natch), but I want to take a look at how it fits into the war movie genre, how it deviates from the genre’s conventions and, you know, what all that means.

Again, I need to do more reading about genre in general, and war movies in particular, but here’s my pre-preliminary thoughts on the matter:

1. The war movie as bildungsroman

Traditionally, war films follow a neophyte as he (and it’s nearly always a he) becomes initiated into the culture of war, and, by doing so, he also becomes a man.    The Hurt Locker doesn’t seem, at least on the surface, to follow this convention.  Why not?  Is this a comment on the genre?  Or is there a coming of age story in this film, just presented in a different way?

On a related note, the war movie also traditionally features an FNG, either as the protagonist or a sidekick, through which the audience is initiated into the culture of war.  Does The Hurt Locker have this? (That’s an honest question, actually. I don’t remember.  Like I said, I’ll have to watch it again.)  What does it say if there isn’t?  If there is, is the convention altered or treated differently?

Similar to the bildungsroman:

2. The war movie and masculine identity

The war movie traditionally (I feel like I’m going to be writing “traditionally” or “conventionally” an awful lot in this post, so from now on, when I write “war movie,” just read “traditional war movie”) involves bringing a character (normally the protagonist) into a community of manhood, as the film’s definition of masculinity is constructed through the actions of the characters.

The Hurt Locker is kinda all about what it means to be a man, was it not?  For one thing, there’s hardly any women in the thing, so all the relationships in it are homosocial (if not homosexual).  And there’s a lot of arguments about The Right Thing To Do, which could be read as an ethical discussion, but in the context of the film they feel like they’re more about what it means to be a man.  (This is all, perhaps, complicated by the fact that it was directed by a woman, a lamentably rare situation)  What is the film saying about being a man?  Are there similar comments being made on masculinity in other, contemporary war movies?  Are there not?

And continuing on with the related notes,

3. The segregation and gendering of space in the war movie

There’s normally a clear division between the feminine-gendered domestic world and the masculine-gendered battlefield in war movies.   This is pretty unmistakable in The Hurt Locker.  Are there any riffs on this convention, though?  Do other contemporary war movies do this to the same degree?

4. Political Messaging/Propaganda and the war movie

God, that’s a pretty general/useless bullet point description, right?  Ok, but here’s what I’m getting at- war films traditionally (there’s that word again) had an overt political message, from the hawkish Sands of Iwo Jima to the dovish Paths of Glory.  And while it’s impossible to create a movie without some sort of political message, The Hurt Locker doesn’t spell its message out for the audience.  The word “apolitical” has been used to describe it (for instance, here’s a Reuters article), and while that’s poppycock, there does seem to be a downplay of the politics of the real war in Iraq.  Do other Iraq/OIF/GWoT movies treat politics similarly?  What does it all mean?

There are lots of other things to look at, of course.  The Individual vs. the Unit.  The Othering of the Enemy (or, in this film’s case, the complete invisibleness of the enemy).  The emphasis on “Authenticity.”  The emphasis on going home. Experiments with nihilism. On and on and on.  I’ll obviously need to focus my research and try to get to some sort of thesis by concentrating on one or two or maybe three of these points and try to come to something meaningful/interesting to say about the text.  But the movie’s new, right?  And it’s popular and respected and, ya know, important, mebbe?  So maybe I can come up with something worth reading about it.

As for taking it on from a genre perspective, that basically means watching a lot of other films, right?  So here’s some I can think of (Wikipedia lists 30 films about the Iraq War.  I won’t be watching nearly that many.):

• Green Zone
• Generation Kill (not really a film. Ruling?)
• Jarhead
• Three Kings (older, maybe not so relevant.  Maybe for contrast)
• The Kingdom
• Stop-Loss
• Grace is Gone
• In the Valley of Elah
• Black Hawk Down
• Brothers
• Homecoming (also maybe not a film.  Almost certainly not a war movie. But Joe Dante! )
• Home of the Brave
• Flags of our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima
• Inglorious Basterds
• Rambo IV (god help me)

Ok, so, like I said, I’m not gonna watch all these.  But once I focus my thesis I can choose which ones I should zero in on.  And I can be convinced that it might bear more fruit to look at The Hurt Locker as an entry in a different genre. Like, are the films about the wars in the Middle East our new westerns, with gunmen bringing order, law and “civilization” to the untamed, “savage” frontier (does the word “savage” even need quotes around it anymore?  Is it ever used unironically?  I mean, of course, outside of the New York Post?)?  Is Moktada al-Sadr the new Chief Cicatriz?  Is Donald Rumsfeld the new Tom Doniphon? Or the new Sentenza?  I mean, the wars were started by a shit-kicking cowboy, right?

But I think I want to focus on The Hurt Locker and I’m pretty sure I want to look at it as a war movie.  I only have questions at this point, but I think that’s a good thing, right?

Oh, jeez, I just looked back on the syllabus and saw this was supposed to be a pitch, instead of a rambling bout of nonsense.  Ummm, did I sell anyone on it?

So, for today we got a lot to read.  I’m not sure if it was more than other weeks, but it sure felt like it.  Not sure why.  Maybe I’m just tired.  A lot of interesting stuff though.

Anyhoo, in the order the readings were listed on the syllabus:

Sloanas and Getino “Towards a Third Cinema.”

A manifesto, is it not? S&G are calling for a Marixst overthrow of the Euro-American film industry’s influence in Latin America, one that they see as a sort of cultural colonization.  They start by asserting that all films, until “recently” (1997?) were no more than consumer goods.  For them, even politically active films that find some root in Hollywood and European films are still Establishment cinema, contributing to the cultural suppression of the colonized nation.  They then move on to ask whether revolutionary film can be made before the revolution, or if the revolution needs revolutionary film to spur it on.    They also refer to the division of art into two sphere: the political and the aesthetic, which we’ve seen a few other writers do so far.

They eventually explain how cinema can be made subversive, into a weapon.  Their guerilla cinema, a movement they see as taking plae across countries throughout the third world, needs to subvert the industry of film and seize production for itself in order to transform (and this is really cool) the camera into “the inexhaustible expropriator[s] of image-weapons” and the projector into “a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.” !

Rocha, “An Esthetic of Hunger”

Rocha’s work also sees third world cinema as one of violence, since this violence is the outward expression of hunger.  Because of an inability for third-world cinema to communicate suffering to the first world, Cinema Novo, as he calls it, confronts the colonizer with the only thing he understands.  Violence forces recognition.

Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,”

A waaay interesting take on cinema of revolt, Espinosa, like Solanas and Getino, is mapping a path to an authentic third-world cinema by subversion, but unlike the others, who concentrated on subverting the production, Espinosa writes of subverting the form itself.  He argues that traditional aesthetic evaluation of film needs to be disregarded by revolutionary filmmakers, and that films that would probably be considered “bad” would carry the most political heft.

Stam and Spense, “Colonialism, Racism and Representation,”

This essay, much like Said’s writings on orientalism, explain how film is involved in the “othering” of colonized and subjected peoples, becoming a means of oppression. Minority and third-world people are demonized or, just as importantly, otherwise stereotyped (even with qualities that could be considered “positive”) by traditional films.  History and geography are misrepresented to suit the political needs of the colonizer.  They emphasize that this racsim is systemic, not individualized, and hope to draw attention to it.

Wollen, “Godard and Counter-Cinema,”

Hello?  What’s this one doing in here? No, i think I get it.  Wollen’s also talking about revolutionary filmmaking, but his essay is about a Euro-centric Marxist revolution (am I wrong?), or , at least, a not-specifically-third-world revolution.  He details how Godard’s work subverts the conventional form of cinema in order to lay the groundwork for revolution. Ultimately, he feels Godard’s counter-cinema isn’t truly revolutionary, since, as counter, it only operates in a society with a functioning established cinema.

and, finally, Crofts. “Reconceptualizing National Cinema,” which goes through what he sees as the major forms film had taken across the world in 1993.  He ends by arguing, I believe, against western concepts of film canon,which he sees as far too limiting on the one hand and contributing to the othering of alternate forms of cinema on the other hand (Hey, there’s an Edward Said sighting).

So, I’d never see Un Chien Andalou before last week, and I don’t think I can let the week go by without commenting on it. [I totally closed my eyes during the eye-slicing part.  I’m a big chicken about gore.  But I just watched it on Youtube in case there were, like, ants crawling out of it or something else I missed.  It wasn’t as bad as I imagined.  The cloud cutting through the moon is somehow worse]  I know it’s a fool’s errand to try to cleanly delineate between the two nebulously-defined movements, but I felt like the film was a lot more post-modern than modern.  I mean, the thing’s lousy with Freudian references, and modernists were all about Freud; but the images don’t seem to cleanly add up to what we’d expect them to be, were they just illustrations of Freudian concepts.  You have the grotesque and the unheimlich and the doppelganger and it’s all presented in this dream-like, subconscious framework that Breton explains; but the way they’re presented, they evade simple explanations.  Un Chien Andalou seems to be more about unknowablility than psychoanalysis.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I understand it, modernism is kinda the child of Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzche and other 19th century thinkers.  While you can certainly see the fingerprints of some of those dudes on this work, I think Un Chien Andalou has more in common with thinkers that would have been more contemporary, like Heisenberg and Einstein- guys the post-modernists loved (love?).    Time, in particular, is treated with a solidly Einsteinian slant.

And then there’s the fragmentation of the work.  There’s a huge emphasis on splitting an event into little chunks of memory, then piecing it back together (something Munsterberg would consider a very filmic thing to do). While there are some definite instances of this popping up in modernist texts, it seems, to me, that the post-modernists were the ones that were really into it.  The fragmentation of memory is sort of about the failure of the mind, and I see that more in a work like Slaughterhouse Five then in something like Mrs. Dalloway.  And speaking of Vonnegut, I’m also reading a huge amount of black humor in Un Chien Andalou, almost to the point of playfulness.  Maybe it’s just me looking for humor in it, but c’mon- a dude that looked like this has to be in on the joke, right?

But, you know, so what?  Who cares if it’s Modernist or Post-modernist?  Would it change our reading of the film if you could say it is definitely one or the other?

No, I don’t think so.  But I did feel, while watching it, the the film was ahead of its time, perhaps shaping, to some extent, the massive movements in art that followed World War II.

Okay, so as a newly-converted vegetarian (“new” as in “about a month or so,” not “new” as in “since class today”), I gotta take issue with the killing the cow scene at the end of Strike.  Yeah, I realize that cow was going to be killed anyway, but using the actual death throes of a suffering animal to lend your film emotional resonance is exploitative (and yeah, I realize that Eisenstein wasn’t operating in a profit-driven environment for film makers, so he’s not being exploitative in exactly the same way film exploitation is considered, but it still unethically trades in involuntary suffering to further it’s political agenda).

That said, I can’t say the thought process behind the inclusion of the butchering of the cow was far off.  Like Comrade Vertov suggested, staged drama is unmistakably artificial next to recordings of documentary footage.  As we watched Strike, a transparently manipulative agit-prop work if there ever was one, I noticed a lot of laughing when the bourgeoisie-serving horsemen threw a baby off the roof.  The staged work looks, you know, staged.  When that terrible sequence of the cow’s death ran, though, there wasn’t nearly as many chuckles, and those that did laugh weren’t laughing at the film’s shortcomings the way we were while we watched the baby getting thrown off the roof.

The use of torturous snuff in order to illicit an emotional response from viewers is cheap and unethical, but it’s also incredibly effective.  Eisenstein’s scene hits you right in the gut, and it haunts you long after the movie ends.